Читать книгу Radical Edge - Don Pendleton - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE

Bolan moved briskly through the rear lots of the string of well-tended ranch houses, his boots crunching on gravel and through scrub. There were no manicured green lawns to be found here. Such suburban affectations weren’t practical in this climate. The houses were nonetheless nicely maintained. Some yards were strewed with toys and dotted with play equipment—a sobering reminder that innocents weren’t far removed from the target area.

The hovering helicopter would, of course, have exposed their operation immediately. Grimaldi had been forced to put Bolan down far enough away from the second safe house to prevent the presence of the Pave Hawk from blowing the surprise. While he hadn’t yet seen anyone on the street—the neighborhood was, thankfully, a quiet one—he was certain he had been noticed through windows he passed. He was making no effort to conceal himself, no pretense of being a civilian. The sight of a black-clad man armed for combat and carrying an assault weapon was sure to have the residents dialing 911.

The fallout from that would be managed by Barb Price’s blacksuit liaisons, trusted field operatives and veteran commandos in their own right, who would be running interference for Bolan as they helped the Farm coordinate the thorny issues of jurisdiction and authority. It was just those issues that would have Brognola’s phone ringing before too long, as the many agencies with dogs in the fight started arguing with Justice about just who should be able to tell whom what to do.

Bolan answered to himself first.

The ergonomic and futuristic P90 in his hands was fully loaded. He had semiautomatic and fully automatic modes of fire at his disposal. The two-stage trigger, tuned by Kissinger and similar to that of the Steyr AUG, provided him with crisp fire control from which he could milk single shots or withering, sustained automatic fire.

“Sarge.” Grimaldi’s voice was clear in Bolan’s earbud. “Something strange is going on. I’m getting telemetry from Barb. She says emergency services are being rerouted to your location.”

“Rerouted?” Bolan asked. “What do you mean?”

“Something about a massive false alarm across town,” Grimaldi said. “Multiple mobile phone calls about a fire and hostage situation. Barb says it’s sketchy, but they’re getting confirmation in now. A block of vacant commercial properties was set ablaze, but there are no hostages. Alamogordo SWAT is reporting negative contact. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Decoy,” Bolan said. “It’s a decoy play.”

“Barb says they’re tracking back to multiple 911 calls reporting gunfire in your target zone,” Grimaldi said. “Stuff that took a backseat to what they thought was a terrorist incident in the other direction. Sounds awfully convenient. Sarge, I think we may have missed the party.”

Bolan picked up the pace, jogging now, the FN P90 in his grip as he moved. He didn’t like the sound of that, not at all. A decoy might mean some kind of sacrifice-and-breakout maneuver on the part of Hyde’s men, perhaps to cover the terrorist leader’s withdrawal. There were countless ways the Twelfth Reich cell might have been tipped off to the threat. He couldn’t guess at them. He could only hurry.

As he neared the safe house, he saw smoke. A small fire seemed to be burning at the back of the structure. Neighbors were already coming out of their homes, pointing and crouching, afraid to stand in the open but too curious or worried not to look. When they saw Bolan, some shrank back. One woman screamed. Another man shouted that there was some kind of trouble, pegging Bolan as someone in authority. The soldier could only keep running. He was now closing on the safe house.

The house was, like the others around it, a low ranch. This one had started out a muddy tan, then bleached an uneven beige by the merciless New Mexico sun.

There was a dead man on the porch.

The butt of the stubby FN P90 was already positioned against Bolan’s body; he snapped the weapon up to acquire the sights. The man on the porch was down, lifeless, his limbs turned at angles no living human being could endure. He wasn’t the threat. Whoever had put him there was.

“Hey! What’s happening?” a young man, just a teenager, called from the neighboring house.

“Go back inside!” Bolan warned. “Justice Department!” The kid slammed the door as if monsters were barking up his walk.

Bolan hit the porch in a combat crouch. His boots scattered brass shell casings, which were thick on the porch floor. The front of the house had been shot to pieces, peppered with so many bullet holes that it looked like Bonnie and Clyde’s last ride. He couldn’t tell, from this vantage, exactly what was producing the black smoke curling from the rear of the building.

