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A rosy dawn was just beginning to crest above the horizon in the east, but the shoreline highway was still dark, the heavy traffic an incandescent river, an endless stream of headlights and brake lights. The expensive cars streamed by, the yawning drivers hidden behind tinted windows.
Keeping one hand on the wheel, Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, changed lanes as he downshifted gears. “Are we talking about a ‘stolen arrow’ scenario?” he asked, glancing at the cell phone clipped onto the polished mahogany dashboard. A newspaper lay on the passenger seat, the checkered grip of a big pistol just barely visible beneath it.
“I can’t say more on an open line,” the voice of Hal Brognola replied over the stereo speakers positioned around the luxury car.
“Understood,” Bolan growled. “See you in fifteen.”
“Make it ten,” Brognola countered, and disconnected.
Taking the next off ramp, Bolan merged into the city traffic.
A few minutes later, the soldier turned a corner and saw the flashing neon sign for the Blue Moon Café. It spite of its proximity to the luxurious Crystal City Mall, this was a genuine, old-fashioned, greasy spoon diner that never closed. The coffee was perfect for degreasing tractors, and the pot roast could be used to patch tank armor, but the chili was spectacular. Best of all, the customers were a wide assortment of humanity, so the occasional predator went unnoticed. Bolan had met Brognola there on a few occasions.
A handful of cars stood in the parking lot, most of them positioned directly on the white lines of a space to make sure nobody dinged the smooth finish of the doors. Parking the sleek McLaren away from the other vehicles, Bolan turned off the softly purring engine and got out, deliberately leaving the keys in the ignition and the door unlocked. Crystal City wasn’t the best neighborhood, and he knew that by morning the expensive car would be gone, stolen and stripped into parts, completely erasing his tracks, and the vehicle’s connection to the Colombian drug lord he had permanently borrowed it from the previous day. If there was one thing the Executioner had come to rely upon, it was the insatiable avarice of humanity.
Pausing for a moment, Bolan patted his windbreaker to memorize the exact position of every weapon he carried: a switchblade knife in his pants pocket, a Beretta 93-R slung in shoulder leather under his left arm, a .357 Magnum Desert Eagle under the right, spare ammo clips in the pockets. Satisfied, he moved across the parking lot, his shoes crunching on the loose gravel.
A swatch of bright light streamed from the entrance of the diner, and as Bolan approached, the shadows near a rusty garbage bin shifted.
“Hey, mister, is this yours?” a raggedy old man asked, proffering a shiny alligator skin wallet. “I found it near the curb, and—”
Instantly stepping aside, Bolan felt something move through the darkness exactly where his head had just been. Brushing back his windbreaker, he drew the 93-R.
“Move along,” he whispered in a voice from beyond the grave.
Hesitantly, the two men paused, lead pipes clenched in their scarred hands. Then they looked into his cold eyes, and quickly eased away until the shadows swallowed them whole.
Holstering his weapon again, Bolan then walked around the Blue Moon diner twice, purely as appreciation, to make sure no professionals had it under surveillance. Those two fools were of no real concern, just a couple of muggers.
Going inside, Bolan found the diner packed with people hunched over tables and industriously eating. There was a constant clatter of silverware, a dishwasher chugged somewhere unseen, and a radio thumped out a stream of golden disco music from yesterday. The smoky air was rich with an enticing mixture of smells, including coffee.
Bolan took a table in the corner with his back to the red-and-white tile wall, getting a direct view of both the front and rear doors.
After a few minutes, a waitress walked to his table with an order pad. She was an aging beauty with titian hair that came from a bottle, and magnificent cleavage that seemed natural. Her name tag said Lucinda. The plastic had been cracked and repaired with tape.
“What’ll you have?” she asked, making the sentence one word.
“Chili and coffee, both hot,” Bolan said.
Lucinda tried to push the Midnight Special, but Bolan pushed back, and they didn’t quite come to blows before she relented. Tucking a well-chewed pencil behind an ear, she walked away in defeat, dodging tables and the fumbling hands of drunks.
The diner was busy, the customers a mixture of truck drivers, college students, pimps, clerks, tourists and a couple of slick willies who might as well be wearing a placard to announce their profession as the independent salesmen of recreational pharmaceuticals. Several of the pimps had some of their female employees along as company, so there was a lot of dyed hair and bare skin on display, but everybody was cool. The Blue Moon was neutral territory, the Switzerland of the Maryland underworld.
A scrawny Latino boy, who seemed far too young to be working at that hour, came over with a steaming mug of coffee, and got Bolan started just as a couple of state troopers entered by the front door. They sauntered past the soldier, joking with the fat guy behind the counter, and ordered some meat loaf sandwiches to go.
The cops departed just as Lucinda returned with his chili, along with a basket of sourdough rolls that Bolan hadn’t ordered, but deeply appreciated. He thanked her, and she accidentally-on-purpose bumped him with her bare thigh a few times before realizing that Bolan was simply being nice and not making a pass. Lucinda grudgingly accepted the rejection and walked away.
Not his type, Bolan noted, using a napkin to clean the spoon. However, even if he had been interested, he still would have done nothing. There were certain people in the world that a wise man only treated with respect: the very old, the very young, and anybody who would be left alone with your food for a significant length of time.
