Radical Edge

More importantly, one of the two crew-served

7.62 mm machine guns had been replaced with an electric M197 Gatling gun. The three-barreled automatic cannon fired 20 mm rounds at rates of fire up to 650 rounds per minute, all controlled remotely from Grimaldi’s seat. While the Pave Hawk wasn’t as heavily armed as the Cobra and Apache gunships Grimaldi had often flown in support of Bolan and other Stony Man personnel, both men were confident the chopper’s offensive capabilities were sufficient to this mission. What Bolan needed, more than airborne firepower, was the speed and range of the Pave Hawk. Its large extra tanks fueling twin General Electric T700-series motors, each pushing almost 2,000 horsepower, would get him where he needed to be as quickly as was practical.

Bolan boarded the Pave Hawk as the machine started to lift into the air once more; the runners barely had time to kiss the ground. As he piled in, Grimaldi looked back from the cockpit.

“Forgive the observation, Sarge,” he said, “but you look absolutely pissed.”

“I am,” Bolan said. He strapped himself into one of the seats. Shifting the FN P90 on its sling, he looked the weapon over, removing the magazine and checking the action. He had spent a lot of time rolling around on the floor of the safe house, fighting in close contact. He needed to make sure his weapons would function when he called on them. The FN seemed none the worse for wear for riding along with him through the misadventure.

“Are you injured, Sarge?” Grimaldi called back. His earbud transceiver broadcast his words to Bolan despite the noise of the rotors overhead. He looked worried.

“It’s not my blood,” Bolan said. The front of his blacksuit and portions of his web gear were stained darker than the rest. He picked several splinters from the latter and from the crease of his canvas war bag before removing, from the bag, a compact cleaning kit. Then he turned his attention to his pistols.

John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Farm’s armorer, would give him grief for the gouge in the 93R’s slide. He could almost hear the man’s commentary now. Each of the weapons Bolan was issued had been combat-tuned, in most cases by Kissinger’s own experienced hands. The goal was always to increase accuracy while enhancing reliability, goals that too often might seem mutually exclusive. Having spent years responsible for selecting and maintaining his own hardware, Bolan was no stranger to the demands on the Farm’s armorer. He appreciated the support Kissinger provided.

The Beretta had, after all, saved his life.

Grimaldi called out their estimated time to the second target zone. He looked back at Bolan again. “Sarge,” he said, “you okay?”

“Yeah,” Bolan muttered. “But I’m mad, Jack. We’ve just left a trail of corpses behind us, and we’re not much further along. Hyde may or may not be at the second safe house. If he’s not, we keep moving through our priority list.”

“That’s the plan,” Grimaldi said. He looked at Bolan as if unsure where the soldier was going.

“They’re wasting lives,” he explained. “Hyde and his hate-filled kind. Terrorists, predators of every stripe. They have motivations, Jack, and while they’re all equally deserving of being put down, as Hal put it, some make more sense than others.” He cleaned the Beretta as he spoke. “Hyde and his ilk want power, sure, but they’ll never hold it. Power is an abstract to them. They wouldn’t know what to do if they were suddenly in charge, suddenly the kings of their own white-as-snow empire. They kill not for power, not for political change, not for money, but because they hate.”

“We’ve faced a few who answered to that description,” Grimaldi said.

“Yeah, and every time, they were wasting lives.”

They rode in silence. The thrum of the rotor blades vibrated Bolan’s chest. He let his hands work as if of their own accord; he could disassemble, clean and reassemble the familiar Beretta 93-R in the dark, on the back of a camel, in a sandstorm. The image made him chuckle despite his stern mood. The phrasing was Barbara Price’s, shared in a moment’s intimacy after the pair had spent some meaningful and only too rare downtime together. Their on-again, off-again relationship was the most Bolan could offer her. It was, for now at least, something she could accept. Neither pushed the other; they were professionals who knew only too well how quickly fates could turn.

He checked the fit and draw of his Beretta in the custom shoulder holster. The leather had been singed by muzzle-blast but wasn’t otherwise damaged. Replacing the machine pistol’s 20-round magazine, Bolan holstered the weapon, topped off the magazine in his Desert Eagle and secured the hand cannon in its Kydex scabbard.

“Jack,” he said. “Time.”

“Sixty seconds, Sarge.”

Good.

It was time to get back to work.

CHAPTER THREE

Bolan moved briskly through the rear lots of the string of well-tended ranch houses, his boots crunching on gravel and through scrub. There were no manicured green lawns to be found here. Such suburban affectations weren’t practical in this climate. The houses were nonetheless nicely maintained. Some yards were strewed with toys and dotted with play equipment—a sobering reminder that innocents weren’t far removed from the target area.

The hovering helicopter would, of course, have exposed their operation immediately. Grimaldi had been forced to put Bolan down far enough away from the second safe house to prevent the presence of the Pave Hawk from blowing the surprise. While he hadn’t yet seen anyone on the street—the neighborhood was, thankfully, a quiet one—he was certain he had been noticed through windows he passed. He was making no effort to conceal himself, no pretense of being a civilian. The sight of a black-clad man armed for combat and carrying an assault weapon was sure to have the residents dialing 911.

The fallout from that would be managed by Barb Price’s blacksuit liaisons, trusted field operatives and veteran commandos in their own right, who would be running interference for Bolan as they helped the Farm coordinate the thorny issues of jurisdiction and authority. It was just those issues that would have Brognola’s phone ringing before too long, as the many agencies with dogs in the fight started arguing with Justice about just who should be able to tell whom what to do.

Bolan answered to himself first.

The ergonomic and futuristic P90 in his hands was fully loaded. He had semiautomatic and fully automatic modes of fire at his disposal. The two-stage trigger, tuned by Kissinger and similar to that of the Steyr AUG, provided him with crisp fire control from which he could milk single shots or withering, sustained automatic fire.

