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He checked his GPS unit again, peering through goggles worn to shield his eyes from being wind-blasted and withered in their sockets. Noting that he’d drifted something like a mile off target since he’d left the Beechcraft, he corrected, dipped his left shoulder and fought the wind that nearly slapped him through another barrel roll.
Lateral slippage brought him back on target, hurtling diagonally through space on a northwesterly course. Bolan couldn’t turn to check the Beechcraft’s progress, but he knew Grimaldi would be heading back to sea, reversing his direction in a wide loop over the Gulf of Guinea before returning to the airstrip in Benin, minus one passenger.
The airfield’s solitary watchman wouldn’t notice—or at least, he wouldn’t care. He had been paid half his fee up front, and would receive the rest when the Stony Man pilot was safely on the deck, with no police to hector him with questions. Whether he had dumped Bolan at sea or flown him to the Kasbah, it meant less than nothing to the Beninese.
Twenty seconds in and he had dropped another 384 feet, while covering perhaps four hundred yards in linear distance. His target lay five miles and change in front of him, concealed by treetops, but he didn’t plan to cover all that distance in the air.
What goes up had to go down.
Bolan couldn’t have said exactly when he reached terminal velocity, but the altimeter clipped to his parachute harness kept him apprised of his distance from impact with terra firma.
Eleven minutes after leaping from the Beechcraft, Bolan yanked the rip cord to deploy his parachute. He’d packed the latest ATPS canopy—Advanced Tactical Parachute System, in Army lingo—a cruciform chute designed to cut his rate of descent by some thirty percent. Which meant, in concrete terms, he’d only be dropping at twenty feet per second, with a twenty-five-percent reduction in potential injury.
Assuming that it worked.
The first snap nearly caught him by surprise, as always, with the harness biting at his crotch and armpits. At a thousand feet and dropping, he was well below the radar that would track Grimaldi’s plane through its peculiar U-turn, first inland, then back to sea again.
And what would any watchers make of that, even without a Bolan sighting on their monitors? Knowing the aircraft hadn’t landed, would they then assume that it had dropped cargo or personnel, and send a squad of soldiers to investigate?
Perhaps.
But if they went to search the point where the Stony Man pilot had turned, they would be missing Bolan by some ten or fifteen miles.
With any luck, it just might be enough.
He worked the steering lines, enjoying the sensation as he swooped across the sky, with Africa’s landscape scrolling beneath his feet. Each second brought it closer, but he wasn’t simply falling down. Each heartbeat also carried Bolan northward, closer to his target and the goal of his assignment, swiftly gaining ground.
Four hundred feet above the ground, the treetops didn’t look like velvet anymore. Their limbs and trunks were clearly solid objects that could flay the skin from Bolan’s body, crush his bones, drive shattered ribs into his heart and lungs. Or, he might escape injury while fouling his chute on the upper branches of a looming giant, dangling a hundred feet or more above the jungle floor.
Best to avoid the trees entirely, if he could, and drop into a clearing when he found one. If he found one.
While Bolan looked for an LZ, he also watched for people on the ground below him. Beating radar scanners with his HALO drop didn’t mean he was free and clear, if someone saw him falling from the sky and passed word on to the army or MOPOL, the mobile police branch of Nigeria’s national police force.
Bolan wouldn’t fire on police—a self-imposed restriction he’d adopted at the onset of his one-man war against the Mafia a lifetime earlier—and he hadn’t dropped in from the blue to play tag in the jungle with a troop of soldiers who’d be pleased to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all.
Better by far if he was left alone to go about his business unobstructed.
Bolan saw a clearing up ahead, two hundred yards and closing. He adjusted his direction and descent accordingly, hung on and watched the mossy earth come up to meet him in a rush.
GRIMALDI DIDN’T like the plan, but, hey, what else was new? Each time he ferried Bolan to another drop zone, he experienced the fear that this might be their last time out together, that he’d never see the warrior’s solemn face again.
