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Crucial Intercept
Don Pendleton
A series of high-profile shootings in Virginia exposes a deadly scavenger hunt with numerous factions competing for the prize. An ex-CIA cryptologist who created an unbreakable code has unwittingly been sold out to the terrorist group who can get to him first.Before any more innocent lives are lost, Mack Bolan must intercept the human bounty and keep the code from falling into enemy hands.With several fully equipped foreign black ops groups tracking his every move and willing to die for their cause, Bolan is running out of time, ammunition and options. He has only one choice–turn the war back on the terrorists. A single American citizen may hold the key to military superiority, but there is only one soldier who can defend it–the Executioner.
The North Koreans were holding Baldero within the building—if the cryptographer was still alive
From his vantage point in a line of cars parked on the street, the Executioner considered the problem. Any attempt to raid the building would cause the North Koreans to either flee or, worse, kill Baldero and cut their losses before they escaped. That could not be permitted. A surgical strike was called for—and the time for action had arrived.
Bolan made sure his weapons were secure in their holsters and that he carried a full complement of spare magazines, drawing from the last of the stores in his war bag. Then he screwed the custom-built suppressor to the threaded barrel of his Beretta 93-R, held the pistol low against his leg and walked up to the front of the curio shop.
Knowing that at any moment, a shotgun blast could chop him in half at the waist, Bolan took a step back and planted a combat-booted foot on the wooden door. It splintered and slammed inward, reverberating off the wall inside.
Bolan dived into the room.
Rescue was coming—and with it, hell.
Crucial Intercept
The Executioner
Don Pendleton
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
1844–1900
Terrorism will not be tolerated in the suburban backyards and city streets of America—not on my watch. I will attack from all sides, from every angle, until the enemies inevitably turn their guns on each other.
—Mack Bolan
THE MACK BOLAN LEGEND
Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.
But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.
Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.
He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.
So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.
But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.
Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
1
Mack Bolan pulled the Crown Victoria sedan into the only free slot among the convenience store’s gas pumps, jockeying for position among the other drivers already fueling up. The man still known to some as the Executioner was just outside Williamsburg, Virginia, having spent the past several hours burning up state highways. The Crown Victoria, an FOUO—for official use only—vehicle on loan from a CIA motor pool, was a “plainclothes” interceptor model. Its big up-rated 250 horsepower V8 engine drove seventeen-inch stamped steel wheels wearing 235/55/17 high-performance rubber, all of it held together by a heavy-duty suspension and frame. The powerful car had served Bolan well, bearing him swiftly from Langley to Charlottesville, then to Lynchburg, and finally to Richmond, where he’d received the call from the Farm that sent him tearing up the road to Williamsburg.
Bolan snapped open his secure satellite phone and dialed the number that would, through a circuitous and redundantly encrypted route, connect him with Stony Man Farm in Virginia. The nerve center for the Sensitive Operations Group, a covert arm of the United States Justice Department, had been the scene of furious activity overnight.
Bolan had gotten no more sleep than had the cyber team at the Farm, for while they traced his location, coordinated with local law enforcement, and fed new destinations to the Executioner, he had pushed the Crown Victoria to reach each and every one of the target zones. Each time, they had been one step behind their quarry. The soldier understood from long experience that sometimes you had to hurry up and wait. There was little he could do but chase down the leads passed on to him by the Farm. Eventually, his path would intercept those of the person or persons he sought, likely with violent results.
He would see to that.
The first urgent contact from the Farm had come just before midnight. Bolan had been staying in a motel near Langley, taking some long-overdue down time to rest after his latest debriefing trip to Wonderland and a meet with Hal Brognola. While he maintained an arm’s length relationship with the United States government’s covert counterterrorism network, Brognola transcended any bureaucratic boundaries or barriers. He liked to keep the big Fed informed of what he learned, each and every time he stepped onto the latest battlefield in his endless war against terror and injustice. The cyber team at the Farm could use the intel to update—or close—files on various threats.
The call alone, when it woke him, would have been enough to leave him instantly alert—but the words of Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, had left no doubt.
“Striker,” Price had said, using the Farm’s code name for the Executioner, “somebody’s shooting up Virginia.”
Bolan had switched on the large color television, after finding the oversized motel remote on top of the set. Predictably, every one of the cable news channels and at least two local Virginia television stations were all over the story. A series of high-profile shootings, committed by groups of men wielding automatic weapons, had torn up several public locations in Charlottesville. The first, in the early evening, had ripped apart an Internet café just off the campus of the University of Virginia, which had sparked fears of another Virginia Tech–style massacre. Nobody had been killed, but significant damage to the facility had been done.
