As for suspicion, his name had been linked to arms deals, civilian border-watch campaigns in the Southwest, and to a shipment of neo-Nazi pamphlets printed in the States that found their way to Germany, where the recipients were jailed under that nation’s postwar laws proscribing hate speech and denial of the Holocaust. No such statutes existed in the States, so he was free and clear.
Almost.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives—still ATF for short, despite the late addition to its title when it joined the Department of Homeland Security in 2002—had been watching when Halsey founded his New Minuteman Militia in 2008. The group had started small, expanding to an estimated fifteen hundred members concentrated in Southern California, with outposts in Arizona and Nevada.
Headquarters for the NMM was located near Victorville, on the western edge of the same Mojave Desert where the ATF’s informant had been left to feed the wasteland’s scavengers. According to the file Brognola had provided, the militia’s turn-coat had been Joseph Allen Gittes, twenty-six, a marginally employed auto mechanic who’d pulled himself back from the brink of methamphetamine addiction while serving time in state prison, then found Jesus, right-wing politics and the patriot militia movement in no particular order.
It was standard stuff, as Bolan understood extremist groups of both Right and Left. Damaged and disaffected individuals were drawn to militant cliques like iron filings to a magnet trawled through dirt. Some claimed to find new meaning for their lives in radical theory. Others simply tried to exorcise their private demons by attacking others—be the targets ethnic minorities, “traitors,” the System, or “The Man.”
Something, somewhere along the line, apparently had driven Gittes to betray his newfound friends of the NMM. He’d been a walk-in at the ATF’s San Diego field office, where agents initially suspected him of clumsily attempting to spy on them on Halsey’s benefit. In time, though, Gittes had produced leads that resulted in the seizure of two midsize arms shipments, taking a few hundred assault rifles and other hardware off the overloaded streets. Agents had listened more attentively when he began to speak of “something big” in the works.
And then, he’d vanished, lost forever.
The autopsy report on Gittes indicated that his legs were broken, blunt force trauma, leaving him alive to crawl across the vast Mojave, seeking help. The desert sun had baked him, dehydrated him, before a snakebite finished off the job. By that time, it was likely a relief.
Agents had questioned Halsey, who professed dismay and grief in equal measure, claiming that he’d missed Gittes around militia headquarters but had concluded—with regret, of course—that the young man had relapsed into tweaking meth and left the movement for another shot at living on the pipe. A feasible suggestion, but it didn’t track with what the dead man’s handlers had observed.
Which left the ATF nowhere. Ditto the FBI, the state police, San Bernardino County’s sheriff, and the other agencies that had examined scattered pieces of the new militia puzzle. Brognola and Stony Man Farm were poised to move against the NMM, but first they needed something to substantiate the “something big” that Halsey was supposed to be preparing.
Taking back our country.
Which meant taking it away from the majority of rational Americans, turning it into…what?
It struck Bolan as a bad idea.
AND SO THE EXECUTIONER prepared for war. He wasn’t rushing into anything, though time was of the essence. That was true whenever Brognola approached him with a new assignment, always an emergency, but rushing blindly into battle wasn’t Bolan’s style.
For starters, he had to cross the continent, and that meant traveling by land unless he planned to make the trip unarmed. Some twenty-two hundred miles of highway lay between D.C. and San Bernardino. Amtrak needed fifty-eight hours to deliver him by train, leaving Bolan afoot at his destination. The alternative was driving: thirty-five hours to cover the distance at a steady sixty-five miles per hour, plus allowances for stops to fill his stomach and the car’s gas tank, maybe a break to sleep somewhere along the way.
In Bolan’s book, the road still beat the rails.
He could be unobtrusive when he wanted to, flying—or driving—underneath the radar. Bolan had perfected the art of “role camouflage,” wherein the average human eye saw what it was trained to expect, rarely looking past a standard-issue uniform or attitude.
In this case, he would be Joe Tourist, passing through en route to somewhere else. If asked, which was unlikely, he’d adjust his destination based on his location at the time, forever moving westward.
Bolan’s current ride was borrowed from a drug dealer in Maryland who had no use for a car these days. The pusher’s forwarding address was the Potomac River, but he’d carelessly forgotten to inform his friends and colleagues of the move. The car was a gray, two-year-old Lexus LS 10 sedan, nothing ostentatious about it unless you peered at the company logo and knew that the L in a circle had doubled the price for a midsize four-door. After Bolan had switched out the plates, he was ready to roll.
He kept in touch with Brognola from the road, adjusting his ETA based on weather, fatigue, construction delays and the car’s peak performance at twenty-odd miles on a gallon of fuel. In fact, it took Bolan forty hours and change to cross the continent, improving Amtrak’s time by three-quarters of a day.
His first stop was a chain motel, where Bolan slept six hours straight, dined twice in the coffee shop and left feeling fit for step one of the campaign he’d mapped out in his head on the long, lonely drive from D.C.
He was supposed to infiltrate Clay Halsey’s private army, prove that it was blitz-worthy before he brought the house down, and Bolan knew the militia chief would be doubly cautious with new recruits after finding an informer in his ranks. Bolan reckoned he couldn’t just show up and volunteer his services. He needed a foot—or a fist—in the door.
To that end, he’d contrived a plan with Brognola to make himself presentable, by fringe extremist standards. First, Stony Man Farm would prep a military file on Bolan—or, rather, on Major Matt Cooper, whose sterling combat record and assorted decorations hadn’t saved him from early retirement after he publicly challenged the fitness and patriotism of his commander in chief.
While that legend was polished and set into place, “classified” but still accessible to determined hackers, Brognola would prepare the scene for Bolan’s introduction to the NMM. Brognola, through the ATF, already knew the name and location of Halsey’s favorite watering hole. All he needed was a group of agents who could hold their own against the target and his vigilante inner circle, until Bolan intervened and it was time for them to take a dive.
Simple.
But simple plans, in Bolan’s world, had a disturbing tendency to go awry. A man living on borrowed time should take nothing for granted.
Assuming Brognola could find the proper cast—which seemed a certainty, given his pull at Justice and the wide array of undercover agents he could call upon—the set itself would still be fraught with danger. And if it fell apart, Bolan’s best shot at penetrating Halsey’s group would go to hell just as quickly.
Anything could happen once the players picked a fight. Halsey’s people could be armed, might even start shooting and hope for the best on a self-defense plea. Local jurors would be impressed by their grooming and righteous demeanor, opposing a band of shaggy barbarians.
But it would never go to trial, if Halsey or his men pulled guns. In that case, Bolan would be forced to intervene, and no one could predict how it would end, with undercover Feds and innocent civilians in the cross fire.
Best-case scenario: Bolan saved the day and was welcomed into the milia’s fold.
Worst-case scenario: a massacre.
Bolan could only keep his fingers crossed, as he prepared for his debut as Major