Devil's Bargain

“Security personnel and procedures have been quadrupled, but we’re reading this as a whole different ballgame than using jumbo jets as flying bombs. Just the same, the skies are swarming with every fighter jet we can put in the air. Incoming international air traffic, especially executive jets, will be intercepted and escorted to landing. No compliance, bye-bye, that’s straight from the White House. Same thing with ships, large, small, pleasure or commercial. The Coast Guard and the Navy have formed a steel wall, up and down both shorelines, likewise the Gulf.”

Was it enough? Bolan wondered. It was a task so monumental it boggled the mind. No amount of manpower, no matter how skilled or determined, could one-hundred-percent guarantee a few of the opposition didn’t slip through the net. Then there were trains, buses, already rolling, loaded with unsuspecting passengers, potential conflagrations on wheels that could detonate any moment. He looked at the monitors, saw numbers scrolling as fast as personnel could scoop up sheafs of printed paper. Digital maps of Chicago, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Miami were yielding the locations of train and bus terminals, points of travel, layovers and final destinations, all flashing up in red.

“So far, we’ve sealed off and stopped all departures from Seattle’s King Street Station. We’re working on Union Station in D.C. now,” James said. “You have Metrorail, the VRE, MARC, and that’s just Washington to worry about. The list is near endless as far as manpower is concerned, covering all bases. We’re stopping trains and buses that are in transit—as we can get to them—board, clear them out, search all luggage, but it’s going to take time, something we don’t have. We’ve just alerted the Chicago Transit Authority. They are under presidential directive to shut down Union Station on Canal Street, but as you might know, Chicago is considered the railway center of the country. God only knows how many trains we’re looking at, arriving or leaving in or within a hundred miles around the compass of Chicago alone. You’re talking over two hundred trains, rolling anywhere along some twenty-four thousand miles of track at any given time. I don’t even have the numbers crunched yet on how many Greyhound, Trailways and charter and tour-bus terminals and depots we have that may be in their crosshairs. There’s more,” he said, and paused. “The headsheds are thinking there could even be eighteen-wheelers, vans, U-Haul trucks out there, cab and limo drivers…you get the picture? If this thing blows up in our faces, the entire transportation network of the United States is shut down, end of story. Even if they set off one, two trains or buses, and you’ve got wreckage and dead bodies all over the highways and tracks. I don’t even want to hazard a guess as to the chaos that would break out.”

“I want everything you have in ten minutes.”

“You’ve got it.”

“I’m thinking we might be able to narrow our problems down in short order.”

“How so?” James asked.

“Where are the prisoners?”

James grunted, jerked a nod to the deep corner of the room where an armed guard stood. “In the cellar. Problem is, we’ve already lost two of the four.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m afraid the show’s already started without you. I have to warn you, Cooper, it’s messy down there. His name is Moctaw, or that’s what he calls himself.”

“What is he?”

“I don’t know, but he was dumped in my lap, damn near a suitcase load of official DOD papers telling me I was to step aside—that is if I wanted to finish my career with the FBI. There was nothing I could do.”

A sordid picture of what he was about to find downstairs already in mind, Bolan followed James across the room, the FBI man barking for the guard to step aside and open the door.

“I’ll leave you to introduce yourself,” James said, wheeled, then marched back for the nerve center.

Peering into the gloomy shadows below, he caught a whiff of the miasma, an invisible blow to his senses. It was a sickening mix of blood, cooked flesh, loosed body waste. He heard the sharp grunts, then a scream echoed up from the pit. He slipped off his shades, braced for the horror he knew was down there, waiting.

Then Mack Bolan, also known as the Executioner, began his descent.

HER NAME WAS Barbara Price, and it was rare when she left her post at Stony Man Farm. She was, after all, mission controller for the Justice Department’s ultra-covert Sensitive Operations Group, her time and expertise on demand nearly around the clock. It was both her present role in covert operations at the Farm, however, and her past employment at the National Security Agency that now found her moments away from rendezvousing with a former colleague.

She watched the numbers on the doors fall, striding down the hallway, looked at a couple pass her by through sunglasses, her low-heeled slip-ons padding over wall-to-wall carpet. She couldn’t shake the feeling something felt wrong about this setup. She hadn’t survived, nor claimed her current position with the Sensitive Operations Group, by taking anything in the spook world at face value.