As expected, the chili was delicious, rich and meaty. Taking his time, Bolan ate slowly, keeping a close watch on the clock hanging slightly askew on the badly painted wall. The ten-minute mark had come and gone, and he was getting ready to go hunt for his friend when Hal Brognola strolled in through the front door.
Instead of his usual three-piece suit, the stocky Fed was wearing a loose vest, a red flannel shirt, denims and work boots to try to blend into the neighborhood. More important, his hair was mussed, and there were scratches on his cheek.
To Bolan, the man looked haggard, as if he was chronically short on sleep. But that was an occupational hazard in D.C.
Slung over Brognola’s shoulder was a laptop that probably cost more than what most people in the diner made in a month. As he went past the other customers, some of the pimps viewed the device with marked interest. Then they saw the Justice man glance back, and quickly returned to their meals.
“Sorry I’m late,” Brognola said, taking the opposite chair at the table. “I ran into an old friend.”
“And he had just found your lost wallet.” Bolan didn’t phrase it as a question.
“Something like that,” Brognola admitted with a shrug. As his jacket swayed open, he briefly exposed a shoulder holster and an old-fashioned snub-nose .38 revolver.
“Leave them alive?”
“Unfortunately. Getting this to you intact was a lot more important,” Brognola said, placing the laptop on the table. He pushed it over. “I’m eager to hear your opinion on this matter.”
Flipping open the lid, Bolan saw the monitor flicker into a scene of a rainy mountain valley. He concentrated on the brief recording. It was obviously taken from a series of security cameras, grainy and unfocused, shifting abruptly from one angle to another. Then the explosions started, and the recording ended soon after that.
Scowling, Bolan watched it again, then sat back and took a sip of the coffee. It was cold, so he waved at Lucinda for a refill.
“Anything else ya want, sweetie?” she asked hopefully. Her upper thigh pressed warmly against his hand on the table, and she shifted slightly to let him feel the play of the tight nylon against his skin.
“Just the coffee, doll,” Bolan said, leaving his hand in place, but quickly lowering the lid on the laptop. “We’re talking some business, ya know?”
“Yeah, sure,” Lucinda said softly, topping off the mugs.
As she turned, Bolan smacked her on the rear. She gave a little jump, then looked backward with the kind of primordial smile of the sort that once had toppled the city of Troy, and walked away with a pronounced bounce in her step, just to let the man see what he had missed having for desert.
“So, when’s the wedding?” Brognola chuckled, watching as the smiling woman disappeared behind the counter.
“Next week, in Vegas. Come as Elvis,” Bolan replied with a straight face, then returned to business. “All right, from the Cyrillic writing on some of the street signs, and the poor condition of the buildings, I would guess this was taken in the Ukraine.”
“Close. Kazakhstan.”
“Somebody blew up a radar outpost in some remote mountain valley. What does this have to do with me?”
Reaching inside the pocket of his flannel shirt, Brognola produced a small envelope. “On my orders, the NSA did a scan of all cell phones in the area during the time of the attack, and they recovered this.”
It was a blurry shot of a burning building with a bird flying by, silhouetted against the flames. Bolan started to ask a question, then paused. Barely visible in the firelight, he could see that the bird was armed with missiles. Obviously, it was some kind of an unmanned attack vehicle— UAV—a drone. Then the implications hit him. One drone couldn’t have done that much damage in a week. There had to have been several of them, eight, maybe ten. And if their first target was the radar station…
“It looks like somebody cracked the heat-signature problem on the engines,” Bolan muttered, returning the picture.
Tucking the photo away, Brognola nodded. “Unfortunately, yes. In my opinion there is no question of the matter. These shots are of a new type of stealth drone, fast, silent, radar-proof and incredibly lethal.”
“Fair enough. Then why are we meeting here and not in your office?”
“Because nobody else in the Justice Department agrees with me on this. Not even the President thinks that there is any real danger to America.”
“And what makes you think there is?” Bolan asked.
“Just a gut feeling.”
Bolan accepted that. Over their long years working together, he had learned to trust the man’s instincts. They had saved the soldier’s life more than once. “Haven’t the British been secretly working on a new stealth UAV?”
“You know your weapons. Yes, it would have worldwide strike capability, and carry a complement of thermonuclear weapons.”
With that kind of range and firepower, the British drone would be enormous. “How close are they to finishing it?” Bolan asked, leaning back in the chair. It creaked slightly under his weight.
“Decades, at the very least.”
“Then there is no way that this was a field test by the British.”
“Not a chance in hell. And even if the Brits had a working version, why bomb Kazakhstan? There’s nothing there of any importance.” Turning the laptop around, Brognola tapped a few keys and shoved it back. “Or at least, that was what I thought until these pictures were relayed back from a WatchDog satellite doing a pass over the area the next day. Pay close attention to what wasn’t damaged in the strike.”
Arching an eyebrow in frank surprise at the statement, Bolan carefully looked over the wreckage from the attack. The photos were black-and-white, but crystal clear, and he soon spotted the pattern in the destruction.
