Battle Cry

Meaning the former Special Branch of Scotland Yard, which had merged with the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch in 2006, to create a new Counter Terrorism Command. The “SO” stood for Special Operations. Where they got the “15” would be anybody’s guess, Bolan thought.

“It would be,” Brognola replied, “but we’ve got pressure over here because the latest victim was American.”

“One of the victims,” Bolan said.

“You’re right. But he was rich and influential, with at least a dozen friends in Congress, one of them a senator.”

“All squeaky wheels,” Bolan said.

“And yours truly is expected to supply the grease,” he said.

“Won’t the locals be all over it?” Bolan asked.

“Locals, officials from London, they may even call in some talent from MI5 and the SIS.”

Britain’s Security Service and Secret Intelligence Service.

“Sounds like I’d have more badges on my hands than terrorists,” Bolan observed.

“You’d have to watch your step,” Brognola said, “but I think it’s doable.”

“Why don’t you drop the other shoe,” Bolan suggested.

“Damn. Was I that obvious?”

“If this was just about a CEO and pacifying congressmen, Justice would send an FBI team out to help the Brits.”

“They’re doing that,” Brognola said.

“More badges. Great. Let’s hear the rest.”

They’d reached the temple’s library, billed as the oldest open to the public in D.C. There were a quarter of a million books on hand, including some printed by Benjamin Franklin a decade before the American Revolution.

“The TIF is marginal,” Brognola said. “Maybe a thousand members total. But they’re getting cash and arms from somewhere, out of all proportion to their size and overall importance in the scheme of things.”

“What are you thinking? Eastern Europe? China?”

“Possibly,” Brognola answered. “But it feels closer to home. The guns aren’t hard to find. The cash…that’s something else.”

“So, I’d be looking for the source.”

Brognola took a CD from an inside pocket of his tailored coat and handed it to Bolan.

“Have a look at this,” he said, “and tell me when you’re good to go.”

BOLAN CHECKED into a Days Inn on the Clara Barton Parkway, near Glen Echo Park in Maryland. He took a single room, no frills, and didn’t bother to unpack. Set up his laptop on the rooms lone table, by a window facing the parking lot, and slipped Brognola’s disk into the CD drive. He opened its single file, then cracked a soda from the minibar and settled down to read.

The Tartan Independence Front had organized five years earlier, based on the information gleaned by Scotland Yard from interviews, wiretaps and other sources. Its founders were admirers—some said ex-members—of the old Tartan Army, a group supporting Scottish independence from the UK that had carried out a string of bombings and other terrorist acts from the early 1970s until a mass roundup and trial of identified members twenty years later. Despite their best efforts, they’d never come close to rivaling the IRA.

But it seemed that someone was ready to try again.

The TIF’s supposed leader was Fergus Gibson, an Edinburgh native born in 1976, whose father had been implicated in—but never charged with—one of the Tartan Army’s bombings in Manchester, England. Examining his face in photographs, Bolan supposed that maybe rebellion ran in the blood. There was a set to Gibson’s jaw, a frown that seemed to be perpetual. Or was it simply that surveillance photos had been snapped when he was in a dour mood?

Gibson had finished three semesters at Edinburgh Napier University before dropping out, without explanation, at age twenty. While it lasted, he’d majored in engineering. His employment record showed stints as a trucker, construction worker and operator of heavy equipment. As far as anyone could tell, he’d never voted in his life, and never voiced any political opinions prior to cofounding the TIF with the guy who reportedly served as his second in command.

Graham Wallace was a year older than Gibson, but there was no indication that he’d ever tried to run the show. A Highlander from Inverness, he’d never been to college but had gone the hard-knocks route, including multiple encounters with the justice system. Five arrests were on record, two of which resulted in convictions. Wallace had served nine months at HM Prison Aberdeen for assaulting a policeman, followed by two-and-a-half years at HM Prison Barlinnie for second-degree arson. The target in that case had been a police car. Intoxication and a psych exam had dropped the charge from first degree.

Since its inception, the TIF had been linked to bombings in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Abderdeen, Dundee and Inverness. Each blast—and two bombs that failed to explode, in Aberfoyle and Lockerbie—had targeted shops or factories owned by English investors. Recently, suspected TIF bombers had left their home turf to detonate charges in Manchester, Leeds, York and London. None of the attacks had claimed a life.

Until Glasgow.

The TIF—if it had done the Lockhart job, which Bolan had no cause to doubt—was stepping up its game. Warnings were out; bloodshed was in. And if Brognola was correct, which normally turned out to be the case, the new aggressive attitude was being fueled by fresh infusions of cash, source unknown.