Since being informed by cutouts she often used to gather intelligence that Max Geller sounded desperate in his attempts to reach her, a dark nagging had hounded her for days. She hadn’t seen, heard from or thought about the man in years, and there he was, hunting her down for undeclared reasons, popping up on the radar screen, out of nowhere.

Finally she returned his call through a series of back channels she arranged. It was the worst of times to leave the Farm, Able Team and Phoenix Force in the trenches, with Mack Bolan, the Farm’s lone-wolf operative and a man she was, on occasion, intimate with, in the field. But Geller claimed to have critical information about what the Stony Man warriors were up against, likewise alluding to a threat so grave to national security the entire world could be changed forever. No, he didn’t dare speak on any line, no matter how secure. They had to meet.

She had run it past Hal Brognola, the big Fed at the Justice Department who was director of the Farm and liaison to the President. He had given her three hours’ leave, but she was to call the time and place for the meet, give him the particulars before she set out. The chopper had ferried her from the Shenandoah Valley to Reagan National, where the Justice Department maintained a small hangar, kept its own vehicles on-site for quick personal access, instead of using “invented” credit cards for rentals. From there in the GMC, a short drive to the hotel in Crystal City, where the feeling she was being followed intensified. It was nothing she could put her finger on, though. Crystal City swarmed with the work force that early-morning hour, a lone blond woman sure to grab the attention of men. Taking extra precautions, just the same, she sat in the hotel lot for fifteen minutes, her instincts flaring so bad she almost called off the meet. A short drive around Crystal City, then she parked in an underground garage, wondered if she was being paranoid. Follow through, she decided. She’d come this far, maybe Geller had something worth hearing. She was grateful, just the same, that the Browning Hi-Power with 13-shot clip was shouldered beneath the windbreaker, two backup clips leathered on her right side.

She found the door to the room where he’d registered under James Wilcox. It had been years since she had worked with the man, both of them gathering signals intelligence and human intelligence for the NSA in a classified program that often involved her directing wet work. Geller was the best at what he did. Tagged the Sphinx, he still was, she knew, the NSA’s best code breaker.

She knocked, waited, glanced both ways down the empty hall, removed her sunglasses. The door opened so quickly that she wondered if he had X-ray eyes or had been standing on the foyer, waiting, listening.

“Thanks for coming.”

The whiskey fumes swarmed her senses, the first red flag warning her again this felt all wrong. He wasn’t the slim, sharply dressed, well-groomed man she remembered. He had aged terribly, gained weight, lost hair. But it was the eyes, sunken with dark circles, unable to focus on her, brimmed with so much anxiety she could smell the fear in the sweat soaked into the collar of his sports shirt. She almost turned, walked away, but he beckoned her to enter.

She did.

“AND JUST WHO the fuck might you be?”

Bolan looked at the ghoul, said, “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

The soldier found it was every bit as messy down there as James warned, and then some. Bolan felt a ball of cold anger lodge in his belly at what he saw in the bastard’s torture chamber. It was gruesome devil’s work to the extreme, and he couldn’t even begin to tally how many laws the butcher had broken. He was fairly certain, though, whichever agency the man pledged allegiance to had given him the green light to do whatever it took to break the prisoners, that he was backed and covered by superiors who would, most likely, wash their hands of this horror show. Yes, Bolan knew the argument—extreme times demanding extreme measures and so forth—but torture in his mind only reduced a man to the same soulless animal level as the enemy. It sickened him to know Moctaw worked for the same government he did. Then again, it occurred to him Moctaw had bulled ahead, aware someone else was on the way to take the reins, the butcher running some personal agenda. Gain information, or threaten the prisoners about talking to the Feds? Every instinct Bolan had earned over the years—fighting every ilk of backstabbing homegrown traitor—warned him something didn’t jibe with the man or his methods. Something else lurked behind the mask, he was sure. Any front Moctaw would put on that this was all done in the name of national security was a ruse. Whom was he protecting? What was he hiding? Or was this simply an extreme solution to the dilemma of fighting terrorism on American soil?

