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Bolan was moving as the second body dropped, waving the frightened cook away and holstering his pistol, going with the M-4 carbine as the other housemen started shouting back and forth, rushing to find out what had happened. Bolan couldn’t translate most of what they called out in Albanian, but he could track the gist of it.
They were coming prepared for a fight, coming to kill him.
Or they’d die trying.
Bolan cleared the kitchen’s exit and found two men armed with submachine guns double-timing toward him, grim-faced and determined. Dropping to a crouch, he stitched the pair from left to right and back again, watching them slam-dance into each other as they fell. The dying gunner on his left began to fire as he went down, the point-blank muzzle-flashes from his SMG setting his partner’s shirt on fire.
The Executioner was up and moving in a heartbeat, ducking to his right as someone at the far end of the corridor squeezed off a pistol shot. It missed him by a yard or more, but Bolan couldn’t see the shooter yet, since he—or she?—had drawn back out of sight around a corner.
Bolan had two goals—to liberate the women caged in Lorik Cako’s house and to eliminate the man himself, together with as many of his gunners as were willing to engage the Executioner. He guessed that would be all of them, which suited Bolan to a tee.
Long odds, but not the worst he’d ever faced.
Not even close.
Six down and counting, with how many more to go? Perhaps a dozen; maybe twice that, with an auction under way. If he could tag the buyers, too, so much the better, but he wasn’t feeling greedy.
Bolan edged along the hallway, watching doors to either side and waiting for the shooter at the far end to reveal himself once more. It happened seconds later, as the guy popped out to fire another round, then jerked back under cover while a burst from Bolan’s carbine filled the air with plaster dust.
No score.
Bolan paused long enough to palm a frag grenade, release its safety pin and pitch the bomb underhanded toward the shooter’s hiding place. It struck the wall down there and bounced around the corner, out of sight, starting a scramble with a frightened cry.
Four seconds later it blew, shrapnel scoring the walls, smoke and more dust erupting downrange. There were cries of pain, or perhaps pleas for help, all gibberish to Bolan’s ears as he advanced to deal with the survivors, whittling down the odds while there was time, before Cako’s troops got their act together and came at him in force. The more he could eliminate before that moment came, the better off Bolan would be.
Not home and dry, by any means, but still more likely to survive and help the women who were waiting for him somewhere in the house. Praying for help, perhaps, and waiting for an Executioner.
CHAPTER TWO
Virginia, two days earlier
Skyline Drive ran through Shenandoah National Park, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Its course covered 105 miles from Front Royal, the northern terminus, to Rockfish Gap near Waynesboro, where it connected with Interstate 64 and U.S. Highway 50, branching off eastward to Charlottesville or westward to Staunton. Those who hadn’t seen enough trees yet could keep on rolling down the Blue Ridge Parkway for another 469 miles, to wind up in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Mack Bolan wasn’t going that far—or even to Rockfish Gap—in his rented Toyota Prius Model NHW20. He’d be leaving Skyline Drive between Luray and Skyland Lodge, taking care of ugly business on a lovely summer’s morning.
The Blue Ridge Mountains never changed. Thrust upward by cataclysmic forces some four hundred million years earlier, they comprised a rugged spine of granite laced with quartz, sedimentary limestone and metamorphosed volcanic formations.
A motorcycle passed him, doing seventy or better, north of Thornton Gap. On any other morning—any other highway— Bolan wouldn’t have considered it a threat, but trips to Stony Man Farm, home to the nation’s most covert strike teams, were different, demanding even more alertness than he normally applied to daily life.
There was a possibility, however slim verging on nonexistent, that he might have picked up a tail in D.C. or at the previous night’s stop in Falls Church, Virginia. Officially, Mack Bolan didn’t exist. He’d been dead and buried for years, his various dossiers stamped Closed, filed and forgotten after a historic flameout in Manhattan’s Central Park.
But still… He’d been out there with various personas, and in his current incarnation as Matt Cooper, he’d been rather active lately. Most of Bolan’s enemies were well and truly dead, but there were bound to be some stragglers somewhere who had glimpsed his mug in passing, on some bloody killing ground or in some seedy dive. Hopefully, no one was on his tail. He hadn’t spotted anyone as yet.
