Читать книгу Dual Action - Don Pendleton - Страница 9

Clay County, Arkansas

Mack Bolan crouched in darkness, studying the “holy city” from a hundred yards outside its southeastern perimeter. He’d never seen a piece of Paradise on Earth before, but on the rare occasions when he pictured it, his vision had excluded razor wire and guards in camouflage fatigues, with military rifles slung across their shoulders.

Then again, Camp Yahweh wasn’t what most mainstream pastors would’ve called a theological retreat. Its population—269 at last report—was committed to a militant version of Christian Identity, the “seedline” doctrine that proclaimed Nordic folk the true offspring of Adam, while nonwhite “mud people” sprang from Eve’s adulterous affair with Lucifer in reptile form.

Camp Yahweh was a monument to racial hatred, but that didn’t make it anything unique in the United States, or in the world at large. There were at least a hundred similar communities that Bolan was aware of, from Alaska to the bayou country of Louisiana, high in the Sierra Madre or—like this one—tucked away in the Ozarks.

Venomous hatred didn’t make Camp Yahweh special.

The Executioner was in search of something else.

The eight-foot cyclone fence with razor wire on top was not electrified. He’d tested it on his first visit to the compound, after snapping photos of the layout to prepare himself for penetration. Bolan guessed they’d found the cost of generator fuel prohibitive in recessionary times, when even zealots had to pinch a penny and donations on the neo-Nazi fringe fell short.

He had the compound’s blueprint firmly fixed in mind, knew the routines of the soldiers on perimeter patrol and when they were relieved. He didn’t know exactly where the object of his search might be concealed, but there were only three apparent possibilities. One unit plainly served as storage. The sentries drew their weapons from another, prior to going on patrol. His third choice was the base command post, occupied by a bearded, long-haired character who could’ve been auditioning for a part as a nineteenth century mountain man.

Bolan rated the command post unlikely, but he couldn’t say for sure until he had a look inside. If he struck out on targets A and B, he’d have to try his luck with C.

But first, he had to get inside.

Bolan crept forward, boots and elbows digging at the soft soil underneath him. He was dressed in black, his face and hands painted to match. The compound wasn’t brightly lit, and while they had floodlights mounted in twin watchtowers, north and south, they weren’t illuminated at the moment. Bolan guessed that they would save the major candlepower for emergencies or combat drills.

Stay dark, he mentally ordered the sentries in the towers. Don’t look down.

Bolan was ready if they saw him, with a Colt Commando assault rifle slung across his back, a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle semiauto pistol on his hip and a sound-suppressing Beretta 93-R selective-fire side arm nestled in a quick-draw armpit rig. His other battle gear included extra magazines for his three firearms, a stiletto, a garrote, grenades and wire cutters.

He used the cutters first, selecting a well-shadowed portion of fence where wild grass had grown taller than usual, nearly knee high. He settled amidst it, waited for the sector guard to pass, then busied himself with the wire. Nocturnal insects covered ered the sounds that his cutters produced, snipping links on a line two feet high, then six inches across.

Bolan timed his move, slid through the flap, then sealed it loosely behind him with a black twist tie. It wouldn’t pass a close inspection, but the guards he had observed so far were young—for Nazis, anyway—and seemed to have no fear of imminent attack.

Indeed, as Bolan knew, there’d been no challenge to their compound at its present site. The first Camp Yahweh, in Missouri, had been raided by a flying squad of FBI and ATF agents in 1997, but the raiders were embarrassed by their failure to discover fugitives or outlawed weapons. The sect had called a press conference to crow about its “victory,” then pulled up stakes and moved to Arkansas.

There had been other changes, too. The former Seed of Yahweh was under new management these days, renamed the Aryan Resistance Movement. Its leaders were more militant, more outraged by the slow drift of society toward equal rights for all.

And if the information out of Washington was accurate, they had a deadly secret.

Finding it, defusing it, was Bolan’s job.

He lay in shadow, clutching the Beretta, while yet another sentry passed by, heedless of his presence in the weeds. When it was clear, the soldier rose and bolted toward the compound’s armory.

