State Of Evil

“Right after Pizza Hut and Girls Gone Wild,” said Bolan.

“Jeez,” Grimaldi said, “I’m dropping a comedian. Who knew?”

“I needed something for my spare time,” Bolan said.

“Uh-huh.” Grimaldi checked his instruments, glanced at his watch, and said, “We’re almost there. You’d better assume the position.”

“Right.” Rising, Bolan briefly placed a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. “Stay frosty,” he said.

“It’s always frosty at this altitude. I’ll see you soon.”

Turning from the cockpit, Bolan made his way back to the open door, halfway along the Cessna’s fuselage.

“WE’VE GOT a quarter mile,” Grimaldi shouted back to Bolan in the Cessna’s open doorway, waiting for the quick thumbs-up.

Whatever was about to happen, it was out of Jack Grimaldi’s hands. He could abort the mission, turn the plane around and violate his old friend’s trust beyond repair, but that option had never seriously crossed his mind.

He was the flyboy; Bolan was the soldier.

He delivered Bolan, and the Executioner delivered where it counted, on the ground.

Grimaldi understood the impetus behind their mission, recognized the urgent strength of loyalty that rose beyond mere friendship to a more exalted level. Still, their small handful of allies was behind them now, and half a world away. The broad Atlantic Ocean separated Bolan and Grimaldi from the support team at Stony Man Farm. Whatever happened on the ground below, Bolan would have to cope with it alone.

And recognizing that, Grimaldi thought, what else was new?

From what Grimaldi knew, Bolan had been a kind of one-man army all his fighting life, from combat sniper service with the Green Berets, through his solo war against the Mafia at home, and in most of the Stony Man missions he’d handled since joining the government team. From boot camp to the present day, Bolan had been unique: a great team player who could nonetheless proceed alone if there was no team left to field.

Most often, in the blood-and-thunder world he occupied, Mack Bolan was the team. Grimaldi simply had the privilege, from time to time, of making sure that Bolan didn’t miss the kickoff.

“Ready!” he shouted in the rush of chilling wind. The drop zone was below them, waiting.

“Ready!” Bolan answered without hesitation.

And when Grimaldi glanced toward the Cessna’s vacant hatch again, he was alone.

THE WIND HIT Bolan like a tidal wave and swept him back along the Cessna’s fuselage, even as he began to fall through space. He plummeted headfirst toward Earth, arms tight against his sides, a hurtling projectile of flesh and bone.

Although he was accelerating by the second, answering the call of gravity, he also felt a lulling sense of peace, deceptive, as if he had been a feather drifting on an errant summer breeze. The jungle canopy below didn’t appear to rush at Bolan, hastening to crush him. Rather, from his vantage point, it seemed to be forever out of reach, a vista seen through plate glass on the far side of a massive room.

Bolan had done enough high altitude, low opening jumps in his time to recognize the illusion for what it was, and to dismiss it from his mind. HALO drops were designed for maximum maneuverability and stealth. The jumper guided himself with pure body language for the first eight thousand feet or so, waiting to pull the rip cord when it counted, minimizing exposure to watchers on the ground.

The jungle helped him there, of course. For spotters to observe his parachute, they’d have to be at treetop level—no mean feat, considering the fact that trees in the Congo jungle below Bolan averaged one hundred feet or more in height. The lofty African mahogany might double that, but climbing giant trees wasn’t child’s play. Unlike most temperate trees grown in the open, giants of the crowded rain forest typically boasted branches only near the top, leaving two-thirds of their trunks entirely bare except for creeping vines and moss or fungus growths.

If Bolan’s parachute became entangled in that lofty canopy, he ran a risk of being killed or crippled in his bid to reach the ground. The first step in his new campaign could also be his last.

Around two thousand feet he pulled the main rip cord. There was a heartbeat’s hesitation, known to every jumper who survives a drop, before the main pack opened and the chute blossomed above him. Bolan’s headlong plummet was arrested as the shroud lines snapped taut, air filling the cells of the sleek pilot chute overhead.

Bolan clutched the risers, using them and the parachute’s slider to guide his descent toward the treetops. This was his most vulnerable time, dipping lower by the moment at a speed most riflemen could easily accommodate. He didn’t think there would be spotters in the treetops, but a hunter in a clearing on the ground might catch a glimpse of Bolan and his parachute, might even have the time to risk a shot before he ran to spread the word.

One clearing in particular preoccupied the jumper’s thoughts.

The drop zone had been chosen based on aerial and satellite reconnaissance, map coordinates for Bolan’s final destination matched against bird’s-eye photographs of the jungle canopy he’d be required to penetrate on D-day. A natural clearing in the forest had been spotted from on high, charted and measured, analyzed for likely risks as far as a computer half a world away could take the problem toward solution. Based on that intelligence, he had been told precisely where and when to leave Grimaldi’s Cessna for his leap of faith.

