“But if they can’t be caught alive...”
“Where are you parked?” Bolan asked his old friend, cutting their conversation short.
“In the metered garage on Memorial Avenue. You?”
“I found curb space outside, on Schuyler Avenue. I like the walk.”
“And you’ve got local digs?”
“The River Inn on Twenty-fifth Street Northwest, in DC.”
Brognola nodded. “Don’t get too comfortable.”
“When do I ever?”
They shook hands again and went their separate ways, each man freighted with secrets, craving answers he knew would be hard-won, if they could be unearthed at all.
Who was it that had once described the Russian mindset as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”? Bolan had the answer to that up front—it had been Winston Churchill, decades before anyone conceived the thought of ISIS or its killer spawn. This time, however, Bolan didn’t have a span of four decades to end a new Cold War.
He had to crack this riddle soon, before the whole thing went to hell.
Bolan didn’t drive back to the River Inn at once. Instead he sat inside his rented Audi Compact Executive sedan, opened his laptop and popped in Brognola’s DVD.
The normal warnings stamped on every disk from Stony Man displayed themselves upon launch, as usual. Pointless, he thought, since anyone who’d stolen it would go ahead and watch it anyway, regardless of the threat of three years’ imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.
There was no introduction. Just a half dozen icons labeled with the rank and surname of the subjects, waiting to reveal themselves upon command.
He started at the top, with Major Randall Darby, thirty-nine years old, a Ranger for the past fifteen. After fulfilling the Army’s requirements, he’d gone to Ranger school, beginning with the basic “crawl phase,” moving on to “mountain phase” at the remote Camp Merrill near Dahlonega, Georgia, passing on with honors to the “Florida phase” at Eglin Air Force Base, then on again to “desert phase” at Fort Bliss, Texas. Along the way, a journey of sixty-eight days, Darby’s leadership skills were judged by both his trainers and the other members of his squad, producing top marks on both sides.
After training, new Rangers typically found themselves in “the worst shape of their lives,” with common maladies including weight loss, dehydration, trench foot, heatstroke, frostbite, chilblains, fractures, tissue tears; swollen hands, feet and knees; nerve damage and loss of limb sensitivity, cellulitis, contact dermatitis, cuts and wildlife bites. Darby had survived it all, emerging with lieutenant’s bars.
He saw his first deployment overseas in Afghanistan, eight months after the US invasion, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. He spent two years “in the sand,” rotated home for additional training, then flew off again to Iraq, saw action in the Horn of Africa against Somali pirates, fought the militant Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in North Africa’s Greater Maghreb, helped reopen the Transit Center at Manas, in Kyrgyzstan, then rotated back to Fort Benning as a Ranger school supervisory officer.
The file contained full details of Darby’s classified missions, and Bolan reviewed them briefly, spending time enough to satisfy himself that there were no black marks against the major’s name, no indication whatsoever of dissatisfaction with the service or the slightest bent toward any kind of radical philosophy or creed.
And yet...
The next file up belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Knowlton, age thirty-five, a second-generation Ranger whose father, now deceased, had returned from Vietnam minus his right leg and left eye, after the Battle of Khe Sanh in Quang Trị Province, near its wind-down in July 1968. In the process, he had killed an estimated sixty-seven of General Vo Nguyen Giap’s North Vietnamese regulars and secured a Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, together with South Vietnam’s Meritorious Service Medal and a lifetime disability pension. His son had joined the Army right after graduating Alabama A & M, passed through Ranger school without a hitch, and served the years of duty every Ranger now expected in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in Africa’s Trans Sahara region, interdicting terrorists and drug shipments earmarked for Central Africa.
At last report, Knowlton had been a lifelong Southern Baptist and rock-ribbed conservative who shared his forebears’ trend of voting for Republicans, airing his patriotism in annual addresses to the local chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars while home on leave. No one had ever heard him say a kind word about Islam, much less seek to convert and aid its most radical faction as a terrorist.
So what had happened to him, then?
The file on Knowlton held no clue—unless, perhaps, it was an ambush he had led against a small al Qaeda faction active in Nigeria. Knowlton had personally slain three of the terrorists that day, discovering after the smoke cleared that the eldest of them was sixteen years old, the other two, twelve and thirteen. They were already seasoned killers, but had something in the act of killing them caused doubt to germinate in Knowlton’s mind or heart?
If so, he had concealed it well until he’d followed Major Darby and four others in defecting from the Rangers and declaring war on the United States.
More questions lacking answers. So far, while the dossiers helped Bolan come to know his enemies, at least in part, the service photos staring back at him were blank, stone-faced, inscrutable.
Third up, in order of descending rank, was Captain Walton Tanner Jr., son of a Marine Corps veteran who’d won a Congressional Medal of Honor during the invasion of Grenada, code-named Operation Urgent Fury in November 1983. At age thirty-one, the captain seemed to be almost a carbon copy of his hero father, other than the service he had chosen as his military path. He’d won a Bronze Star Medal in Afghanistan, another in Iraq with an oak leaf cluster to denote additional awards, and claimed a Purple Heart on his third tour of duty in the sand, after he’d taken a sniper’s bullet to one leg. The Medal of Honor still eluded him, but there was every chance he might have earned one, with a fourth foreign deployment in the wings when he had suddenly and unofficially departed from the Rangers, trailing Major Darby and Lieutenant Colonel Knowlton into their small group without a name.
As with the others, Tanner’s file offered no clue to his defection, nothing to suggest he harbored any Muslim sympathies. He had been born and raised Episcopalian, and had earned a bachelor of arts in history from George Washington University in DC, then dropped out of its master’s program to become an Army Ranger. What followed was a virtual replay of the preceding files Bolan had scanned: Afghanistan, Iraq and, for a smidgen of variety, Operation Freedom Eagle in the Philippines, combating the Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemaah Islamiyah Muslim militants. The latter tour had sent him home with a Distinguished Service Cross, Homeland Security Distinguished Service Medal and a Purple Heart for minor shrapnel wounds.
If he had ever mentioned Islam publicly, no record of his comments was preserved in military files. He’d gone to chapel on most Sundays, when his scheduling permitted, and had showed no deviation from his faith or military oath until he went over the wall one night, with Darby and Knowlton. What drove him to that action, as with his companions, still remained a mystery.
One note and worth considering—Tanner had lost his mother and his only sibling, sister Lucie, in a random auto accident some eighteen months before his ultimate decision to defect. The good news: Bolan thought he could gain access to Tanner’s father, the true-blue leatherneck, and maybe get some kind of private insight missing from the dossier. MPs would have been after him first thing, Bolan presumed, but if they’d taken any notes from that interrogation, nothing showed up in Brognola’s file. Bolan would find out what he could, waste no unnecessary time, and then move on.
To number four, Lieutenant Tyrone Moseley,