He reached it, tried the door and found it locked. Bolan was kneeling, pick in hand, ready to remedy that problem when a scuffling footstep sounded close behind him and a gruff male voice demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

SIMON GRUNDY LOVED his life. It was a strange thing for him to imagine, knowing where he’d come from—foster homes and juvey hall, a half-assed motorcycle gang, state prison—but it was God’s honest truth.

Praise Yahweh.

Who’d have guessed that a habitual offender, malcontent and full-time badass would mature into an officer and gentleman, committed to salvation of his race and nation from encroachment by an enemy who made the Russians and the Red Chinese seem penny-ante by comparison?

Grundy supposed it would’ve made his mother proud, if she had crawled out of a bottle long enough to focus on her only son for ten or fifteen seconds in her worthless life. As for his father, well, Grundy would need a name to find that shiftless bastard, and it wasn’t worth the trouble after thirty-seven years.

The Aryan Resistance Movement was his family now, and that made Grundy proud.

He stood before the mirror in his quarters, counting brushstrokes as he groomed his flowing beard. Most of his troops preferred the skinhead look, but Grundy favored a more biblical style. It could’ve looked bizarre, but he believed his hulking build and forceful personality made him imposing, rather than ridiculous.

Grundy was midway through stroke ninety-five, just after midnight, when somebody gave a shout outside. He didn’t recognize the voice, heard no coherent words, but any breach of Camp Yahweh’s decorum was his ultimate responsibility. Grundy set down his brush, considered putting on a shirt, then stepped outside bare-chested.

Let the ladies look, if they were so inclined.

At first glance, from the doorway of his quarters, nothing seemed to be amiss. He checked the towers, then the fence, and found his sentries standing ready, trying to pinpoint the sound. They were having no luck, so far.

The voice had been a man’s, but Grundy couldn’t say if it had sounded angry, startled or afraid. He ruled out joy, since none of Camp Yahweh’s inhabitants would draw attention to themselves with shouts of glee at midnight.

He should count the guards, Grundy decided, make sure none of them had suffered any kind of mishap or—

The fireball nearly blinded him. Its shock wave struck a second later, driving spikes of pain into his eardrums. Grundy rocked back on his heels, with the concussion of the blast, then felt its heat wash over him.

The armory.

He didn’t have to guess. Even if Grundy hadn’t known Camp Yahweh’s layout perfectly, he would’ve recognized the sound of ammo cooking off, the rapid fire of boxed rounds burning. He instinctively recoiled, crouching, and scuttled back inside his quarters.

What in hell was happening?

He plucked an AR-15 from a wall rack mounted near the door and peered outside again. Guards kept their distance from the flaming ruin of the armory, ducking and dodging slugs that whined through darkness from the pyre. Grundy was on the verge of self-congratulation for their discipline—no panic firing yet—when suddenly an automatic weapon stuttered in the night, some thirty yards east of the burning building.

Full-auto? Something was very wrong.

Machine guns were forbidden in Camp Yahweh. Grundy knew each weapon in the armory—whatever might be left of it—and he examined every private piece brought into camp, from knives to long guns. Nothing was allowed that might provoke another raid, be it a switchblade or a silencer. Up front, at least, he played it strictly by the book.

Which meant that any shooter with full-auto capability was an intruder, wreaking havoc with his men.

Grundy was looking for the prowler’s muzzle-flash, tracking his noise, when someone called out in the night, “That isn’t one of us!”

The sentries started to converge, drifting off-station from the fence, but Grundy didn’t want them moving yet. If there was one intruder in the compound, why not more?

He shouted to the guards, identified himself and ordered them to stand their ground. They were conditioned to obey and did as they were told, although reluctantly. Grundy supposed he’d lose them soon, unless—

“Give me the lights!” he bellowed at the tower guards. “Light up the east side, now!”

