Force Lines. Don Pendleton
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classified government facility, how they intended to hide the mess they were in the process of creating.
Infinity had referred to the night’s outing as an invisible program of confirmation and cooperation, and Drobbler went back to watching what he couldn’t see but had been told was happening inside the walls of the germ factory. There were no vehicles, now that the black GMCs had rolled through the main gate with their cargo of nylon bags, evidence seized, he suspected, that wouldn’t leave behind any trace of what the Dormitory—as Infinity called the bio-chem compound—was all about. The small helipad was already chocked to capacity by the Black Hawks, and the men in spacesuits who had disgorged from those gunships had been inside for twenty-some minutes by his reckoning.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Drobbler threw the man a sideways look. If Infinity did, then he might want to pull the HK MP-5 SD 3 subgun off his shoulder. Now that he knew what was happening down there, he wasn’t sure he was all that keen on going the full distance. His attitudes, opinions, in short, his whole point of view about the dreadful and rapidly deteriorating state of affairs in the Western World were anarchist, to put it kindly, but he was a few short hours away from…
“Even with full cleansing of the Dormitory and the kind of plausible deniability we are able to erect around ourselves, we cannot safely determine at what point and how this will all warrant a closer investigation.”
“Which is why the green light…”
“Further, it does not help our cause on two specific fronts. One, that your vaunted leader deemed it necessary to make himself a national television star. Attention is the last and most dreaded area we need to concern ourselves with at this late juncture. Two, that your organization was infiltrated.”
Drobbler grimaced. “I thought you said you took care of that?”
“Be all that as it may, we still do not have absolute control over the United States Department of Justice, even from the deep shadows, even with all of our resources.”
“The attention thing, right?”
“Very astute.”
Drobbler fought to keep the scowl off his face, as he spotted a sarcastic twinkle in those blue eyes. He turned away from Infinity’s laughing stare, just as he heard the wail ripping from the east edge of the main building. An icy shiver walked down his spine an instant before he saw the dancing shadows come flailing into the aura of spilled light. Infinity had the tactical radio in hand before the horror fully registered in Drobbler’s mind.
“Infinity to Dragon leader!”
Drobbler heard the order barked for the door in question to be sealed, but it was too late. The human comet streaked onto open ground, ran on for a few feet, thrashing inside the fireball, as if it could somehow escape from that hellish cocoon. Then it seemed to wilt inside the shroud of fire, toppling in a slow-motion buckling of the legs. Drobbler had seen more than enough. But, even as he turned away and fell back into the fuselage, the screams of a man being burned alive—an employee of the United States government—echoed in his ears. He felt sick to his stomach. Suddenly, had it all been up to him…
But it wasn’t. And, even if he could refuse to move forward, what he’d just witnessed, he was sure, was meant to serve as a warning.
He was onboard for the full ride, and began to wonder if it all was only just bound for Hell.
CHAPTER TWO
The man in black was a silent ghost, virtually invisible to the naked eye at that predawn hour, as he crept to the edge of the dense western exterior of pine forest. With the HK MP-5 SD 3 submachine gun and its integral sound suppressor, he knew it was a safe bet that he wouldn’t be mistaken for some hunter who had lost his way, or some weekend warrior most notable for blustering through the local saloons of Montana’s Glacier Country with tall tales of big game kills from a half mile or more out.
He was, though, in the strictest and most lethal sense, a hunter, and of the most dangerous game. Here, east of Flathead River and at the western edge of the Continental Divide, and now as anywhere then previous in his War Everlasting, Mack Bolan had no interest in bagging grizzly, elk or bighorn sheep to stuff and hang on his trophy mantel.
As for the warrior part…
The big, tall shadow hit a crouch at what he determined was the most secure scouting roost, as he spied his perch through the green world of his night-vision goggles. Concealed in a horseshoe of thick brush, the man also known as the Executioner took a few moments to get his bearings, review, assess, upon giving his six and flanks another thorough scan.
No warrior, he knew, no matter how good, how often he’d been tested in the fires of combat could ever rely on the bloody glory of yesterday’s victories to carry him through the next engagement. That would be foolishness. But it was something often overlooked by the arrogant, the proud, the bully, those who believed all they had to do was to show up for the fight and fearsome reputation would take over, all but send a foe scurrying to hide under his bed.
There was, Bolan knew, always a David out there to every man’s Goliath.
That in mind, the lone wolf operative for the ultra-covert Stony Man Farm couldn’t say, one way or the other, if the two FBI agents who had gone undercover to infiltrate the Sons of Revelation had been careless and sloppy, falling back on their own hallowed and sanctioned law-enforcement status, which, of course, no sociopath, no armed reprobate ever respected anyway. Whatever the case, they were found, beaten to a pulp in an abandoned log cabin up near the town of West Glacier, before, that was, they’d each been shot once in the head. Since the FBI fell under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, and considering the nature of their shadow work and the group believed to have executed them, Hal Brognola had offered Bolan the assignment.
Looking back, Bolan should have declined—murder investigations were somebody else’s job description—but Brognola was a high-ranking official at the Justice Department who also headed up the Sensitive Operations Group at the Farm. Beyond that, and notwithstanding he was the soldier’s longtime friend, Brognola was liaison to the President of the United States, the Man being one of the few in the loop about Stony Man’s existence, and who also gave the Caesar’s thumbs-up or -down to each mission. That the murder of a federal law-enforcement agent fell under the statute of capital punishment was serious enough to give Bolan second consideration, but there were other factors involved that had seen the soldier give the man from Justice the final nod. Aside from the fact that both agents were leaving behind grieving widows and children, stoking the natural fires of Bolan’s sense of justice, both men had managed to pull together enough loose threads of a general conspiracy, one that allegedly involved the import of foreign enemies of America, and who were believed associated with the radical militia group now in question.
Then the hunches, swirling around some big event the agents had tagged the Day of Judgment, though what the exact nature of the conspiracy had gone to the grave with them. With money, however, with the arsenal the enemy was alleged to possess—and there was no telling what other kind of firepower they had at their disposal—anything was possible, the soldier knew, even the sale or acquisition of a tactical nuke, a so-called dirty bomb, or chemical or biological agents. Throw the fuel of twisted ideology into the fire of one man’s belief in his superiority to his fellow man, and that all but blazed his will to use violence and intimidation. From grim and countless personal experience, Bolan knew just such individuals would spare no extreme, would even view collateral damage—the murder and misery of the innocent—as the cost of their revolution, and to further their agenda.
The Sons of Revelation had more than a few former lawmen, ex-military and two ex-spooks that Bolan knew of among the bunch of armed malcontents. That alone raised a red flag in the warrior’s mind.
Shedding the high-tech headgear, Bolan adjusted his trained night-stalking vision to the sheen of light that enveloped the compound. He took one last look at the PDA, found the coordinates—programmed into the palm-held cutting-edge computer by the cyberteam at