The dark patch of the clearing lay below him now, and slightly to his left, meaning a hundred yards or so, from Bolan’s altitude. It was a black hole from his viewpoint, while sunlight reflected on the treetops all around that vaguely oval gap amid the foliage. From two thousand feet, it looked like the cup on a putting green. Up close, he guessed, it would resemble an abandoned well or mine shaft yawning to receive him.

If he didn’t miss his mark and hang up in the trees.

Bolan was skilled at navigating parachutes. He’d learned the art as a young Green Beret and practiced it sporadically throughout his wars, keeping his skills and reflexes in shape. Still, there were always unexpected twists and turns in any combat mission. Wind might carry him off course, a bird could strike him in the head and render him unconscious, or the guidelines on his chute might snap, leaving him rudderless.

If none of that transpired, he had a chance to hit his mark—and only then would he find out what happened next.

The guide lines didn’t break. No windy gale or suicidal bird disrupted Bolan’s plan. He steered the parachute without a hitch, correcting his descent by slow degrees until the dark mouth of the jungle clearing was directly underneath his feet. Up close it was a black maw, roughly oval, thirty-seven feet, nine inches wide at treetop level.

The dimensions were precise, but Bolan had no clue what might be waiting for him at the bottom of the shaft.

Assuming that he ever got that far.

He marked a bull’s-eye in his mind, steered for it, watching his target instead of the belled chute above him. Bolan pointed his toes, peering between his boots as if they formed a gunsight’s V.

So far, so good.

The treetops rose to meet him much more swiftly now, it seemed, during the final yards of his descent. Gripping the risers firmly, Bolan fought to keep the parachute on course, resisting updrafts from the sun-warmed canopy.

The clearing yawned beneath him. With a hiss of ripstop nylon, Bolan hit his mark. The forest swallowed him alive.

It was a curious sensation, being swallowed by a jungle. First, the sunlight flickered, faded, screened by treetops looming overhead as Bolan cleared the forest canopy. An instant later he felt a drastic change in the humidity and temperature. Though shaded now, Bolan had also lost the morning breeze. It felt like plummeting into a sauna, fully clothed.

Dead air didn’t provide the same support for Bolan’s parachute, either. The pace of his descent accelerated, but he had no room for any kind of meaningful maneuver. What had once gone up was coming down, and he could only brace himself for impact as the ground rose to accept its human sacrifice.

A glance in passing told him that the clearing had to have been created by a lightning strike that shattered one great tree, in much the same way demolition experts drop a skyscraper without inflicting any major damage on its neighbors. Eight feet below him, closing fast, Bolan saw the detritus of the forest giant’s fall. A ragged stump sprouted from mulch and teeming fungus growths, surrounded by remains of charred and rotted wood.

Before he had a chance to think about what might be living, breeding, feeding in the giant compost heap below him, Bolan struck the spongy surface. He had time to veer a yard or two off course, avoid impalement on the sharp-pronged mahogany stump, but that effort cost him balance on the landing and he rolled in filth, smothered in the chute as it descended like a shroud.

Bolan opened the quick-release clasps on his harness and shed it, pulled his knife and slit the parachute, emerging from it like some mutant forest life-form rising from its amniotic sac. At once, he sheathed the blade, unslung his AUG and waited where he stood for any challenge from the jungle murk.

A silent minute passed, then two, and he was satisfied. Keeping his rifle close at hand, Bolan hauled in the flaccid remnants of his chute, and opened his entrenching tool. The mulch beneath his boots was soft and had a mildew stench about it. When he broke the surface crust, it teemed with vermin—ants, worms, beetles Bolan didn’t recognize—but he dug deeper, leaving those he had disturbed to scramble for another path to darkness, out of sight.

He dug until he had a pit of ample size to hold the bundled parachute, his spare, the harness and the helmet he had worn. Filling the hole was faster, but he took the extra time to evenly disperse the surplus mulch he’d excavated from the reeking mound. The next rain, probably sometime that afternoon, would mask whatever signs of digging Bolan left behind. Searchers would have to excavate the spot themselves, to find his gear, and there was no good reason they should even try it if they’d hadn’t seen him drop in from on high.

Digging ditches in ninety-degree heat and ninety-eight-percent humidity drained a strong man’s vigor in a hurry. Bolan was a veteran jungle fighter, long accustomed to the hardships of tropical climates, but every day spent away from the jungle, swaddled in the chill of fans and air conditioners, reduced a subject’s tolerance for enervating heat. His thirty hours in Brazzaville had helped provide a measure of reacclimation, but there was a world of difference between the city—any city—and the bush.

Bolan folded his shovel, stowed it and allowed himself a sip of water from one of his canteens. Ironically, dehydration was a major risk in the midst of a sodden rain forest, where any water he found would be teeming with germs, unfit to drink unless he boiled it first.

And Bolan couldn’t risk a fire.

Not yet.

He might be burning something later, but for now he had to pass unnoticed through the forest en route to his target. Any chance encounters on the way increased the danger to himself and to his mission.