As if in answer to his order, yet another thunderous explosion rocked the camp. It was the storage shed this time, roof lifting on a jet of fire that made him think of a volcano spewing lava toward the sky. Two of its walls fell outward, burning, while the others stood in stark relief against the darkness that surrounded them.

Storage.

They kept no arms or ammunition in that shed, but there was fuel for vehicles and generators, propane tanks for cooking. All together, burning fiercely now to light the darkest corners of the camp.

The floodlights blazed, sweeping the compound, bright beams crossing, passing on, returning to the site of the explosion. As they swept across the landscape, Grundy saw a black-clad figure ducking for the shadows, painted face averted from the light.

“Intruder!” he called out to anyone within earshot. Pointing, he ran after the stranger, shouting orders all the way. “Fall in, goddammit! Head him off! I want that prick alive!”

THE EXECUTIONER squeezed off a short burst from his autocarbine as the troops converged. One of his targets stumbled, fell and didn’t rise again.

The lights were trouble, tracking him across the compound when he might’ve otherwise eluded hunters in the dark. Ducking behind a hut that sprouted radio antennas from its angled roof, he craned around the corner, found his mark and milked a 5 or 6 round burst from his stuttergun. The nearest of the floodlights imploded and went dark as soldiers scattered from it, ducking out of sight below the tower’s waist-high walls.

Someone—perhaps the mountain man—was shouting orders at the other troops, coordinating the advance. They hadn’t cornered Bolan yet, but it could happen, if he didn’t stay ahead of them. Step one was blacking out the other light before it marked his place and someone on the sidelines made a lucky shot.

He saw the glaring beam wash over his position, even though it couldn’t find him in the shadow of the small communications hut. It wouldn’t take the sentries long to close around him, pin him down, and numbers could defeat him then. He wasn’t Superman, wasn’t invincible. A storm of fire would drop him where he stood, like anybody else, unless he found a way out of the trap.

Lights first.

Taking a chance, he stepped into the open, raised his weapon, sighting down the beam of that all-seeing eye. Before the startled hunters could react, Bolan triggered another burst and blacked out the floodlight, toppling one of its minders from his lofty perch into a screaming swan dive to the earth below.

The sudden darkness covered him, but not for long. On orders from their chief, the camp’s guards were advancing, still maintaining discipline of fire, but it would only take one glimpse of Bolan in the shadows, one stray shot, to spark chaos.

Why wait?

Bolan fired two quick rounds toward the west, then pivoted, already moving, and triggered two more to the east. He was running south toward the command post when someone to the east returned his fire, immediately echoed by a weapon to the west.

Good hunting, Bolan thought, and left them to it. Gunfire popped and crackled through the compound, drowning out the gruff voice of the officer who tried to shout it down. The leader would have a rough time with control, Bolan calculated, but the danger hadn’t passed, by any means. A stray shot could be just as deadly as a sniper’s well-aimed bullet, and the sudden crash in discipline meant sentries would be trigger-happy all around the compound.

Bolan concentrated on his first task, pushing on through firelight and shadows toward the command post. If the object he sought wasn’t there, he was stumped—and that boded ill for his mission.

Where was it?

What was it?

Bolan had hoped he’d recognize the object when he saw it, but so far the camp had yielded nothing even close to what he sought. If he struck out at the CP, he’d have to seek another source of inside information that could put him on the track.

Inside.

Someone from Camp Yahweh might do the trick, but that would mean escaping with a hostage under fire. It would be risky, at the very least, perhaps impossible. A last resort, in any case.

Bolan stayed focused on his first priority. The camp CP was fifty yards in front of him, with two men posted on the porch. He saw no trace of the leader, guessing that the bearded officer would be among his troops.

So much the better.

Closing from their right-hand side, the Executioner drew the 93-R from its armpit rig and triggered two quick shots. The nearer guard collapsed as if he were a puppet and someone had snipped his strings. The other spun to face a danger he couldn’t identify, and Bolan dropped him with a quiet Parabellum round between the eyes.

He left them there, shrouded in shadows, and passed through an unlocked door into the boss man’s private quarters. They were neat enough, but still possessed a kind of musky odor that he couldn’t place.