“Somebody is getting ready to do a Hitler,” Bolan said in a low, hard voice.
“Yes.” Brognola sighed, as if releasing a heavy burden.
Once more, Bolan looked at the pictures of the smashed defensives of the Oskemen Valley, and the completely unharmed bridges, tunnels, electrical power plant and, of course, the old Soviet factories. It would seem that somebody knew their history.
For a long time after World War II, military strategists had analyzed the attack pattern of Hitler’s army, trying to figure out why he would pass by one town to attack another. The strikes almost seemed random, even chaotic, until some clever paper-pusher in the Pentagon compared the invasions to Hitler’s supply list.
None of the blitzkriegs were random—they were all precise hits on factories that he wanted to take intact, scientists he wanted captured alive, or mines that he desperately needed undamaged and fully operational, so that his engineers could regularly upgrade the backbone of his army, the panzer tank.
“Anything else been hit?”
“Unknown. Too many of the smaller countries surrounding China are third world nations. Their capital cities are relatively modern, but the outlying farms are still operated by sheer muscle power.”
True enough, Bolan supposed. “The people operating the drones probably hit the valley during a storm to try to disguise the destruction as lightning strikes,” he stated.
Brognola nodded. “Now, given the location of the valley…”
“Along with its complete lack of nuclear weapons.”
“…I think that we can easily make an educated guess who is behind all this,” Brognola growled, closing the lid on the laptop. “Our old pal, Red China.”
“You mean the Red Star,” Bolan corrected. He had tangled with the Communist spy agency before and found them a lot trickier, and much deadlier, than the KGB had ever been, even in its glory days.
Across the diner, a couple of pimps started shouting at each other over who owned what street corner, and suddenly switchblade knives snapped into view. Instantly, Lucinda hurried over with a pot of boiling coffee. As the pimps rose, she spilled it on the table and everybody quickly retreated to avoid getting scalded. Wheeling out a bucket and mop, the scrawny Latino youth started cleaning up the mess and the frustrated pimps took their fight outside and away from the other customers.
“This could just be an internal coup,” Bolan suggested. “The Red Star has wanted to seize absolute control over China for a long time.”
“Maybe,” Brognola admitted, folding his hands on the table. “But the worst-case scenario is that they’re planning to expand the borders of their nation, and seize everything they can—Russia, Laos, Vietnam, Japan, India—giving them an unbreakable stranglehold on the east, paving the way for a Communist expansion such as the world has never seen before. And after that…”
“World domination?” Bolan said, pulling out some loose bills from his pocket.
“Nobody has seriously tried that in a long time,” Brognola added. “I’ve been wondering when it would happen again.”
“Where’s the Farm on this?” Bolan asked, paying for the food and leaving a generous tip.
“Both teams are in the deep bush of South America handling another matter,” Brognola replied, typing on the laptop’s keyboard. A second later, the screen turned blank, the hard drive gave a loud buzz, then went silent and a puff of smoke rose from inside the machine.
“Barbara says it would take at least a week to extract Able Team and Phoenix Force. That is, without full military intervention,” Brognola continued, pushing aside the hot laptop. There were scorch marks on the tabletop where it had sat.
“So I’m alone on this.”
“I’ll try to rustle you up some tactical support some friends overseas. There’s an Israeli hacker who owes me a favor, Soshanna Fisher. But yeah. Basically, you’re alone on this.” Brognola gave a wan smile. “You’ve been there before.”
“Only out of necessity,” Bolan said, then rubbed the back of his neck. “This is a pretty wild-ass theory, Hal.”
“Yes, it is, Striker.”
“And you’re probably dead wrong.”
“Sure as hell hope so.”
“But if you’re right…”
“Yeah, I know.” Brognola sighed.
“I’ll call if I find anything,” Bolan said, offering his hand.
The men shook.
“Any idea where to start your search?” the big Fed asked. “China is mighty big. But—”
Bolan interrupted, standing. “I’m headed for Hong Kong first.”
Pushing back his chair, Brognola frowned. “What for?”
“To ask somebody about the drones,” Bolan replied, heading for the door.
Before the big Fed could respond, his cell phone vibrated.
Checking the screen, Brognola saw the call was from one of his contacts in the NSA. Only minutes ago, the Lady Durga, the flagship of the Indian navy, a brand-new, state-of-the-art, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, had been reported sunk off the Sea of Bengal after entering a fog bank. All hands lost. It was a major blow to India.
Plus, at the exact same time, a research lab in South Korea got hit by lightning during a rain storm and mysteriously burned to the ground. They had been working on a new type of radar. The entire staff of technicians and scientists were dead, and all of their records destroyed, along with the only working prototype.
“Move fast, Striker,” Brognola muttered, snapping the phone shut with a savage jerk of his wrist, “because it looks like its has already hit the fan.”
CHAPTER TWO
Northern Laos
Five trucks jostled along the old dirt road meandering through the steaming jungle. Razor-sharp machetes welded to the grilles and bumpers helped trim away the hanging vines and thorny creepers that regularly overgrew the winding road. By this time the next day, there would be no trace that anybody had driven through the jungle at this point, which was the precise reason this particular road was used so often.