He struck the door with a powerful front kick, near the knob, not bothering to try it. Molding flew in three directions as the flimsy, hollow-core door slammed against the interior wall. Bolan ignored that; he was already charging inside, ready to flood the room with 5.7 mm rounds.

The living room was a slaughterhouse.

A smoke alarm was squealing. The fire from the rear of the house was gaining momentum; its crackling was growing louder. Smoke drifted in lazy clouds through the L-shaped living area, escaping through bullet holes spidering the bay window at the front of the home. The plaster walls were pocked with similar holes and sprayed with blood. More blood soaked every visible piece of furniture. There was a dead woman on the couch, two dead men on the floor near a card table and a pair of reclining chairs, and another dead man near a very old and very shattered tube television. The man near the television had almost no head. He had taken what was likely a shotgun blast at close range.

Shells were thicker here than they had been on the porch. Bolan crouched and, using a metal pen he carried in his web gear, fished up first one, then another. He checked half a dozen casings throughout the living room. All were .40 caliber. He pocketed several, careful not to touch them.

Crouched low, he moved from body to body, making sure. There were no signs of life. The house was a tomb. It was worse than that, however.

The dead hadn’t merely been neutralized; they had been mutilated, shot again and again in what could only have been postmortem overkill. Bolan filed that fact for analysis even as his mind worked overtime to make sense of what he was seeing.

Had the skinhead safe house been hit by a rival gang? A conflicting security firm? Counterterrorists, perhaps operating without authority on American soil? The first was possible; the second was unlikely, given the Farm’s contacts and Brognola’s knowledge of domestic security operations. The third was possible but didn’t seem to fit. Bolan had only too recently found himself caught between rival security and black-ops personnel from multiple countries, in playing bodyguard and escort to a Very Important Person whom he had to transport to Wonderland. Even at their most vicious, foreign kill teams wouldn’t have wasted the time and firepower necessary to do this kind of job on poorly trained skinhead combatants. An ops team from a nominally allied nation, like Israel, certainly wouldn’t kill so unprofessionally.

The term caught in Bolan’s mind. That was what bothered him. The position of the bodies indicated that the skinheads had barely had time to process the assault on the safe house. They weren’t arrayed behind cover or braced in fatal funnels such as the hallway from the living room to the kitchen. They were, instead, dead where they’d probably been sitting when the attack came. Bolan paused just long enough to snap pictures of the dead, wondering if he would fine Shane Hyde among them. But the Twelfth Reich leader wasn’t there.

He moved down the corridor to the kitchen, holding the FN P90 before him. Two more dead men waited here, one stripped to the waist, his tattoos proclaiming the supremacy of his race and stretching in blues and blacks across his back. He had been shot as he sat at the kitchen table. He lay in a puddle of his own brains amid the mess of an overturned cereal bowl and an opened can of beer.

The fire licking up from the stove and consuming the ventilator hood was almost out of control. Bolan grabbed the dusty fire extinguisher from its strap on the kitchen wall, pulled the pin and sprayed its contents across the stovetop. The extinguisher was long expired, according to its pull-tag, but it did the job. Whatever had been burning was now a black, frosted mess in the center of a charred frying pan.

Food, still cooking on the stove…and the man lying dead at the table had been shot down in the middle of his skinhead’s breakfast of champions. Something about this was very wrong. Bolan took out his phone and photographed the dead men, noting the flashing icon that indicated transmission to the Farm.

“Sarge,” Grimaldi said in his earbud. “The first of the emergency responders is inbound to you in less than three minutes. A pair of uniforms. You’re about to have company.”

“Understood,” Bolan said.

There was a groan from nearby.

At the back of the kitchen, a door that appeared to have been punched several times—perhaps during some skinhead’s drinking binge, producing several fist-size holes in the cheap pressboard—led to the basement. The sounds of pain and distress became louder. They were coming from behind the door, which stood slightly ajar.

Bolan didn’t wait. He simply ripped the door open the rest of the way, angling the short barrel of the P90 against his body so he could target the space without turning his weapon into a lever to be used against him. The gaunt, shaved-headed man lying on the stairs within had full tattoo “sleeves” up his arms. The mesh muscle shirt he wore was ragged and bloody. He was hugging himself, holding his guts in, trying to staunch the massive wound where he had been shot.