Bolan turned off Skyline Drive onto the Farm’s single-lane access road. No gates were visible at first. Approaching vehicles or pedestrians had to round a corner first, by which time they had tripped two sets of sensors and were screened from view of any other passing travelers.
Alone, where they could be examined and condemned without an audience.
As soon as Bolan saw the gate, he keyed a pager-size device that would alert the Stony Man Farm team to his arrival. They already knew that someone was approaching, from the hidden sensors, but his signal would prevent a mobilized reaction in defense.
The gate still didn’t open, though. For that, he had to nose the Prius in and power down his window, leaning out to let a hidden camera focus on his face without a layer of tinted glass obstructing biometric measurements. The Farm was far removed from Hollywood in every way—not least among them being that a new arrival couldn’t pass on looks alone.
Bolan supposed there had to be intercoms somewhere around the gate, but no one greeted him by verbal communication. Instead, the steel gate topped with razor wire rolled open on its hidden track, taking its sweet time. He waited, then drove through and saw the gate reverse direction in his rearview mirror, shutting out the world.
It felt like coming home, if any place deserving of that label still remained on Earth, but even Stony Man wasn’t invulnerable. Some years back, a rogue CIA agent had pierced the Farm’s veil of secrecy and mounted an attack that claimed the life of April Rose, Bolan’s love. That debt was paid, but it would never be forgotten.
As he rolled up to the farmhouse, Bolan saw three figures waiting for him on the porch. Hal Brognola, stationed in the middle, was his oldest living friend and overseer of the Stony Man operation, working mostly from his office at the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington. Before the current program was created, the big Fed had been a G-man, hunting Bolan nationwide, drawn slowly into grudging admiration of the Executioner’s technique and its results, then into a covert alliance that could have cost Brognola his pension, if not his life and freedom.
On Brognola’s left stood Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller. Bolan caught her smile as he stepped from the vehicle, returned it with feeling, then turned his attention to the man on Brognola’s right.
Aaron Kurtzman, nicknamed “the Bear” for his beard and hulking size, had been shot in the spine on the same night April Rose died, confined to a wheelchair since then. The chair was low-tech, as Kurtzman had refused a motorized chair.
“You’re early,” Brognola declared by way of greeting.
“Caught a tailwind,” Bolan said, and shook hands all around.
“You need to freshen up, or shall we get to work?”
“Work’s good,” the Executioner replied.
THE FARM’S WAR Room was a basement chamber, accessible by stairs or elevator. Bolan’s party used the elevator for Kurtzman’s sake, those who were ambulatory taking familiar seats around a conference table built for an even dozen. So far, within the project’s history, there’d been no need to bring in extra chairs.
Brognola sat at the head of the table, with Bolan on his right, Price on his left. Kurtzman took the other end and manned a keyboard that controlled the War Room’s lighting and its audio-visual gear. He dimmed the lights a little, leaving them bright enough to read by without eye strain, and lowered a screen from the ceiling behind Brognola’s chair. Beside him, a laptop hummed to life.
“What do you know about Albania?” Brognola asked without preamble.
“It’s on the Adriatic, in southeastern Europe,” Bolan answered. “Facing toward the heel of Italy. Russia took over after World War II, but then there was some kind of break that pushed Albania toward China in the early sixties. The communist regime collapsed along with Russia and the rest of them, in 1991 or ’92, followed by chaos and violence. It’s one of the poorest, most backward countries in Europe. Beyond that,” he added, “not much.”
“That’s better than average,” Brognola said. “But you forgot the Albanian Mafia.”
“Okay.” Bolan breathed and bided his time.
“Like every other place on Earth,” Hal said, “Albania’s had its share of criminal clans and secret societies throughout history. I know you faced one of its organizations not long ago. They operate under a loose set of laws called kanuni, as you know, similar to the Mafia’s rule of omertà, triad initiation oaths, and so on.”