And that he’d be to blame.
Not in the sense of taking out his oldest living friend, but rather serving Bolan up to those who would annihilate him without thinking twice. A kind of Meals on Wings for cannibals.
That was ridiculous, of course. Grimaldi knew it with the portion of his mind that processed rational, sequential thoughts. But knowing and believing were sometimes very different things.
Granted, he could have begged off, passed the job to someone else, but what would that accomplish? Nothing beyond handing Bolan to a stranger who would get him to the slaughterhouse on time, without a fare-thee-well. At least Grimaldi understood what had been asked of Bolan, every time his friend took on another mission that could be his last.
The morbid turn of thought left the ace pilot disgusted with himself. He tried to shake it off, whistled a snatch of something tuneless for a moment, then gave up on that and watched the Gulf of Guinea passing underneath him. Were the people in the boats craning their necks, tracking his engine sounds and following his progress overhead? Was one of them, perhaps, a watcher who had seen the Beechcraft earlier, reported it to other watchers on dry land, and now logged his return?
It was a possibility, of course, but there was nothing he could do about it. Radar would have marked his plane’s arrival in Nigerian airspace and tracked him to the inland point where he had turned. The natural assumption would be that he’d dropped something or someone; the mystery only began there.
Or, at least, so he was hoping.
Nigeria imported and exported drugs. According to reports Grimaldi had seen from the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency, Colombian cocaine and heroin from Afghanistan came in via South Africa, while home-grown marijuana was exported by the ton. Police, as usual, bagged ten percent or more of the illicit cargoes flowing back and forth across their borders, when they weren’t hired to protect the shipments.
So, they might think he had dropped a load of drugs.
And then what?
It was sixty-forty that they’d order someone to investigate the theoretical drop zone, which meant relaying orders from headquarters to some outpost in the field. Maybe the brass in Lagos would reach out to their subordinates in Warri, who in turn would form a squad to roll out, have a look around, then report on what they found.
Which should be nothing.
If they went looking for drugs, they’d check the area where Grimaldi had turned his plane, then backtrack for a while along his flight path, coming or going, to see if they’d missed anything. There were no drugs to find, so they’d go home empty-handed and pissed off at wasting their time.
But if they weren’t looking for drugs…
He knew the search might be conducted differently if the Nigerians went looking for intruders. Whether they were educated on HALO techniques or not, they had to know that men manipulating parachutes could travel farther than a bale of cargo dropping from the sky, and that the men, once having landed, wouldn’t wait around for searchers to locate them.
It would be a different game, then, with a different cast of players. MOPOL still might be involved, but it was also possible that Bolan could be up against the State Security Service, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the competing National Intelligence Agency. The SSS was Nigeria’s FBI, in effect, widely accused of domestic political repression, while the NIA was equivalent to America’s CIA, and the DIA handled military intelligence.
In the worst-case scenario, Grimaldi supposed that all three agencies might decide to investigate his drop-in, with MOPOL agents thrown in for variety. And how many hunters could Bolan evade before his luck ran out?
Grimaldi’s long experience with Bolan, starting as a kidnap “victim” and continuing thereafter as a friend and willing ally, had taught him not to underestimate the Executioner’s abilities. No matter what the odds arrayed against him, the Sarge had always managed to emerge victorious.
So far.
But he was only human, after all.
One hell of a human, for sure, but still human.
Grimaldi trusted Bolan to succeed, no matter the task he was assigned. But if he fell along the way, revenge was guaranteed.
The pilot swore it on his soul, whatever that was worth.
He didn’t know jackshit about Nigeria, beyond the obvious. It was a state in Africa, beset by poverty—yet oil rich—disease and chaos verging on the point of civil war, where he would stand out like a sore white thumb. But the official language was English, because of former colonial rule, so he wouldn’t be stranded completely.
And if Bolan didn’t make it out, Grimaldi would be going on a little hunting trip.
An African safari, right.
He owed the big guy that, at least.
