The Executioner lingered a moment at the top of the hill, waiting for the moon to disappear behind an incoming bank of clouds. Drifting on the faint breeze was the smell of barbecued chicken. Bolan shifted his gaze to a two-story clapboard building nestled between the foothills a hundred yards away, near the same mountain road where he and the other campers had earlier tested their driving skills. Smoke trailed up from behind the building, which had once served as the Army base’s administrative headquarters and now housed the Wildest Dreams “faculty.” Bolan assumed there had to be some sort of patio behind the building with an outdoor grill. He also figured the camp staff was likely having a late dinner.
Like him, they’d barely broken a sweat during the day’s activities, and he knew it would be awhile before they all turned in. Their rooms were in the same building, though, and the previous night when Bolan had staked out the quarters, no one had ventured out once the lights had been dimmed. The only other personnel to be concerned about were guards posted out near the main entrance to the complex, but the gate was nearly a quarter mile away, hidden from view behind the bramble and magnolia trees.
The lax security led Bolan to believe that the camp organizers were confident their fantasy enterprise allowed them a means by which to hide in plain sight and pursue their ulterior business without drawing scrutiny. Clearly, the founders of Wildest Dreams—retired Marine Sergeant Jason Cummings and longtime Mercenary Quarterly editor Mitch Brower—were unaware that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had recently linked them to trafficking in black market arms, not only with overseas soldiers-of-fortune, but also a number of U.S.-based militia outfits, including several fringe groups advocating an overthrow of the federal government. Bolan, like his SOG counterparts and the President himself, was concerned that the Aberdeen weapons heist signaled the approach of that day when the militias crossed the line from mere propagandizing to carrying out their threats of armed insurrection.
Once the clouds fully obscured the moon, Bolan broke from the trees and started downhill. Halfway to the storage building, he froze. Behind him, he heard the sound of an approaching car. He was near the camp’s outdoor workout area and quickly took cover behind a stack of old tires used for agility drills. Moments later, the twin beams of the BMW Z3’s headlights swept across the grounds. The sports car was heading down the road that led to the main building. The Executioner ducked still lower as the lights passed over him. Clutching his paltry minigun, Bolan held his breath and listened intently for any sign the car was slowing.
The BMW purred steadily as it drew closer. Bolan was on the driver’s side of the road and, as the Z3 rolled past, maintaining its speed, he peered out and caught a glimpse of the man behind the wheel. It was Mitch Brower, the Mercenary Quarterly editor, a square-jawed, middle-aged man with close-cropped gray hair and sideburns. In the passenger seat was a woman. Bolan’s view was too obstructed for him to get a good look at her other than to note that she had long, straight hair and lean features. She and Brower were talking to each other, clearly unaware they were being watched.
Bolan waited for the car to pass, then crawled to the cover of a chest-high length of concrete sewer pipe half-submerged in a shallow, man-made pond. As part of their training the day before, he and the other campers had been forced to slog into the pond’s icy water and then crawl through the pipe wearing a full backpack. The Executioner had aced the test and then gone back in the water a second time when one of the campers had been overcome with claustrophobia halfway through the pipe.
Staring past the pipe, Bolan watched Brower pull around to the side of the building and ease into a parking space between a Chevy Suburban and Jason Cummings’s Hummer H2. Also parked in the lot were an open-topped Jeep and a handful of older cars whose crumpled frames were a testimony to their use in demonstrations on how to bypass roadblocks and crash through gates and fences.
The woman let herself out of the car and walked at arm’s length from Brower as they headed toward the front walk. From the way she carried herself, the Executioner sensed that she was younger than Brower, but there was no suggestion of intimacy between them. She was more likely a colleague than Brower’s mistress Bolan figured. He wondered what role, if any, she might have played in the Aberdeen heist. There was no point dwelling on it now, however, he realized.
There was work to be done….
“SO, WHAT’S THE VERDICT?” Joan VanderMeer asked as she and Mitch Brower entered the converted administration building. The quarters were sparsely furnished, and there was little in the paneled front entryway other than a framed movie photograph of George C. Scott portraying General Patton and a bulletin board festooned with business cards and flyers posted by previous participants in the fantasy camp.
“That chicken smells good,” Brower responded evasively as he closed the door behind him. “I hope there’s some left.”
“We just ate, remember?” VanderMeer teased as she swept a strand of reddish hair from her forehead. The woman was in her early thirties, with pale blue eyes and a slowly fading spray of freckles across her upper cheeks. She looked like a genteel elementary schoolteacher, but the tone of authority in her voice suggested she didn’t need to be around children to show that she was in charge. In truth, there were few figures more influential in the militia movement.
“And don’t change the subject,” she added, engaging Brower with a smile that was as direct as it was disarming.
Brower grinned back at the woman. Over dinner down the road at a Sykesville diner, Brower had listened patiently as VanderMeer lobbied him on the merits of starting up a Web site to supplement the editorial content of his soldier-of-fortune magazine. She’d put forth a convincing argument—citing increased revenue from merchandising and a wider advertising base—and had offered to not only personally help set up the site but to also bring in someone who could maintain the site. Brower was old school when it came to favoring the printed page as the best means of getting his message across, but he knew there was a ring of truth to VanderMeer’s sales pitch. Furthermore, a part of him was resigned to the fact that his dwindling subscription base was due largely to the growth of the Internet. If he didn’t change with the times, Brower suspected that he would eventually find himself obsolete, along with the magazine he’d spent more than twenty years running.
“You’re as headstrong as your father used to be, you know that?” Brower told the woman as he led her down a long corridor to the dining room.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” VanderMeer said. “But you’re still not answering my question.”
“All right, all right, I give up!” Brower said with mock exasperation. “My God, woman, you’re more persistent than my athlete’s feet.”
“Just don’t get any ideas about rubbing some kind of ointment on me.” VanderMeer smiled back at him. “Unless I ask first, of course.”
The pair shared a laugh as they entered the dining room. Jason Cummings and the rest of the fantasy staff were finishing their chicken dinners. Cummings was Brower’s age, a bald man with an antiquated handlebar mustache and nearly the same physique he’d had more than thirty years earlier when he’d played nose tackle in the Rose Bowl for Army. His eyesight hadn’t fared quite as well, but he was too vain for glasses; the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes elongated as he looked up from his plate and squinted at Brower and VanderMeer.
“Sounds like you got yourself another convert, there, Joanie,” he said, smirking at the woman. Cummings had succumbed to VanderMeer’s sales pitch more than a year earlier, bringing her in to upgrade the fantasy camp’s Web site.
“Something like that,” Brower conceded.
Cummings was seated at the end of an elongated dining table. The four other men at the table, all in their mid-forties, were all absorbed with attacking the food heaped on their plates. Louie Paxton, a long-haired, potbellied veteran of the NASCAR circuit, oversaw most of the camp’s road tests. The man seated next to him, Xavier Manuel, had served four stints as a Marine drill sergeant, making him the natural choice to lord over the workout area. Similarly, Ed “Charlie” Chang’s