The big Fed paused, then proceeded when Bolan said nothing.
“Albanian mobsters made their living from vice and black-market trading under the old Red regime. They got their first real boost during the war in Kosovo, which interrupted the flow of Turkish heroin to western Europe through Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia. Rerouting tons of smack through Albania changed the drug landscape. So much heroin passed through Veliki Trnovac that the DEA started calling it the Medellín of the Balkans. Today, the Albanian Mob has active branches in Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia and they’re giving the Cosa Nostra a run for its money in Italy. Scotland Yard’s tracking Albanian operators in the U.K. And—huge surprise—they’ve made it to the States.”
“Sounds like a problem for the FBI,” Bolan said.
“And it would be, if we lived in normal times. By which I mean pre-9/11 times, without two wars in progress overseas and half the G-men in the country eavesdropping on mosques. It’s no great secret that the Bureau shifted its priorities after the towers fell. Hell, it was in the papers and on CNN—twenty-four hundred agents removed from ‘traditional’ investigations to work the terrorist beat, while Mafia and white-collar prosecutions dropped by 40 percent or more. They’re trying to redress that imbalance today, over at the Hoover Building, but they left the barn door open too damned long.”
“So, let’s hear it,” Bolan said.
“Last week,” Brognola said, “a Coast Guard cutter on patrol along the Jersey Coast tried to stop and search an unidentified trawler. The trawler’s captain made a run for it, then set the boat on fire and bailed. He got away somehow, or maybe drowned, with whatever crew he had aboard. The boat—a shrimper stolen from New Orleans six weeks earlier—burned to the water line with nineteen people still aboard.”
Bolan frowned. “You said—”
“That the captain and crew got away. These were passengers.”
As Brognola spoke, photos of a blackened, listing boat began to scroll across the screen behind him. Soon the focus shifted to recovery of charred and shriveled corpses, while the trawler did its best to sink and disappear.
“Illegals,” Bolan said.
The big Fed nodded. “From the autopsy reports, it was eight men, seven women and four children. Cooked alive belowdecks, for the most part.”
“Jesus.”
“Maybe He was watching,” Brognola told Bolan, “but He didn’t lend a hand.”
“They were Albanians?” Bolan inquired.
“Affirmative. Against all odds, the Coast Guard saved some papers from the wheelhouse. Traced a bill for fuel back to a dock on Bergen Neck, New Jersey. Sift through the standard bs paperwork, and you’ll discover that the dock belongs to this guy.”
Bolan watched new photos march across the screen above Brognola’s shoulder. Each image depicted a man of middle age and average height, with an olive complexion and black hair going salt-and-pepper at the temples. His meaty face reminded Bolan of a clenched fist with a thick mustache glued on.
“Arben Kurti,” Brognola said. “He runs the Mob on this side of the water, moving drugs, guns, people—anything that he can milk for cash.”
“So, human trafficking,” Bolan said.
“Split two ways. He offers immigrants a new start in the States, complete with bogus green cards, if they pay enough up front. Sometimes they get here and discover that they still owe more. You’ve heard the stories.”
“Sure.”
“The other side of it is purely what we used to call white slavery, before the world went all politically correct. Today its labeled compulsory prostitution. If the Mob can’t dupe women into using their underground travel agency, thugs snatch them off the streets of European cities, maybe some in Asia and Latin America, too. Age only matters if it helps to boost the asking price.”
Across the table, Barbara Price mouthed a curse that Bolan hadn’t heard her use before. Her ashen face was angled toward the screen as Kurtzman kept the pictures coming.
Girls and women being led from seedy rooms by uniformed police. Stretchers employed to carry out the ones who couldn’t walk, either because they had been drugged or used so cruelly that their bodies had rebelled, shut down in mute protest. A couple had the pallid look of death about them.
Bolan wondered whether it had come as a relief.
“Kurti answers to this man, back home,” Brognola said. Another string of slides revealed a somewhat older man, larger in girth if not in height, dressed stylish by southern European standards without working the Armani trend. He was fat-faced, with bad teeth and tombstone eyes.
