CHAPTER ONE
Outside Alamogordo, New Mexico
Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, put a single 9 mm bullet through the left eye of the tattooed, skinhead terrorist, stepping over the body just as it collapsed onto the dusty ground. Shifting the FN P90 he wore on a sling across his chest, he let the silenced snout of his Beretta lead the way.
Neo-Nazis, Bolan thought with distaste. A dime a dozen. The domestic terrorists were like roaches, forever scuttling about no matter how many you crushed under your boot.
The soldier continued his slow crawl along the fence line surrounding the ramshackle, clapboard safe house. The structure was a mess; it appeared, at first glance, to be a mass of sun-bleached plywood and faded plastic tarps held together with hope and weighed down with cinder blocks.
A second skinhead sentry risked a look around the corner of the building, probably thinking he had heard something. He had, and it was the second-to-last thing he ever would hear. The very last thing was the muffled clap of Bolan’s Beretta as a 147-grain hollowpoint bullet dug a channel through the sentry’s brain.
Bolan moved quickly, crouched low, staying beneath the sight lines of the open windows. They were covered with heavy plastic over sheets of what was probably Plexiglas. The interior of the safe house buzzed with activity. Heavy-metal music blared from a stereo. Shouts and jeers could be heard. There was a party going on inside. Bolan had to hand it to the terrorists; they were remarkably true to type. When neo-Nazis weren’t preying on those they hated, they spent their free time mired in teenage-mentality hedonism. The fact that they had posted sentries at all surprised Bolan, at least mildly.
Hal Brognola, director of the Sensitive Operations Group based at Stony Man Farm, Virginia, had placed the secure satellite call to Bolan in the middle of the night, waking the Executioner.
“They’re animals, Striker,” Brognola had said, using Bolan’s code name. “Latter-day race cultists, worse than every skinhead and white supremacist gang you’ve taken down in years past. The group calls itself Twelfth Reich.”
“That’s imaginative,” Bolan had commented.
Brognola ignored that. “Their leader is one Shane Hyde. His file and psych profile are long and complicated. ‘Delusional nut job’ is the short version, but with caveats. He’s not so unbalanced that he isn’t also extremely dangerous, nor so wide-eyed that he’ll tip his hand before he’s ready. He has military experience, too. He was discharged from the Army on medical grounds just after Desert Storm. Seems his commanding officer considered him unstable and, after a series of altercations with several black and Hispanic soldiers, Hyde was shuffled around until the Army could be rid of him. He disappeared for a few years after his discharge, only to reappear on the Mexico border at the center of several high-profile immigration disputes.”
“I take it he’s not a fan of illegal aliens.”
“Who is?” Brognola sounded as if he were speaking through clenched teeth. Which meant he was chewing an unlit cigar, something he did under stress. Bolan could hear the edge in his old friend’s voice. “Hyde is an avowed racist, but he’s not just that. He’s got charisma, Striker. He’s smart and he knows how to network. He’s got a real knack for locating, and absorbing into his plans, people who share his outrage over the plight of the white middle class in America. That’s his rallying cry, incidentally. He sees himself as champion of what he calls ‘the only group it’s socially acceptable to oppress.’”
“He hasn’t just talked about it.”
“No. We believe he’s personally or indirectly responsible for at least a score of racially motivated bombings and murders,” Brognola said. “The pace of the crimes tenuously linked to Hyde and Twelfth Reich is increasing, too. They’re getting stronger and growing more bold. Until now they’ve done their best to keep secret, for the most part. The FBI has been on to them, or to parts of several cells, for a while now, trying to build a case that would take the investigation to the top. Hyde’s cagey, though. He’s managed to stay far enough from his handiwork that most of the ‘legitimate’ government agencies don’t have enough on him.”
“That sounds thin, Hal.”
“That’s because that’s not all there is to it,” Brognola said. “The Bureau had a special team on this, not long after the intelligence community started getting wind of Twelfth Reich as a cohesive organization. They put an undercover group on it, three trained operatives. But something went wrong. Two of them never came back. The third lived but, like his fellow agents, he lost his family. Hyde’s people are believed to be behind the arson deaths of seven civilians, all told. They staged simultaneous raids on the agents’ homes, duct-taped whoever they found inside and burned them alive.”
Bolan said nothing for a long moment. Finally, he spoke. “The survivor?”
“Beaten, maimed and left for dead,” Brognola said. “At last word, he was living in an assisted-care facility in San Diego. We believe one of the three agents was tortured badly enough to give up the other two. The corpse’s fingernails and teeth had been removed.”
“Yeah,” Bolan said. He had seen it done, seen the aftermath of such barbarity, more than once.
“After the disaster,” Brognola explained, “the investigation stalled. Any information the agents might have gathered undercover was lost with them. The survivor, Agent Russell Troy, couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about it. I’m told he was catatonic for a while. Whatever the reasons, nothing solid on Hyde or his fellow race cultists was produced. Various agencies here and abroad have tried since. Interpol would love to get their hands on Hyde, too, because we’ve traced him to several trips abroad. He is believed to be spearheading a push for renewed racist violence in Europe, and may well be the man behind three different separatist cells. We know he’s been linked to the terrorist group Ausländer Toten, half a dozen of whom were caught with the components of a Russian military surplus nuke in Berlin three weeks ago.”
“So Hyde has his claws in a lot of pies,” Bolan said. “How do we know? If we can’t get anything on him officially, where’s this intel coming from?”
“Largely through the efforts of Bear and his people,” Brognola said, referring to Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, head of Stony Man Farm’s computer team. “He’s tweaked the internet chatter algorithms we use to screen sensitive and secure or encrypted data traffic. In its infancy it was part of the old Carnivore program that most of the public has heard about. In reality, it’s worlds more advanced.”
“But what it gives you isn’t legally actionable,” Bolan said.
“No,” Brognola admitted. “Not even a little. Which is where you come in, Striker.”
“You had my attention at ‘animals.’”
“Twelfth Reich hasn’t yet publicly claimed responsibility for what is now a series of increasingly deadly terrorist attacks. Most of these have been covered up, described as gang killings or the results of failed drug deals, that sort of thing. The hope was to prevent a national panic should the extent of Twelfth Reich’s involvement at the national level—and its body count—come to light. But Bear and his team have intercepted communications from Twelfth Reich cells that tell us something big is coming. We think they’re getting ready to announce themselves publicly. There’ll be no ignoring them when they do.”
“Which means you’ll have a domestically produced al Qaeda on your hands,” Bolan surmised.
“Exactly,” Brognola said. “Imagine the damage it would do to public confidence in the government, and in Homeland Security, if we can’t stop this before it reaches that point. Twelfth Reich strikes conducted multiple times per month, even per week, with sympathetic media outlets serving as mouthpieces for the terrorists. We’ll lose