Bolan looked at the prisoners. Naked, they were strapped to thick wooden chairs, which were bolted down to the concrete floor. There were two bodies, a dark hole between their eyes. The soldier figured they were the lucky ones. The other two prisoners had some sort of steel vise holding their heads erect, clamps fastened to their eyebrows, their eyes bulging with terror, flicking around like pinballs at their tormentor. Whoever this Moctaw was, Bolan saw he was good with the Gestapo tactics. The black bag, opened on the table, had been emptied of a series of shiny surgical instruments, one of which was a bloody pair of shears. Tourniquets, Bolan saw, were wound around the wrists and ankles of the dead men, all of their fingers and toes strewed in the blood still pooling on the floor. At some point, the bastard had castrated his first two victims, genitals adding to the gory mess at the stumps of their feet. It was obvious where the cigar in the butcher’s hand would have gone next. One glance at Moctaw, and Bolan pegged him as little more than a thug. Six-six at least, the muscled Goliath swelled out the black leather apron, blood speckling his craggy features, red drops still falling from a dark mane of disheveled hair. In the tight confines of mildewed brick the stench alone was damn near enough to make even a battle-hardened soldier like Bolan gag. Then he saw the series of oozing burn holes running up the torsos, necks, cheeks, the bastard working his way up, letting them know they were seconds away from having their eyes seared out.

Bolan produced his credentials, thrust them in Moctaw’s face. The butcher grunted, unimpressed, or disappointed, the soldier couldn’t tell. “Your fun’s over.”

“Special Agent Matt Cooper, uh-huh. I heard about you.”

“Then you heard I’m in charge. That’s straight from the White House. You’re out of it.”

“Out of it? This one here,” he snarled, shoving the glowing end of the cigar toward the prisoner at the far end, “was just about to talk.”

“I’ll handle it from here.”

“You’ll handle it? What—you going to bring them some cookies and milk? Sweet-talk ’em? Maybe offer them some all-expenses-paid deal if they sing?”

Bolan stepped around the table, saw the Beretta 92-F within easy reach of the butcher. “Give me the cigar.”

It was a dangerous moment, Bolan watching as Moctaw wrestled with some decision, the soldier braced for the butcher to make a grab for the weapon. Moctaw bared his teeth, dumped the cigar on the table.

“It’s your party, G-boy. I hope you’re not just some six-pack of asskick, all show, no go, since you’re the man of the hour now. Maybe you don’t know it, but this country’s entire transportation system is on the verge of being shut down, I’m talking 9/11 five, maybe ten times over, depending on how many of these scumbags are out there. This is no time for ‘pretty please.’”

Bolan made his own decision right then, picked up the cigar. “I’m aware of what’s at stake.”

“Really? These Red Crescent terrorists pull off their big event, shit, we’re going to need Iraqi oil revenue ourselves to help put it all back together. This country will never be the same, they light up even one train or a couple of Greyhounds.”

“Besides your gift for stating the obvious, exactly what have you learned?”

Moctaw hesitated, then picked up one of four small square black boxes from the table. The clips-on gave Bolan a good idea of what they were, then Moctaw confirmed it, saying, “These are satellite-relay pagers. Far as we know, only the Russians and the Israelis, and maybe the Chinese and North Koreans, have this sort of technology.”

“And the NSA and the CIA.”

Moctaw hesitated. “Right. There are no markings, no serial numbers on these. I couldn’t tell you where they came from. They house computer chips that can tie into military communications satellites. Punch in your personal code, hooks you into the principal user, you can beep or be beeped, send or be sent a vibrating signal anywhere from three to five thousand miles. That’s how they knew to move.”

“Which means whoever’s running the operation is still out there.”

“That would be a good assumption. We’ve learned they were communicating by courier when they set up shop, or used P.O. boxes. Basic, keep it simple. For the most part they stayed off the phone, e-mail, Internet, but a couple of them got antsy, even made some overseas calls back home to their loved ones to say goodbye and they were on their way to Paradise. Not real smart. We were able to intercept—”

“I know all that.”

Moctaw scowled, then continued, “The usual bogus passports, only they come to America as Europeans, dyed hair, clean-shaved, perfect English. Never know they were camel jockeys. Two of them,” he said, nodding at the corpses, “were Iraqis, former fedayeen, to be exact. Made a point of letting me know they were going to blow up some buses and trains, jihad for Gulf II, standard Muslim-fanatic tirade. The two still breathing are Moroccan, recruited, they tell me, in Casablanca by Red Crescent about a year ago.” Moctaw pulled the Greyhound tickets from his bag, slapped them on the table. “Four one-way tickets. Two heading north, Port Authority. The other two were westbound, final stop Houston. I’ve got their ordnance upstairs. Three hundred pounds of Semtex between them, wired and ready to be activated by radio remote.”