And Jack Grimaldi always paid his debts.
TOUCHDOWN WAS better than Bolan had any right to expect after stepping out of an airplane and plummeting more than 24,000 feet to Earth. He bent his knees, tucked and rolled as they’d taught him at Green Beret jump school back in the old days, and came up with only a few minor bruises to show for the leap.
Only bruises so far.
Step two was covering his tracks and getting out of there before some hypothetical pursuer caught his scent and turned his drop into a suicide mission.
Bolan took it step by step, with all due haste. He shed the parachute harness first thing, along with his combat webbing and weapons. Next, he stripped off the jumpsuit that had saved him from frostbite while soaring, but which now felt like a baked potato’s foil wrapper underneath the Nigerian sun. That done, he donned the combat rigging once again and went to work.
Fourth step, reel in the parachute and all its lines, compacting same into the smallest bundle he could reasonably manage. That done, he unsheathed his folding shovel and began to dig.
It didn’t have to be a deep grave, necessarily. Just deep enough to hide his jumpsuit, helmet, bottled oxygen and mask, the chute and rigging. If some kind of nylon-eating scavenger he’d never heard of came along and dug it up that night, so be it. Bolan would be long gone by that time, his mission either a success or a resounding, fatal failure.
More than depth, he would require concealment for the burial, in case someone came sniffing after him within the next few hours. To that end, he dug his dump pit in the shadow of a looming mahogany some thirty paces from the clearing where he’d landed, and spent precious time re-planting ferns he had disturbed during the excavation when he’d finished.
It wasn’t perfect—nothing man-made ever was—but it would do.
He had a four-mile hike ahead of him, through forest that had so far managed to escape the logger’s ax and chainsaw. As he understood it from background research, Nigeria, once in the heart of West Africa’s rain forest belt, had lost ninety-five percent of its native tree cover and now imported seventy-five percent of the lumber used in domestic construction. Some conservationists believed that there would be no forests left in the country by 2020, a decade and change down the road toward Doomsday.
That kind of slash-and-burn planning was seen throughout Africa, in agriculture, mineral prospecting, environmental protection, disease control—you name it. The native peoples once ruled and exploited by cruel foreign masters now seemed hell-bent on turning their ancestral homeland into a vision of post-apocalyptic hell, sacrificing Mother Nature on the twin altars of profit and national pride.
Of course, the foreigners were still involved, and if they didn’t always have traditional white faces, they were every bit as rapacious as Belgium’s old King Leopold or Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm. Africa still had treasures to steal or buy cheaply, and Nigeria’s main claim to fame was petroleum.
Which brought Bolan’s mind back front and center to his mission as he slogged through a forest whose upper canopy steamed, while its floor lay in warm, muggy shade.
The oil rush was on in Nigeria, had been for years now, and like any mineral boom, it spawned winners and losers. The haves and have-nots. In Nigeria’s case, the have-nots—or rather, some of them—had taken up arms to demand a piece of the action. Barring concessions that pleased them, they aimed to make life untenable for the haves.
Which led to Bolan traveling halfway around the world, sleeping on planes and later jumping out of one to drop from more than four miles high and land on hostile ground where he’d be hunted by both sides, if either one detected him.
All for a young woman he’d never met or heard of previously, whom he’d never really get to know, and whom he’d never see again if he pulled off the job at hand and saved her life.
The really weird part, from a “normal” individual’s perspective, was that none of it seemed strange to Bolan. Hell, it wasn’t even new. The maps and faces changed, of course, but it was what Mack Bolan did.
Well, some of what he did.
The rest of it was killing, plain but often far from simple. He’d received the Executioner nickname the hard way, earning it. A few had nearly rivaled Bolan’s record as a sniper when he wore his country’s uniform.
As for the rest, forget it.
If there was another fighting man or woman who could match his body count since Bolan had retired from military service to pursue a one-man war, it ranked among the best-kept secrets of all time.