“Don’t move,” Bolan ordered. The man held no weapon that the soldier could see, but that didn’t mean he was unarmed. In his time fighting terror and crime, Bolan had seen every sham I’m-wounded ploy in the book. He wasn’t easily fooled. “Who did this?” he said. “Who hit you?”

“I think I’m dying,” the skinhead said. “Hell…I think I’m dying… .”

“Tell me,” Bolan snapped. “Before it’s too late. Before you’re out of time. You can get even. You can hit back at whoever did this. Tell me who it was.”

“You gotta…” the man said. He tried to draw breath and apparently couldn’t. “You gotta…”

Just what it was Bolan had to do, he would never know. The man stopped gasping. The light left his eyes.

That was that. There would be no intelligence to be had here.

“Sarge,” Grimaldi said in Bolan’s ear, “I’m transmitting to the locals. I’m warning them that there is a Justice Department agent on the premises. They don’t like it. I’m not getting confirmation that they’ll hang back.”

“Understood,” Bolan said again. “Out.”

He placed two fingers against the dead man’s neck, knowing he would feel no pulse. A quick check of the skinhead’s pockets revealed nothing. Up once more, Bolan made his way carefully back through the kitchen, just in time to confront a pair of uniformed Alamogordo Police Department officers with their guns drawn.

“Freeze!” they shouted, almost in unison.

“Matt Cooper,” Bolan said, citing the cover identity that appeared on the credentials issued him by Stony Man Farm. “Justice Department.”

“Drop the weapon!” one of the cops called.

“You were contacted,” Bolan said. “You’re interfering in a federal operation.”

“Drop your weapon!” the police officer repeated. His partner looked at him dubiously, though he didn’t lower his own gun.

“Continue pointing that weapon at me,” Bolan said, “and we’re going to have a problem.”

“Are you threatening to fire on duly appointed law-enforcement officers?” the first cop demanded.

“No,” Bolan said. “I don’t shoot the ‘good guys.’ However, if you don’t stop pointing those guns at me—” he paused, and his voice became steel “—I will take them away from you and beat you unconscious with them.”

“Put it down, Jimmy,” the man’s partner whispered urgently.

Reluctantly, the first officer lowered his weapon. The second breathed a noticeable sigh of relief as he did the same.

“How many are you?” Bolan asked. It was only a matter of time before the safe house was swamped with law enforcement and emergency response personnel. He would need to move quickly if he was to find anything useful amid the debris before the place was overrun with competing administrative concerns. The crush of jurisdictional red tape would make Bolan’s job more difficult no matter how well-meaning the cops themselves were.

The officers exchanged glances, probably trying to decide if it was safe to tell Bolan anything sensitive. Stepping toward them and lowering his own weapon, the Executioner removed the Justice Department identification from his web gear and waved it under their eyes. That seemed to mollify them, though the cynical part of Bolan’s mind told him that it shouldn’t have. Were the soldier some sort of assassin or other well-equipped hostile operative, forged credentials would pass such a quick inspection.

“Backup is on the way,” Jimmy said. “We’re it for now. What happened here, Mr.…”

“Cooper,” Bolan repeated. “Agent Matt Cooper, Justice Department.” He leaned on the last two words heavily. It wouldn’t hurt for these men to know he had the authority of Washington, D.C., behind him.

“I’m looking for this man,” Bolan said. He held up his satellite phone and called up the most recent mug shot of Hyde. “Shane Hyde. A wanted extremist with ties to several domestic terror organizations.” That simplified the issue quite a bit, but it would be enough to get his meaning across.

“You thought he might be here?” the second officer said. “Did you…did you kill all these people?”

“Negative,” Bolan said. He pressed his lips together. Even the implication was disturbing. “This location has been assaulted by a force of armed operatives, size unknown, affiliation unknown.”

“You don’t talk like a Fed,” Officer Jimmy said.

“You talk like a military man,” his partner stated.

Bolan ignored that. He gestured toward the kitchen. “Everything around you is potential evidence. Don’t touch anything. There’s a basement. I intend to investigate.” He turned to leave them. Over his shoulder, he said, “Stay out of my way.”

