Bolan boarded the Pave Hawk as the machine started to lift into the air once more; the runners barely had time to kiss the ground. As he piled in, Grimaldi looked back from the cockpit.
“Forgive the observation, Sarge,” he said, “but you look absolutely pissed.”
“I am,” Bolan said. He strapped himself into one of the seats. Shifting the FN P90 on its sling, he looked the weapon over, removing the magazine and checking the action. He had spent a lot of time rolling around on the floor of the safe house, fighting in close contact. He needed to make sure his weapons would function when he called on them. The FN seemed none the worse for wear for riding along with him through the misadventure.
“Are you injured, Sarge?” Grimaldi called back. His earbud transceiver broadcast his words to Bolan despite the noise of the rotors overhead. He looked worried.
“It’s not my blood,” Bolan said. The front of his blacksuit and portions of his web gear were stained darker than the rest. He picked several splinters from the latter and from the crease of his canvas war bag before removing, from the bag, a compact cleaning kit. Then he turned his attention to his pistols.
John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Farm’s armorer, would give him grief for the gouge in the 93R’s slide. He could almost hear the man’s commentary now. Each of the weapons Bolan was issued had been combat-tuned, in most cases by Kissinger’s own experienced hands. The goal was always to increase accuracy while enhancing reliability, goals that too often might seem mutually exclusive. Having spent years responsible for selecting and maintaining his own hardware, Bolan was no stranger to the demands on the Farm’s armorer. He appreciated the support Kissinger provided.
The Beretta had, after all, saved his life.
Grimaldi called out their estimated time to the second target zone. He looked back at Bolan again. “Sarge,” he said, “you okay?”
“Yeah,” Bolan muttered. “But I’m mad, Jack. We’ve just left a trail of corpses behind us, and we’re not much further along. Hyde may or may not be at the second safe house. If he’s not, we keep moving through our priority list.”
“That’s the plan,” Grimaldi said. He looked at Bolan as if unsure where the soldier was going.
“They’re wasting lives,” he explained. “Hyde and his hate-filled kind. Terrorists, predators of every stripe. They have motivations, Jack, and while they’re all equally deserving of being put down, as Hal put it, some make more sense than others.” He cleaned the Beretta as he spoke. “Hyde and his ilk want power, sure, but they’ll never hold it. Power is an abstract to them. They wouldn’t know what to do if they were suddenly in charge, suddenly the kings of their own white-as-snow empire. They kill not for power, not for political change, not for money, but because they hate.”
“We’ve faced a few who answered to that description,” Grimaldi said.
“Yeah, and every time, they were wasting lives.”
They rode in silence. The thrum of the rotor blades vibrated Bolan’s chest. He let his hands work as if of their own accord; he could disassemble, clean and reassemble the familiar Beretta 93-R in the dark, on the back of a camel, in a sandstorm. The image made him chuckle despite his stern mood. The phrasing was Barbara Price’s, shared in a moment’s intimacy after the pair had spent some meaningful and only too rare downtime together. Their on-again, off-again relationship was the most Bolan could offer her. It was, for now at least, something she could accept. Neither pushed the other; they were professionals who knew only too well how quickly fates could turn.
He checked the fit and draw of his Beretta in the custom shoulder holster. The leather had been singed by muzzle-blast but wasn’t otherwise damaged. Replacing the machine pistol’s 20-round magazine, Bolan holstered the weapon, topped off the magazine in his Desert Eagle and secured the hand cannon in its Kydex scabbard.
“Jack,” he said. “Time.”
“Sixty seconds, Sarge.”
Good.
It was time to get back to work.
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