Colony Of Evil

“Ten minutes,” the pilot said, as if Bolan didn’t know exactly where they were, tracking the course of Skyline Drive, a thousand feet above the treetops. Cars passing below them looked like toys, the scattered hikers more like ants. If any of the hardy souls on foot looked up or waved at Bolan’s chopper, his eyes couldn’t pick them out.

Bolan had been wrapping up a job in Canada when Hal Brognola called and asked him for a meeting at the Farm. Quebec was heating up, with biker gangs running arms across the border from New York. Some of the hardware, swiped from U.S. shipments headed overseas, traveled from Buffalo by ship, on the St. Lawrence River, while the rest was trucked across the border at Fort Covington. Don Vincent Gaglioni, Buffalo’s pale version of The Godfather, procured the guns and pocketed the cash.

It had to stop, but agents of the ATF and FBI were getting nowhere with their separate, often competitive investigations. By the time Bolan was sent to clean it up, they’d lost two veteran informants and an agent who was riding with his top stool pigeon when the turncoat’s car exploded in a parking lot.

Bolan had sunk two of the Gaglioni Family’s cargo ships with limpet mines, shot up a convoy moving overland, then trailed Don Gaglioni to a sit-down with the gang leaders outside Drummondville, Quebec. The meeting had been tense to start with, but they’d never had a chance to settle their dispute. Bolan’s unscheduled intervention, with an Mk 19 full-auto grenade launcher had spoiled the bash for all concerned.

It had been like old times, for just a minute there, but Bolan didn’t set much store in strolls down Memory Lane. Especially when the path was littered with rubble and corpses.

There was enough of that in his future, he knew, without trying to resurrect the Bad Old Days of his one-man war against the Mafia. A little object lesson now and then was fine, but there could be no turning back the clock.

Which brought him to the job at hand—whatever it might be. Brognola hadn’t called him for a birthday party or a house-warming. There would be dirty work ahead, the kind Bolan did best, and he was ready for it.

Which was not to say that he enjoyed it.

In Bolan’s mind, the day a killer started to enjoy his killing trade, the time had come for him to find another line of work. Only a psychopath loved killing, and the best thing anyone could do for such an individual was to put him down before he caused more misery.

Soldiers were trained to kill, the same way surgeons learned to cut and plumbers learned to weld. The difference, of course, was that a warrior mended nothing, built nothing. In battle, warriors killed, albeit sometimes for a cause so great that only blood could sanctify it. Some opponents were impervious to grand diplomacy, or even backroom bribes.

In some cases, only brute force would do.

But those were not the situations to be celebrated, in a sane and stable world. Peace was the goal, the end to which all means were theoretically applied.

Back in the sixties, bumper stickers ridiculed the war in Vietnam by asking whether it was possible to kill for peace. The answer—then, as now—was “Yes.”

Sometimes a soldier had no choice.

And sometimes, he was bound to choose.

“We’re here,” the pilot said as Bolan saw the farmhouse up ahead. Below, a tractor churned across a field, its driver muttering into a two-way radio. There would be other watchers Bolan couldn’t see, tracking the chopper toward the helipad. Fingers on triggers, just in case.

They reached the pad and hovered, then began to settle down. Bolan looked through the bubble windscreen at familiar faces on the deck, none of them smiling yet.

It wasn’t home, but it would do.

Until they sent him off to war again.

“GLAD YOU COULD MAKE IT,” Hal Brognola said, while pumping Bolan’s hand. “So, how’s the Great White North?”

“Still there,” Bolan replied as he released his old friend’s hand.

Beside Brognola, Barbara Price surveyed Bolan with cool detachment, civil but entirely business-like. The things they did in private, now and then, might not be absolutely secret from Brognola or the Stony Man team, but Barbara shunned public displays. She was the perfect operations chief: intelligent, professional and absolutely ruthless when she had to be.

“You want some time to chill? Maybe a drink? A walk around the place?” Brognola asked.

“We may as well get to it,” Bolan said.

Clearly relieved, Brognola said, “Okay. Let’s hit the War Room, then.”

Bolan trailed the big Fed and Price into the rambling farmhouse that was Stony Man’s cosmetic centerpiece and active headquarters. From the outside, unless you climbed atop the roof and counted dish antennae, the place looked normal, precisely what a stranger would expect to see on a Virginia farm.

Not that a stranger, trespassing, would ever make it to the house alive.

Inside, it was a very different story, comfort vying with utility of every square inch of the house. It featured living quarters, kitchen, dining room—the usual, in short—but also had communications and computer rooms, though major functions were in the Annex, an arsenal second to none outside of any full-size military base, and other features that the standard home, rural or urban, couldn’t claim.

The basement War Room was a case in point. Accessible by stairs or elevator, it contained a conference table seating twenty, maps and charts for every part of Mother Earth, and audio-visual gear that would do Disney Studios proud.

How many times had Bolan sat inside that room to hear details of a mission that would send him halfway around the world, perhaps to meet his death?

Too many, right.

But it would never be enough, until the predators got wise and left the weaker members of the human herd alone.

Aaron Kurtzman met them on the threshold of the War Room, crunched Bolan’s hand in his fist, then spun his wheel-chair to lead them inside. As Stony Man’s tech master, Kurtzman commonly attended mission briefings and controlled whatever AV elements Brognola’s presentation might require.

Brognola took his usual seat at the head of the table, his back to a large wallscreen. Price sat to the big Fed’s right, Bolan on his left, while Kurtzman chose a spot midway along the table’s left-hand side. A keyboard waited for him on the tabletop, plugged into some concealed receptacle.

“Okay,” Brognola said, “before we start, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to keep up with the news these past few days.”

“Not much,” Bolan said. “Scraps from radio, while I was driving. Headlines showing from the newspaper dispensers.”

“Fair enough. We’re in the middle of a flap that has the White House nervous, not to mention certain friends abroad. Starting three days ago, on Thursday, we’ve experienced a series of attacks on Jews, here in the States and down in Mexico. It has the White House in an uproar, for assorted reasons, and we’ve got our marching orders.”

Bolan knew the protocol for Stony Man briefings. Brognola went by a script of sorts, and liked to keep his ducks all in a row.

“Who were the victims?” Bolan asked.

The big Fed tipped a nod to Kurtzman and the overheads dimmed just enough to simulate twilight. Behind Brognola’s back, a photo of a smiling couple dressed for formal partying filled up the screen.

“That’s Aderet Venjamin on the left,” Brognola said, without glancing around. “His wife’s Naomi. For the past five years, Venjamin has been assigned to the Israeli consulate in New York City.”

“Someone hit him?” Bolan asked. It was the logical assumption.

“Nope. The wife.”

Bolan’s surprise was indicated by a raised eyebrow.

“On Thursday morning,” Brognola pressed on, “she went out shopping on Park Avenue. One bodyguard, one driver, both ex-military. As she left a jeweler’s, two men on the sidewalk shot the guard, threw nitric acid in her face and fled on foot. No clear description of the perps, no vehicle observed.”

“Survivors?” Bolan asked.

“The lady’s still alive,” Hal said, “if you can call it living. Left eye gone, partially blinded in the right. Skin grafts may help a little, but she’ll never look like that again.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the screen behind him.

“Anyone claim credit for it?” Bolan asked.

“We’re not sure.”

“Meaning?”