He didn’t enjoy being brusque with police, who were just trying to do their jobs. He simply didn’t have time to be diplomatic. Hyde wasn’t here and, if he had been, the assault on the safe house opened multiple worrisome possibilities. Had he already been taken out, possibly by one of the terrorist organizations to which he was connected? Had they mounted a daring coup, hoping to silence the security threat Hyde represented to them?

Bolan rejected that idea. Until his strike at the first of the pair of safe houses, Hyde and Twelfth Reich would have no reason to believe they were being targeted. Hyde’s allies, then, would likewise have no reason to be any more concerned than they already were about working with him.

Unless there was something else at ploy here. Some kind of leak, possibly within the web of law-enforcement agencies already homing in on Hyde. The man had, after all, been previously targeted, with disastrous results for the agents involved.

The Executioner dismissed this speculation. There was little value in it. He would simply have to keep moving forward through the priority list until Hyde, or some sign of him, shook loose. Until he could uncover new intelligence, there were no other options.

The temperature dropped to comfortable levels as he descended the open stairway to the basement, flicking on the combat light attached to the FN P90’s rail system. He was ready to fire through the stairs, if need be; he had ambushed plenty of men himself from such a position. The basement was largely empty, however. There were a few cardboard cartons of what appeared to be trash, a water heater, what looked to be a nonfunctioning furnace and several empty metal garage shelves.

Satisfied there was nothing here, Bolan started back up the stairs. It was then that he heard the sound of a thump in the living room.

He hurried back in that direction to find the police officers had ripped a heavy-metal band poster from the plaster wall, ignoring his instructions. They had uncovered a cavity into which a small but sturdy-looking safe had been set. Officer Jimmy and his partner had apparently removed the lockbox and dropped it on the floor of the living room. The safe was oblong, painted black, covered in deep gouges where its paint had been scraped away near the lock and handle lever.

“Don’t touch that,” Bolan ordered. Jimmy looked up, annoyed.

“There was a tear in the poster,” Officer Jimmy’s partner offered. He appeared embarrassed. “We weren’t intentionally—”

“He’s a Fed,” Jimmy said. “He’s not God, Gray. Relax. We’ve as much jurisdiction as anyone until—”

“And what happens when everyone else gets here?” Gray asked.

“How many times you going to try to call it in?” Jimmy said, irritated. He reached for the safe.

“I said,” Bolan interjected, “don’t touch that.”

Jimmy looked up. “Listen, Agent Cooper—”

He held up a hand. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Jimmy asked.

“Oh, crap,” Gray said. “I hear it. Metal moving. Like a spring uncoiling. A rasping sound.”

Bolan pointed. The sound was coming from the safe.

The soldier went to the wall and examined the cavity. There was a piece of simple, light gauge wire jutting from a hook screwed into the hole in the plaster. Removing the safe had torn something free and snapped the wire.

Bolan looked past the two cops and through the damaged bay window. Despite his warning, civilians had begun to gather before the house, milling about and craning their necks for a better look. The squad car belonging to the police sat in the drive, its LED light bar cycling red and blue.

“We’ve got to move this fast,” Bolan said. He suspected a bomb. The safe was booby-trapped. Whoever had hit the house had missed it during their assault. Now the two police officers had triggered some deadly insurance left in place by the skinheads, probably to prevent their secured information from falling into law-enforcement hands.

There was no way to tell how big the explosion might be. Containing even a moderate charge, the safe would become a huge pipe bomb. Pressure would build within it until the safe itself became shrapnel. They had to get it away from the bay window and the civilians beyond.

“Basement,” Bolan ordered. The police officer complied and the three of them managed to lift the safe and shuffle through the corpses and debris toward the kitchen.

“It’s speeding up,” Gray said. “I can feel it vibrating faster.”

“Move, move, move,” Bolan urged. They reached the kitchen. “Dump it down the stairs, then take the back door! Get out!”

The cops shuffled with him as far as the dead man at the top of the basement stairs. Then Bolan used one hand to shove the door all the way open before he put his shoulder under the safe.

“Go!” he commanded.

The cops backed away, through the rear doorway. Bolan heaved with all his strength, feeling the muscles in his shoulders burn, sensing the tipping point as the bomb started to fall down the stairway.

He was framed in the basement doorway, his arms outstretched, his hands open before him as he released the heavy, booby-trapped metal box—

The world burst into blinding flame.