Toxic Terrain. Don Pendleton
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He calculated where the man would be standing to cast a shadow at that angle, aimed and fired, punching several holes through the wall in that direction. The hot loads that John “Cowboy” Kissinger had loaded up for him back at Stony Man rammed through the wall at a tick over 1,500 feet per second and found their mark. Bolan watched the shadow in the window drop to the ground, but the rounds kept pouring into the building.
“Is there another way out of here?” Bolan asked.
“Yeah, we can get out the back.”
“That means they can get in the same way,” Bolan said, “but I don’t see many other options here.” The door to the back was directly behind the operating table. Bolan noted that the shots were only coming at them from the front of the building. “I wonder why they aren’t shooting at us from the back.”
“They might be, but they’d have to penetrate about twenty feet of hay bales to reach us. We’ve got hay stored on that side of the building.”
“Have you got any roof vents?”
“Of course,” Kemp said. “We have to comply with building codes.”
“Are they turbine vents?”
“No, only every other one is a turbine,” Kemp said.
“That means we can get out through the others,” Bolan said. “Follow me.”
While they’d been discussing the building’s specifics, Bolan had slipped into the shoulder rig that held his Beretta 93-R and extra magazines. He didn’t bother with the destroyed, bloody shirt. He put the reloaded .44 Magnum handgun back in its holster, which he’d clipped onto his belt, and led the way into the back room with the Beretta.
Scoping out the rear room, which was really just a large barn, complete with pens occupied by various cows, sheep and horses, all of which were extremely distressed due to the gunfire, Bolan saw that the back door was still closed. “I wonder why they haven’t come through the back door?” he asked.
“Probably because of Earl,” Kemp said.
“Earl?”
“He’s an especially foul-tempered Angus bull that we use for sperm,” Kemp replied. “I think they’re going to need something with a little more kick than a .223 to get past Earl.”
Kemp and Bolan made their way to the stack of hay bales along the far wall. They scrambled to the top, then climbed into the metal rafters holding up the roof. The soldier punched out the first roof vent he found and they both climbed onto the roof, Bolan’s feet clearing the vent milliseconds before the shooters burst through the front door.
Bolan looked over the peak of the roof and saw an SUV parked on the street a few feet away from the driveway that led into the clinic’s parking lot. The vehicle appeared empty except for the driver, but it was hard to be certain because of the darkly tinted windows. He saw that the men in front of the building had entered through the front door, probably expecting to find perforated bodies. But the only person in the front of the building was the man Bolan had shot, and he wasn’t moving. Two men stood guard at the rear of the building, just outside Earl’s pen, waiting to see if anyone came out the back.
The drop to the ground was too far to risk jumping. A sprained or broken ankle would be a death sentence for both of them, but Bolan saw an option—a large manger filled with alfalfa for Earl to munch on. But first the soldier had to deal with the sentries, and he had to do it fast, because judging from the commotion in the building, the shooters had discovered that they hadn’t succeeded in killing him and Kemp. Bolan aimed the sound-suppressed Beretta at the farthest sentry and drilled a round right between his eyes. The man’s buddy saw him fall and looked up for the source of the coughing sound made by the Beretta, but before he could raise his own gun, Bolan put a second round through the top of his head, dropping him like a stone. Then the Executioner stood up and fired three quick rounds through the SUV’s open driver’s window. It was dark inside the SUV cab, but Bolan saw the outline of spray issuing from the driver’s head as the man slumped forward, setting off the SUV’s horn.
“Now what?” Kemp asked.
“Now we jump.” Bolan grabbed the woman around the waist and jumped down into Earl’s manger. The falling bodies startled the bull and he lunged away. Before he comprehended the fact that he had visitors, both Bolan and Kemp were running for the corral. Earl gathered his wits and charged the pair, but they managed to grab the rail of the corral and hurl themselves out of the pen just before the bull crashed into its metal bars. That made Earl angrier, and he was about to charge the fence again when the back door opened and two gunmen came blundering into his pen. The gigantic black bull whirled and before the first man out knew what was happening, Earl ran him down and pummeled his body into the hay and manure. The man’s partner froze, giving the bull an opening, which he put to good use, ramming the sentry against the steel building, snapping his spine.
Kemp and Bolan missed out on all the Earl-generated carnage because they’d jumped in a Yamaha Rhino ATV that Kemp and Bowman used for doing chores around the clinic property. The Rhino was a side-by-side ATV, meaning that rather than sitting astride it the occupants rode in bucket seats inside a Jeep-like cab. They’d already cleared the property and were heading into the Badlands by the time Earl had pulverized his second victim.
Bolan let Kemp drive the ATV. He had plenty of experience driving every type of off-road vehicle, but the vetknew how to operate this particular one and she knew the terrain.
“Where are we going?” he asked over the roar of the engine, which Kemp was running at full throttle.
“I know a safe place,” she replied.
3
Killdeer Mountains, North Dakota
Chen’s driver pulled off the highway and headed for the Ag Con facility on Gap Road. This facility operated on a much smaller scale than their main complex. It was really more of a family ranch than a large-scale cattle operation. Chen and his associates had selected it because of its isolation and inaccessibility—it was located so far back in the Badlands that they could land helicopters without alerting neighbors. It didn’t afford much room for their research and development operations, but it was the perfect place to store a couple of prisoners.
Not that their presence hadn’t raised suspicion among the locals. Chen and the other Chinese nationals working for Ag Con stuck out like the proverbial raisins in the oatmeal. That’s why Ag Con relied on the mercenaries from Build & Berg Associates—they at least looked like the locals, and in fact even sounded like them. Many of the B&B mercs came from Eastern Europe, and western North Dakota had been settled by Ukrainians, Germans, Russians, Poles and Hungarians; Eastern European accents were still commonplace.
The locals were self-sufficient, and they valued their freedom. They didn’t want to be bothered, and by the same token, they didn’t bother anyone else. The locals didn’t like confrontation and they kept to themselves. It was the perfect social climate for Ag Con’s plans.
When Liang’s troops lost the intruder’s trail, Liang guessed that the man might try to contact the veterinarian. Since Cooper was wounded, Liang predicted he’d need medical attention, and where better to get that than in a clinic—even an animal clinic. He’d sent a six-man team to ambush the pair, but had lost contact with the men soon after they’d identified Cooper and Kemp inside the clinic. That could only mean that the ambush had failed. So he sent a second team to cleanse the scene of all evidence of Ag Con involvement.
The clinic was two miles north of town. Gunfire was a fairly normal occurrence in the area—target shooting was one of the few recreational activities the region offered—but a fusillade of automatic rifle fire at three o’clock in the morning would raise some eyebrows, even among the stoic locals. So after he’d sent the cleanup crew to the clinic, Chen called Gordon Gould and had him order Sheriff Buck to the scene. Buck was to report the shooting as an act of vandalism, but he was to report that there had not been any injuries. Chen wasn’t as confident in Gould’s ability to control the sheriff as was