Less than an hour after the computer lab shooting, another one-sided gun battle had shot up a public Laundromat in downtown Charlottesville. Then, an hour and a half after that, a convenience store on the outskirts of the city had taken a broadside from what one witness described as “four Chinese men with Uzis.” This was the worst of the incidents, to that point; a clerk working behind the front counter had been tagged by a bullet. The young man had died on the way to the hospital.
It was the report of “four Chinese men” with automatic weapons that worried the men and women at the Farm, and it was this concern—as well as the shootings occurring in close succession in a major metropolitan area—that had tripped warning flags. There were no current reports of new terrorist threats from Asian fringe groups, Asian gangs, or even from within elements of nominally hostile governments such as China. Bolan’s jaw had tightened, at that. It had not been so long ago that he had found himself dealing with heavily armed and very hostile Chinese sleeper cells on American soil in Hawaii. The Chinese government had dismissed the attacks as the work of rogue elements in their military. A lot of people had died before it was over, and Bolan had no desire to see a repeat performance from yet another highly organized and disciplined gathering of “rogue” operatives trained and equipped in Communist China.
When he had said as much, Price had dismissed it as unlikely. Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, Stony Man’s computer expert and the leader of the Farm’s cyber team, had found no indication of a coordinated terror effort. There was no communications traffic or Internet traffic to indicate it, and very little in the way of official government maneuvering. At least, there was nothing to which the Farm’s team could trace the violence. That was enough to satisfy Bolan on that score, at least for now, but it did leave the question of what was happening in Virginia—and he had said as much.
“That,” Price had replied over the secure line, “we think we do know, at least in part. Bear and his people have been burning up the ether trying to get what surveillance data there was to be had. We’ve managed to extract security camera images from two locations. The first is from the Internet café, and the second is from the convenience store. Using image enhancement technology on the convenience store video footage, we’ve compared it to a fairly clear picture from the Web cameras in the computer lab. There’s a link, which I’m sending to your phone now.”
Bolan had taken his phone from his ear to see the data transfer icon blinking. It did not take long for the image to load on his own small color screen. The picture itself was black-and-white, bearing the unmistakable pixel dithering of an image that has been put through the digital wringer to make it more clear. It was the face of a man with long, dark hair.
“Who’s this?” Bolan asked, putting the phone back to his ear.
“That,” Price said, “is Daniel Baldero. Thirty-years-old. Five-foot-ten, 270 pounds. Paid for college by joining the Air Force. Honorable discharge. Earned a couple of degrees in computer programming before he was finished going to school, in Newport News. Last address of record, according to the Virginia DMV, is Charlottesville, Virginia. Mr. Baldero can be, thanks to the footage we’ve used to identify him, positively placed at the scene of two out of three of those shootings.”
“Doing what?”
“Running for his life, from what we can see,” Price said.
“So he’s not one of the shooters.”
“No,” Price said. “And of course we can’t place him at the laundry shooting because there were no functioning cameras there. But as coincidences go—”
“It’s a pretty big one,” Bolan agreed. “This Baldero is either the unluckiest man in Virginia, or something’s fishy and he’s involved.”
“It gets more interesting,” Price said. “Mr. Baldero is a computer programmer and cryptographer by trade, formerly employed by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“Formerly,” Bolan repeated.
“As of two weeks ago,” Price reported. “He resigned without explanation.”
“Is he on the run?”
“We checked, and they deny it,” Price had said. “Logically, there’s no reason he should be on the run, at least not from the CIA. They have no reason to chase him down. He’s just a former employee, as far as they’re concerned, and not one with any sort of contract to which they could hold him.”
“But again, as coincidences go,” Bolan said.
“It’s a pretty big one,” Price echoed. “The Man wants us on this, Striker, and Hal’s given us the green light.”
“I’ll leave immediately,” Bolan said. “But I’m going to need transportation. The rental I’m driving hasn’t got the guts for a field operation.”
“We’ve got a car on its way to you by courier,” Price said. “Hal’s made an arrangement with the CIA. You’ll get one from their motor pool.”
“There’s that word again.” Bolan frowned at the phone. “I’m going to need weapons and equipment for an extended field operation.”
“Already in the car and on the way to your door,” Price said. “Cowboy keeps a few specially prepared care packages ready and waiting for little emergencies like these.” John “Cowboy” Kissinger was the Farm’s armorer. He had personally tuned the Beretta 93-R machine pistol in the leather shoulder holster Bolan was strapping on, and he had custom-built the suppressor fitted to the weapon. He had also done an accuracy job on the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle that was Bolan’s other nearly constant companion, which he carried in a Kydex holster in his waistband on his right hip.