He had a job to do, now, in Nigeria. Helping a total stranger out of trouble.
And there would be blood.
CHAPTER TWO
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
Thirty-three hours prior to touchdown in Nigeria, Bolan had cruised along Skyline Drive in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, watching the marvels of nature scroll past his windows. As always, he knew that the drive was only the start of another long journey.
His destination that morning wasn’t the end.
It was a launching pad.
He blanked that out and took the Blue Ridge drive for what it was: a small slice of serenity within a life comprising primarily tension, violent action and occasional side trips into Bizarro Land.
Bolan enjoyed the drive, the trees and ferns flanking the two-lane blacktop, and the chance of seeing deer or other wildlife while en route. He’d never been a hunter in the “sporting” sense, and while he’d never thought of carrying a placard for the other side, it pleased him to see animals alive and well, wearing the skins or feathers they were born with.
When you’d dropped the hammer on enough men, he supposed, the “game” of killing lost its dubious appeal.
But stalking human predators, well, that was Bolan’s job. And it would never end, as long as he survived.
So be it. He had made a choice, in full knowledge that there could be no turning back, no change of mind or heart once the decision was translated into action. Bolan was the Executioner, and always would be.
War without end. Amen.
Which didn’t mean he couldn’t stop and smell the roses when he had the opportunity. What was he fighting for, if not the chance to lead a better and more peaceful life?
Of course, he fought for others. Sacrificed his future, in effect. There’d be no wife and kiddies, no white picket fence, no PTA meetings or Christmas parties at the nine-to-five office. No pension or gold watch when he’d put in his time.
Just death.
And he’d already had a preview of his own, stage-managed in Manhattan by the same folks who had built the installation that lay five or six miles down the scenic route.
Mack Bolan was no more.
Long live the Executioner.
BOLAN CLEARED security without a hitch. He passed a tractor harrowing one of the fields on his left as he drove toward the main house. Stony Man was a working farm, which paid some of the bills and supported its cover, since aerial photos would show cultivated fields and farmhands pursuing their normal duties.
Those photos wouldn’t reveal that the workers were extremely motivated cops and members of America’s elite military teams—Navy SEALs, Special Forces, Army Rangers, Marine Corps Force Recon—who spent duty rotations at Stony Man under a lifetime oath of secrecy. All armed. All dangerous.
There were risks involved in spying on Stony Man Farm. Each aircraft passing overhead was monitored on radar and by other means. If one appeared too nosy, there were means for dealing with the problem.
They included Stinger ground-to-air missiles and a dowdy-looking single-wide mobile home planted in the middle of the Farm’s airstrip. If friendly aircraft were expected, a tractor pulled the mobile home aside to permit landing. If intruders tried to land uninvited, the trailer not only blocked the runway, but could drop its walls on hinges to reveal quad-mounted TM-134 miniguns, each six-barreled weapon capable of firing four thousand 7.62 mm rounds per second.
Fifty yards out from the farmhouse, Bolan recognized Hal Brognola and Barbara Price waiting for him on the wide front porch. A couple of young shirtless warriors in blue jeans and work boots were painting the upper story of the house, a procedure that Bolan had never observed before. He caught Price glancing his way and couldn’t help smiling.
The home team waited for him where they stood. Bolan climbed the three porch steps and shook their hands in turn. Price’s greeting was professional, giving no hint of all the times they’d shared a bed in his upstairs quarters at the Farm, when he was passing through.
“Good trip?” Brognola asked, as always.
“Uneventful,” Bolan answered.
“That’s the best kind. Join us in the War Room?”
Bolan nodded, then followed Brognola and Price inside.
The War Room occupied roughly one-quarter of the farmhouse’s basement level. It was basically a high-tech conference room, with all the audiovisual bells and whistles, but Brognola had always called it the War Room, since discussions held around its meeting table always ended with an order to destroy some target that duly constituted authorities found themselves unable to touch by legitimate means.
Sooner or later, it came down to war.