There’d been a time when Bolan would have looked to Moscow first, but Russia was a mess these days, nearly bankrupt, ruled by a decadent kleptocracy that was too busy stealing to foment some crackpot revolution in the West. The Russians might sell guns to Gibson and his crew, but the days of free hardware and lavish donations to leftist guerrillas were gone.

Who else was in the business of supporting terrorism? China focused mainly on the Far East, and was having trouble with its homegrown dissidents, as well as agitation over the long-running occupation of Tibet. Cuban agents kept their hands in with Latin American activists and some outposts in Africa, but Europe had proved to be sterile ground for Castro-style radicalism.

That left the Middle East, but terror’s financiers in that region generally confined their support to Islamic extremists, or at least to die-hard enemies of Israel. Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia had no more in common with the TIF than with the IRA in Belfast or the Ku Klux Klan in the United States.

Call it a mystery. It wouldn’t be the first Bolan had cracked by application of strategic pressure. And, with any luck, it wouldn’t be the last.

With the critical information committed to memory, Bolan hit the CD’s drop-down menu and ordered his laptop to Erase This Disk. It took about a minute, then he double-checked, extracted the CD, snapped it in two and dropped it in the small trash can beside him.

Done.

Bolan booked his flight from JFK to Glasgow International online, showered, set his alarm for 6:00 a.m. and went to sleep.

AFTER AN EARLY breakfast at the motel’s coffee shop, Bolan drove north from Washington to Newark, New Jersey, arriving just after 10:30 a.m., with six hours left before check-in at JFK.

By 11:15 a.m., Bolan was crossing the Goethals Bridge to pick up the Staten Island Expressway, making good time heading toward Brooklyn where he’d drop the rental car.

Ace Storage stood on Flatbush Avenue, between Marine Park and Floyd Bennett Field. A cyclone fence topped with razor wire surrounded ten ranks of fifty storage units each, which rented by the month or year. Bolan’s was number 319, secured with a combination lock that packed a two-gram high-explosive wallop if you failed to get the numbers lined up properly in two attempts.

Bolan had similar facilities across the country in various places. Each held weapons, ammunition and assorted other items that might be of use to him in an emergency. The rental fees were paid by credit card, through Stony Man, on active accounts maintained under half a dozen false names. Each straw man had a Grade-A credit rating. None appeared in any law-enforcement registry or other database maintained by state or federal government. Their addresses were local mail drops, but the bills were paid online. If anybody stole one of the bills and tried to scam the card’s owner—which hadn’t happened yet—the consequences would be suitably severe.

Bolan spent fifteen minutes in his storage unit on the early afternoon of his departure from the States. He left behind one of his four Beretta 93-R pistols, with its shoulder harness, and an MP-5 K submachine gun that he’d kept beneath the hired car’s shotgun seat. Also abandoned for the moment was a Gerber automatic knife with four-inch tanto blade, serrated over half its cutting edge—a modern switchblade, in effect.

Opening a compact fireproof safe, Bolan removed a passport, California driver’s license, credit cards and other basic ID matching the “Matthew Cooper” name on his flight reservation. Name and address aside, the items were legitimate, concocted from originals secured through Brognola’s Stony Man team. The phone number displayed on Cooper’s driver’s license would ring through a relay in Los Angeles, to a voice-mail system at Stony Man Farm, in Virginia. Bolan, as Cooper, could check his messages from anywhere on Earth, but didn’t have to answer.

After all, he was on vacation.

It was a short drive from Ace Storage to JFK International Airport via Shore Parkway and the Nassau Expressway. He dropped his rental car at 1:05 p.m., ate an overpriced lunch in Terminal 4, and took his time checking in for his 6:30 p.m. flight. Security was slow, as always, with the standard questions, pat downs, and inspections of a thousand shoes.

Bolan passed through the metal detector, raised his arms for an up-and-down pass with a handheld security wand, then waited for his shoes and carry-on to clear the X-ray machine. No weapons there, and nothing to excite the watchers even if they sought a closer look, but he was passed on without opening his bag.

The rest came down to waiting at the designated gate until his flight was called, reading a travel guide to Scotland that he bought at Hudson News. A detailed map of Glasgow was included.

By the time a disembodied voice announced the start of boarding for his flight, Bolan was more than ready to be on his way. A patient man by any standard, trained to lie in wait for days behind a sniper scope if need be, he still chafed inside at the inevitable downtime between his acceptance of a mission and the moment when he hit the ground running, embarking on yet another gamble with the Reaper.