“Then I’m not going to waste any more time talking,” Bolan said, watching headlights pan across the curtains of the motel room’s window. “Unless it’s another coincidence, the car is just arriving. Your timing is impeccable.”
“We try,” Price said. “Oh, and be sure to check inside the trunk.” When she spoke again, her tone was warmer, but also more anxious. “Be careful, Striker.”
“Always, Barb.”
“Good hunting.”
“Thanks. Striker out.” He closed the phone.
The courier was at the door just as Bolan opened it—the man said not a word. He was dressed in slacks and a blazer and had about him what Bolan thought of as the “junior G-man” look. He nodded and tossed the keys to Bolan, which were for the Crown Victoria now idling in front of Bolan’s open motel-room door. Then he disappeared around the corner of the building.
Bolan looked at the car, then back to where the courier had been. He shook his head slightly.
There was work to do.
THAT PHONE CALL had been one long, tiring drive ago on only half a night’s sleep, fueled by truck-stop coffee and a fast-food breakfast consumed at highway speed. Since then, the Executioner had tracked the increasingly violent outbreaks of gunfire from site to site in Virginia. The Farm relayed to him the location each time it happened, but Bolan knew as well as Price did that they would not get ahead of the shooters by playing a reactive game. They needed to get in front of the gunners, whoever they were.
He had checked each site, the latest a motel in Williamsburg that had been blown half to hell. Yet again, there was no evidence of the shooters themselves. He had phoned in and reported as much. Price had promised that the follow-up field team, a covert Justice analysis unit protected by blacksuit gunners from Stony Man, would check for evidence he might have missed in his cursory inspection, as they had been doing behind him all night. They would also see if there were any local surveillance sources to be pulled for analysis. That didn’t concern Bolan, at least not immediately. He would be surprised if the tapes showed anything of use except to confirm Baldero’s presence. Intelligence on the shooters would be helpful, but even that wasn’t crucial at the moment. The only thing that mattered was getting out in front of the shooters, and that depended on the pattern analysis Stony Man had been working on.
“Price here.”
“Striker,” Bolan said. “Same story here.”
“You’re still outside Williamsburg?”
“Yes,” he said. “Your crew can move in on the motel. I saw a lot of shell casings but not much else. No sign of our boy, and nothing of use. Barb, you’ve got to get me in front of this. Has Bear run his pattern analysis?”
“Got you right here, Striker.” Aaron Kurtzman’s voice came over the line. “I’m here with Barb. Our instincts have been right all along. We’re plotting the shootings and they make a line, more or less. That puts the next possible cluster of targets in a more or less straight line through Hampton, Newport News and Norfolk, if the pattern holds.”
“Then I’m headed to—” Bolan began. He stopped.
“Striker?” Price asked in Bolan’s ear. The soldier’s head snapped left, then right. His eyes narrowed.
“I hear gunshots,” Bolan said. He snapped the phone shut and half-vaulted the hood of the Crown Victoria, throwing himself behind the wheel and slamming the door shut. The big tires squealed and the engine roared as he floored the vehicle, tearing out of the convenience store parking lot. Horns honked as he cut off several vehicles. The car whipped onto the highway and he hit the automatic windows, rolling them all the way down on both sides, fore and aft.
He heard it again, then—the unmistakable sound of automatic gunfire in the distance, moving away from him. He pushed the interceptor onward, yanking the wheel hard left, cutting across a side street and taking another.
When he heard the next burst of shots, it was louder. He was getting closer. He scanned the traffic far ahead of him.
Logistically, this was very bad. It was broad daylight. A running gun battle in an American city, especially an American tourist city, was going to pour gasoline on the already raging media fire over the cluster of shootings throughout the night. The Executioner had been listening to news-talk radio throughout his nighttime chase. Every station was bubbling over with sensational reporting on the “terrorist attacks,” with hysterical talking heads manning their desks and filling the airwaves with commentary from “experts.” The incessant speculation and mindless chatter had eventually become so much background noise to Bolan, who understood only too well the reality that the reporters were playing at analyzing.
From a pocket of his blacksuit—the formfitting black combat clothing that could pass for casual street clothes to the untrained eye, especially when worn under a light windbreaker as he was doing—Bolan removed a tiny earbud headset and donned it. He flipped open his secure sat phone and replaced the device in his pocket after hitting the first speed dial. Price’s voice came to him almost instantly, filtered through the earpiece.
“Striker?”