Ignore it, he thought.

Bolan swiftly checked any hiding places he could think of in the Spartan quarters: closets, footlocker, beneath the sturdy cot. He checked desk drawers, in hope of finding sketches, plans, perhaps a note that would direct him to a secret cache.

Nothing.

Bolan retraced his steps through empty rooms, back to the porch. The two dead guards were lying where he’d left them, but they weren’t alone.

Five gunmen ringed the porch, all watching Bolan over weapons pointed at his chest.

“DROP THE WEAPON! Raise your hands! Don’t move!”

The shouted orders echoed from behind Simon Grundy, causing him to turn and squint through firelight toward his quarters. Several of his men were clustered there, pointing their weapons at a tall man on the porch.

A tall man dressed in black, faces and hands painted with combat cosmetics to match.

“Hold up, there!” Grundy shouted at them. “Don’t—”

Before he could complete the thought, a burst of automatic fire blazed from the stranger’s weapon, toppling one of Grundy’s troopers from the porch. At the same instant, as if propelled by his weapon’s recoil, the trespasser sprang backward, slammed the door with his free hand and disappeared.

The others started pouring fire into the bungalow, as fast as they could pull the triggers on their AR-15 carbines. Bullets drilled the wall, blew out the windows, rattled the vibrating door in its frame. Grundy imagined his belongings in there, shot to hell, but he was focused on the stranger.

“Cease-fire, dammit!” Rushing among them, he grabbed first one rifleman and then another, wrestling them off target, shouting in their faces to be heard above the small-arms racket. “Hold your fire! I want that bastard breathing!”

“Too late, Major,” one of them replied. The youngster grinned and giggled.

“Oh, you think so?” Grundy shoved him toward the bullet-scarred front door. “So, get in there and check it out.”

The skinhead hesitated, then put on his war face, nodded once and rushed the door. He didn’t think to try the knob, but kicked it open, Grundy waving others in behind him as he rushed the living room.

There was no body in the living room, no blood to indicate that any of his men had scored a hit with their wild firing through the wall and windows. They fanned out, checking the corners, even though they offered no concealment for a man-sized target.

Stalling.

Grundy led them to the bedroom door, which he knew he had left ajar. The trespasser had closed it, and two bullet holes marked the painted surface, as if peepholes had been carelessly installed, off center and at different levels.

“Nowhere else for him to go,” one of the soldiers said. They moved in closer, ringed the door with scowls and steel.

Grundy was trembling, but he couldn’t order one of them to go ahead of him this time. What would they think, if he sent someone else to check his sleeping quarters, maybe check under the bed for bogeymen.

Clutching his piece one-handed, Grundy turned the knob and shoved the door back with sufficient force to make it strike the wall, crouching as it swung open. Reinforcements crowded close behind him, leaning in to aim above his head and shoulders. If they fired, he would be deafened, but he didn’t mind the company just then.

The empty room made nonsense of their melodrama. Grundy rushed the closet, threw it open to reveal his extra uniforms, but no intruder hiding there. As he turned back to face the room, two of his men were peering underneath the cot from different sides and making faces at each other.

“Nothing,” one of them declared.

“The window’s unlocked, Major.”

Grundy saw it closed, the way he’d left it, but the corporal was right. The latch was open now. He always kept it locked from force of habit. Someone else had opened it, used it as an escape hatch. Leaning closer, he saw scuff marks on the wall, probably from boots.

“Outside!” he shouted. “Make a sweep! We have to find out where he went and stop him. If he gets away…”

He meant to say, We’ll never know who sent him, but his soldiers were already rushing out, not waiting for the why and wherefore of it. Orders were enough for them, these fine young savages. They lived for action, didn’t give a damn why they were fighting, as long as someone tagged the mission with a rousing call for race and honor.

They were children, but they weren’t afraid of dirty work.

He followed them outside, eyes sweeping Camp Yahweh for any sign of the intruder or companions who had thus far managed to avoid detection. Were there others, lurking in the shadows? Were they Feds or mercenaries? Members of some rival nationalist movement or some leftist private army?

