3

      Fort McHenry, Baltimore

      It had been Bolan’s turn to choose the meeting place, and he’d made his selection on a whim. It had to be within an hour’s drive of Washington, but within those parameters anything went.

      He’d chosen Fort McHenry for its history— “Star Spangled Banner,” and all that—as well as its proximity to certain high-crime streets that might prove useful if the call from Hal Brognola concerned another job.

      And what else would it be?

      Granted, Brognola was a friend of long standing who phoned his regards on holidays, birthdays and such. He couldn’t send cards, because Mack Bolan had no fixed address. But a weekday phone call requesting a face-to-face ASAP could only mean work.

      And work meant death, no matter how they tried to dress it up in frills.

      The fort had been restored with loving care. Tourists could stroll along the parapets where early defenders had cringed from the rocket’s red glare, clutching muskets and sabers, most praying they wouldn’t be called on to use them.

      That had been during the country’s second war with Britain, going on two hundred years ago, and Bolan’s homeland still hadn’t achieved a lasting peace. Its history was scarred by conflict stretching from the shot heard ’round the world to Kabul and Baghdad. The freedoms cherished there were sacrosanct to Bolan, but their price was high.

      He wondered, sometimes, what the politicians thought they had achieved, besides securing their own reelection, but it never troubled him for long. The republic had survived good presidents and bad, congressmen who helped the poor and robbed them blind, judges who did their level best and others who were on the take from every scumbag they could find. America endured, sometimes despite its leaders, rather than because of them.

      In Bolan’s world it was a different story. He’d quit taking orders when he shed his Army uniform and launched a new war of his own, against the syndicated criminals responsible for nearly wiping out his family. That war had taught him things he’d never learned in Special Forces training, and Bolan had taken those lessons to heart.

      These days, he was unique among all other warriors he had ever known or studied. The nearest facsimile came from ancient Japan, when masterless samurai called ronin traveled at will through a feudal landscape, choosing their battles and renting their swords to the highest bidder.

      Bolan wasn’t a mercenary, though. He’d cast his lot with Hal Brognola at the Department of Justice, and Brognola’s covert-action teams at Stony Man Farm, in the wild Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. But he didn’t belong to them. Bolan was free to turn down any job that didn’t suit him, though he rarely exercised that privilege. In most cases he found that Brognola’s concern, his sense of urgency, matched Bolan’s own.

      That didn’t mean he’d want the job the big Fed brought to him this morning, at Fort McHenry. Every time they met, a part of Bolan’s mind was ready to decline the mission, picking it apart in search of elements that made it hopeless or unworthy of his time. It was a rare day when he found those elements—not half a dozen times in all the years he’d worked with Hal—but it could happen.

      As his compact with Brognola left him free to pick and choose, so it allowed Bolan to chart selected missions of his own, without Brognola’s go-ahead. Brognola nearly always backed him to the limit, but they both knew that it wasn’t guaranteed, and if the man from Washington said no, it wouldn’t be a deal breaker for either of them.

      Not yet, anyway.

      Moving among the tourists, eavesdropping on fragmentary conversations, Bolan marveled at their ignorance of history. One woman thought Fort McHenry had been shelled by “Communists” during the Civil War. Her male companion solemnly corrected her, insisting the aggressors had been French. Most of the others didn’t seem to care what might’ve happened there, so long ago, as long as they could spend a morning in the sunshine, briefly free from care.

      And maybe that, thought Bolan, was the reason many of his nation’s battles had been fought.

      History books extolled the U.S. combat soldier’s dedication to abstractions—Justice, Freedom and Democracy were those most prominently listed. Bolan, for his part, had never met a soldier who spent any barracks time at all debating politics, when there was talk of women, sports or food to be enjoyed. And in the orchestrated panic that was battle, he had never heard a fighting man of either side die with a patriotic slogan on his lips. They asked for wives or lovers, parents, siblings—anyone at all, in fact, except the leaders who had put them on the battlefield.

      Armies defended or invaded nations. Soldiers fought to stay alive and help their buddies. Only “statesmen” waged war for ideals, and most of them had never fired a shot in anger, or been fired on in return.

      Bolan had once maintained a journal, filled with thoughts about his private wars, the Universe, his place within the scheme of things and mankind’s destiny. He’d discontinued it some years ago, more from a lack of idle time than any shift in feeling, and he didn’t miss it now.

      Who’d ever read or care about his private thoughts, in any case? Officially, he was a dead man, had been since his pyrotechnic finish had been staged by Hal Brognola in NewYork. From there, he’d been reborn—new face, new life, new war.

      Except, in truth, his war had never really changed.

      His enemies were predators in human form, who victimized the weak and relatively innocent. Like some unworthy patriots and holy men, they dressed their crimes in disguises of infinite variety. They were left- and right-wing, conservative and liberal, Muslim and Christian, Jew and gentile, male and female, young and old. They came in every color of the human rainbow, but they always wanted the same thing.

      Whatever they could steal.

      Bolan stood in their way, sometimes alone, sometimes with comrades who were dedicated to the fight for its own sake. And while he knew he couldn’t win them all, he’d done all right so far.

      He found the spot he’d designated for his meeting with Brognola, leaned against the rough stone of the parapet and settled in to wait. The man from Justice thrived on punctuality, but Bolan was ten minutes early. He had time to kill.

      He couldn’t see or hear the ghosts who walked those grounds, but Bolan never doubted they were present, bound by pain and sacrifice to the last battleground they’d known in life. And something told him that they didn’t really mind.

      BROGNOLA STEPPED UP to the wall at Bolan’s side, and said “Been waiting long?”

      “Not too long,” Bolan answered. “Shall we walk?”

      “Suits me,” Brognola said.

      He studied Bolan, as he always did, striving for subtlety. It wasn’t good to stare, but he supposed that shooting furtive glances from the corner of his eye would make him seem ridiculous, like something from a Peter Sellers comedy.

      “How are you?” he inquired at last.

      “Getting along,” Bolan replied.

      Okay. No small talk, then.

      “I’ve got a project that I thought might suit you, if you’re interested,” Brognola told him, cutting to the chase.

      “Let’s hear it.”

      “What do you know about India?”

      Bolan considered it, then said, “Huge population. Sacred cows. Border disputes with Pakistan and China. Trouble with the Sikhs.”

      “Endangered species?” he suggested, prodding.

      Bolan shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

      “What