Bolan wished he could study that face through a sniper scope.
“Rahim Berisha,” Brognola announced, by way of introduction. “Think of him as Albania’s Teflon Don. He’s got the best and worst friends that money can buy, on both sides of the law. Some say he knows the president of Albania, but we can’t prove it. There’s no doubt that he has connections to the Albanian army, moving weapons out the back door for a profit. Double that in spades for the Albanian State Police and RENEA—their Unit for the Neutralization of Armed Elements. Word is that Berisha uses SWAT teams to back up his hardmen when there’s any kind of major trouble.”
“Makes it rough to bust him,” Bolan said.
“So far, it’s been impossible,” Brognola said. “He’s been indicted seven times, but something always goes off-track at the Ministry of Justice in Tirana. Paperwork misfiled, warrants thrown out on technicalities, and so on. As you might suspect, witnesses called to testify against him qualify as an endangered species.”
Once again, no great surprise.
“So, the job would be…?”
“Shut them down,” Brognola stated. “Hell, take them off the map. This pipeline needs to close, for good.”
For good, indeed. And Bolan thought, at least for now.
He harbored no illusions about cleaning up the world at large, saving society or any such high-flown ideal. The best that any soldier on the firing line could do was fight, carry the day in one location at a time and hope he wouldn’t have to win the same ground back again before he had a chance to rest, regroup and savor something of his hard-won victory.
And every victory was transient. There was no such thing as killing Evil in the real world, only in the text of so-called holy books forecasting distant futures that the Executioner would never live to see.
But he was doing what he could, with what he had.
“I’ll need a rundown on the syndicate and major players,” Bolan said unnecessarily.
“All right here,” Brognola said, sliding a CD-ROM across to Bolan in a paper envelope. “You want to check it out before you go, in case you think of any questions?”
“Will do,” Bolan said.
“I’ve got a meeting back in Wonderland, with the AG,” Brognola said. “Barb or Aaron should be able to fill in the gaps, if I’ve missed anything.”
“You won’t have,” Bolan said with full assurance.
“Well.”
“Don’t keep them waiting,” Bolan said, already on his feet.
“They have an auction coming up in Jersey,” Brognola observed. “We don’t have any details, but it’s soon. You’ll find a couple guys on there who might know when and where, in case you want to drop around and place a bid. Or something.”
“That’s a thought.”
They shook hands once again and Bolan trailed the others from the War Room, back in the direction of the elevator. Brognola was talking while he led the way.
“Remember, it’s a different world there, in Albania. Picture the worst bits of Colombia, without the jungle. Their constitution guarantees all kinds of rights, and everybody from the cops to the cartels ignores it. Human rights? Forget about it. The legitimate economy is in the toilet, circling the drain. But hey, you’ve dealt with worse.”
And that was true.
But every time he faced long odds, the laws of probability kicked in. Some day…
Bolan derailed that train of thought before it reached its terminus. Only a would-be martyr went to war anticipating failure. Just as only fools ignored the risks involved.
“Safe trip,” he told the big Fed on the farmhouse porch.
And wished himself the same.
CHAPTER THREE
East Keansburg, New Jersey, the present
A shotgun blast shredded the wall two feet above Mack Bolan’s head, frosting his hair and shoulders with a cloud of plaster dust while streamers of wallpaper flapped like dying tentacles. He answered with a short burst from his carbine, saw his adversary lurch and stagger out of sight beyond a corner, but he couldn’t guarantee the kill.
The odds were in his favor this time, since few human beings managed to survive a torso wound from 5.56 mm NATO rounds. The relatively small projectiles started to tumble when they penetrated a medium more dense than air, thereby creating catastrophic wound channels through flesh and bone. While entrance wounds were smaller than a quarter-inch across, inside the target might be virtually disemboweled.
Which didn’t necessarily equate to instant death.
The gunner with the 12-gauge had been moving on his own two feet when Bolan saw him last. Whether he dropped dead after passing out of sight or was prepared to fire again, lying in wait, remained to be discovered.