“Sarge.” Grimaldi’s voice was clear in Bolan’s earbud. “Something strange is going on. I’m getting telemetry from Barb. She says emergency services are being rerouted to your location.”

“Rerouted?” Bolan asked. “What do you mean?”

“Something about a massive false alarm across town,” Grimaldi said. “Multiple mobile phone calls about a fire and hostage situation. Barb says it’s sketchy, but they’re getting confirmation in now. A block of vacant commercial properties was set ablaze, but there are no hostages. Alamogordo SWAT is reporting negative contact. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Decoy,” Bolan said. “It’s a decoy play.”

“Barb says they’re tracking back to multiple 911 calls reporting gunfire in your target zone,” Grimaldi said. “Stuff that took a backseat to what they thought was a terrorist incident in the other direction. Sounds awfully convenient. Sarge, I think we may have missed the party.”

Bolan picked up the pace, jogging now, the FN P90 in his grip as he moved. He didn’t like the sound of that, not at all. A decoy might mean some kind of sacrifice-and-breakout maneuver on the part of Hyde’s men, perhaps to cover the terrorist leader’s withdrawal. There were countless ways the Twelfth Reich cell might have been tipped off to the threat. He couldn’t guess at them. He could only hurry.

As he neared the safe house, he saw smoke. A small fire seemed to be burning at the back of the structure. Neighbors were already coming out of their homes, pointing and crouching, afraid to stand in the open but too curious or worried not to look. When they saw Bolan, some shrank back. One woman screamed. Another man shouted that there was some kind of trouble, pegging Bolan as someone in authority. The soldier could only keep running. He was now closing on the safe house.

The house was, like the others around it, a low ranch. This one had started out a muddy tan, then bleached an uneven beige by the merciless New Mexico sun.

There was a dead man on the porch.

The butt of the stubby FN P90 was already positioned against Bolan’s body; he snapped the weapon up to acquire the sights. The man on the porch was down, lifeless, his limbs turned at angles no living human being could endure. He wasn’t the threat. Whoever had put him there was.

“Hey! What’s happening?” a young man, just a teenager, called from the neighboring house.

“Go back inside!” Bolan warned. “Justice Department!” The kid slammed the door as if monsters were barking up his walk.

Bolan hit the porch in a combat crouch. His boots scattered brass shell casings, which were thick on the porch floor. The front of the house had been shot to pieces, peppered with so many bullet holes that it looked like Bonnie and Clyde’s last ride. He couldn’t tell, from this vantage, exactly what was producing the black smoke curling from the rear of the building.

He struck the door with a powerful front kick, near the knob, not bothering to try it. Molding flew in three directions as the flimsy, hollow-core door slammed against the interior wall. Bolan ignored that; he was already charging inside, ready to flood the room with 5.7 mm rounds.

The living room was a slaughterhouse.

A smoke alarm was squealing. The fire from the rear of the house was gaining momentum; its crackling was growing louder. Smoke drifted in lazy clouds through the L-shaped living area, escaping through bullet holes spidering the bay window at the front of the home. The plaster walls were pocked with similar holes and sprayed with blood. More blood soaked every visible piece of furniture. There was a dead woman on the couch, two dead men on the floor near a card table and a pair of reclining chairs, and another dead man near a very old and very shattered tube television. The man near the television had almost no head. He had taken what was likely a shotgun blast at close range.

Shells were thicker here than they had been on the porch. Bolan crouched and, using a metal pen he carried in his web gear, fished up first one, then another. He checked half a dozen casings throughout the living room. All were .40 caliber. He pocketed several, careful not to touch them.

Crouched low, he moved from body to body, making sure. There were no signs of life. The house was a tomb. It was worse than that, however.

The dead hadn’t merely been neutralized; they had been mutilated, shot again and again in what could only have been postmortem overkill. Bolan filed that fact for analysis even as his mind worked overtime to make sense of what he was seeing.

Had the skinhead safe house been hit by a rival gang? A conflicting security firm? Counterterrorists, perhaps operating without authority on American soil? The first was possible; the second was unlikely, given the Farm’s contacts and Brognola’s knowledge of domestic security operations. The third was possible but didn’t seem to fit. Bolan had only too recently found himself caught between rival security and black-ops personnel from multiple countries, in playing bodyguard and escort to a Very Important Person whom he had to transport to Wonderland. Even at their most vicious, foreign kill teams wouldn’t have wasted the time and firepower necessary to do this kind of job on poorly trained skinhead combatants. An ops team from a nominally allied nation, like Israel, certainly wouldn’t kill so unprofessionally.

The term caught in Bolan’s mind. That was what bothered him. The position of the bodies indicated that the skinheads had barely had time to process the assault on the safe house. They weren’t arrayed behind cover or braced in fatal funnels such as the hallway from the living room to the kitchen. They were, instead, dead where they’d probably been sitting when the attack came. Bolan paused just long enough to snap pictures of the dead, wondering if he would fine Shane Hyde among them. But the Twelfth Reich leader wasn’t there.

He moved down the corridor to the kitchen, holding the FN P90 before him. Two more dead men waited here, one stripped to the waist, his tattoos proclaiming the supremacy of his race and stretching in blues and blacks across his back. He had been shot as he sat at the kitchen table. He lay in a puddle of his own brains amid the mess of an overturned cereal bowl and an opened can of beer.

The fire licking up from the stove and consuming the ventilator hood was almost out of control. Bolan grabbed the dusty fire extinguisher from its strap on the kitchen wall, pulled the pin and sprayed its contents across the stovetop. The extinguisher was long expired, according to its pull-tag, but it did the job. Whatever had been burning was now a black, frosted mess in the center of a charred frying pan.