There was only one way to find out.

He had to capture one alive and make him squeal.

“Stay sharp!” he ordered his assembled soldiers. “Cover every corner of the camp. We need—”

Across the compound, at the motor pool, an engine growled and headlights blazed. Before Grundy could snap out a fresh command, one of their jeeps was off and racing toward the gate.

THE JEEP was military surplus, which required no key. Bolan needed a ram to breach the gate, and speed to give him an advantage on Camp Yahweh’s infantry. A mile would do it, if he got that far. He could discard the stolen wheels, then, and proceed on foot to reach his own.

But first, he had to make it out of camp alive.

About the time that his pursuers finished ransacking the CP hut, he slid into the driver’s seat, reviewed the world’s simplest controls and gunned the jeep to life. There was no point in running dark, since they could see him by the light of leaping flames in any case, so Bolan used the high beams as offensive weapons, blinding any troops who stood directly in his path.

There weren’t that many of them. Most had rushed to join their CO at his quarters, or else fanned out to police the camp’s perimeter. Of the dependents in Camp Yahweh, the wives and children of the “Master Race” commandos, Bolan had seen nothing yet and hoped to keep it that way. They were not civilians in the strictest sense, having withdrawn from civilized society to live a racist pipe dream fraught with danger, but he didn’t want them in his line of fire, if it could be avoided.

Wherever they were hiding, none of them emerged as Bolan made his short run toward the gate. He gunned the jeep to its top speed, aimed at the double gates a hundred yards downrange. Two guards were stationed there, and by the time he’d covered half the distance to his target, others were arriving, racing to assist their comrades.

Others still were firing from behind him, peppering the jeep with semiauto fire that struck like ringing hammer blows. A hollow thunk told Bolan that one round had drilled the gas can mounted on the tailgate, but he knew he had fuel enough to get where he was going, and the gunmen would need tracer rounds to set the sloshing gasoline on fire.

Racing across the open camp, he swerved the jeep from side to side, ducking as low as possible while still maintaining visibility across the dashboard. By the time he’d covered fifty yards, the windshield was a pile of pebbled safety glass in Bolan’s lap and strewed around his feet. Sparks flew from glancing bullet strikes, while solid hits drilled through the fenders, flaking paint in perfect circles.

Thirty yards.

The soldiers on the gate were firing at him now, so Bolan aimed his autocarbine through the empty windshield frame and held down the trigger, sweeping its muzzle back and forth in short arcs, left and right. The Colt Commando’s 30-round magazine emptied in less than three seconds, but it lasted long enough to sweep the resistance from the gate and scatter bodies in Bolan’s path. One thumped beneath the tires before the Jeep hit the chain-link gates and powered through.

Behind him, gunfire stuttered on for several seconds, but Bolan quickly killed the headlights and robbed them of their target. It was open country for another hundred yards or so, before he hit tall grass approaching spotty woods. Beyond that point, he had to risk the low beams as he sought a winding path around and through the trees.

Pursuit was possible, since Bolan hadn’t taken time to disable the other vehicles in camp, but it would take some time to organize, and he would see the headlights coming. By the time they found the abandoned jeep, Bolan would’ve found his way on foot back to the rental car he’d stashed a mile due north of Camp Yahweh.

If any of them followed Bolan that far, it would be their last mistake.

He found a place to park, then changed his mind and pushed the vehicle into a ravine with water rippling somewhere near the bottom. There was no point making its retrieval easy on the enemy, he thought. At that point, leaving empty-handed, any inconvenience he could cause was a victory of sorts.

And Bolan wasn’t finished with the Aryan Resistance Movement yet.

CampYahweh hadn’t yielded what he hoped to find, but there were other places he could look, people he could interrogate.

He wasn’t giving up.

The cost of failure was too high, in terms of human lives and suffering.

When Bolan’s job was done, the enemy would know it.

Those, that was, who’d managed to survive.