The duo navigated a series of storage rooms, each bearing metal chests. Some of these were labeled, and some weren’t. Each held, according to its markings, a small fortune in gold, diamonds and other precious metals and stones. Bolan and Delaney ignored these, chased on as they were by the determined ranks of the SCAR gunners.
They fought their way around an L-shaped hallway, dropping mercenaries left and right. Bolan kept dispensing loaded magazines to Delaney from the supply he kept in his war bag.
“There!” Bolan pointed. A reinforced fire door divided the section in which they fought from the next level of the Vault. Bolan pushed Delaney through the doorway, paused to fire the M-16 and almost made the cover of the fire door before he caught a shotgun blast.
The soldier hit the floor, hard. Delaney slammed the fire door shut, throwing the heavy bolts. The door absorbed several bullets from the other side, but none penetrated.
“Come on, Cooper,” Delaney said. She pulled the damaged M-16 from his hands; the rifle had taken the brunt of the impact. A few pellets had struck him in the arms and torso, but the wounds were minor and Bolan barely noticed them through the rush of adrenaline. He would feel the pellets later, when he had time to recover, but for now there was very little blood and no impact on his performance.
There was another set of heavy doors. What Bolan had at first taken to be fire doors was clearly meant as an emergency barrier for a fight of this type—though the Vault’s designers had apparently failed to consider that the same doors could stymie the Vault’s defenders after an invading force slipped past the outer perimeter, as Bolan and Delaney had done.
There was yet another doorway leading farther into the center of the Vault. Bolan threw it open, with Delaney close behind.
They entered a bedroom.
The sheer incongruity of it stopped them both for a split second. Then Bolan realized what they were looking at. A large, round bed waited in the center of the room. A bathtub and shower were to one side, and a hot tub stood between the two. Studio lighting was arranged and hung from the ceiling, as did boom microphones. Digital video cameras were mounted on tripods, pointing at the bed. An adjacent changing area and dressing room boasted a mirrored table with various pieces of clothing, makeup and other accoutrements.
“Hell,” Delaney said. “It’s a porno studio.”
“Looks like,” Bolan said. “Apparently there are levels to Trofimov’s illegal empire that we didn’t know about.”
“It does make sense,” Delaney said. “He’s got plenty of connections in the cable and television world. And he’s got built-in distributorships, if he were to leverage his other commercial interests.”
Something was tickling the back of the Executioner’s mind. He looked around, examining the camera equipment.
“The only thing I don’t get,” Delaney said, “is why hide it here, in the middle of his most secure storage facility, where he’s keeping his most valuable possessions?”
“Think about it,” Bolan said. “Trofimov is a manufactured entity. He’s all about image. Everything he does, everything he wears, everything he says is all calculated to enhance the image of himself that he projects. He’s the elder statesman of cable news and a reluctant warrior for journalistic integrity—all because he says he is and presents himself that way.”
“And porn doesn’t exactly fit that image.”
“Exactly,” Bolan said, checking his handguns. He handed over several more loaded magazines to Delaney, who changed out the near-empty magazine in the MP-5 K. “Trofimov is happy to profit from the seediest elements of the entertainment industry—” he swept the room with one arm “—just like he runs his news network, based on sensationalism and outright lies. But if word got out how he’s really doing things, what he really is, he’d be ruined. The image would be shattered.”
“What’s the plan, Cooper?”
“We haven’t seen nearly all of this place,” Bolan said. “We’ve passed the outer storage levels, but based on the sheer size of the site, there’s got to be more. We press on.”
“What about the mercs behind us?”
“They’ll make their way through here in pursuit eventually,” Bolan said. “We can’t keep them off us indefinitely, and I see no reason to try.” He removed several of Cowboy Kissinger’s miniature proximity Claymore mines from his war bag.
“Put these in front of the doorway,” he said. “Arm them and get out of the way fast, before they activate. You have a delay of perhaps ten seconds.”
“Got it,” Delaney said, looking at the explosives.
“We’ll have to keep watching our backs,” Bolan said, “but that will give them something to think about.”
“What about local law enforcement?” Delaney said. “We’ve started yet another public firefight. They’ll be along soon.”
“They may well be,” Bolan said, “but I don’t expect them to get past the outer perimeter. Those SCAR troops still active will do their best to keep them out, and they’ve got the advantage of what’s left of their fortifications. The locals will seal off a perimeter, maybe call in SWAT, but they’ll stand off for the most part, wait to see what happens. We’re on our own for the duration.”
“You knew that coming in?”
“I did. This is my job to do, and I’m going to do it. Anyone gets in our way, I’ll drop them.”
“You’re a hard man, Cooper.”
“I have a hard job to do.”
There was a nearly hidden doorway leading out of the adult-movie studio. Bolan pushed this open and stuck his head through, Beretta 93-R in his right fist, checking for gunners. The corridor beyond was narrow and held nothing threatening. He motioned for Delaney to follow.
As the FBI agent was climbing through the narrow doorway, the proximity mines exploded. The blasts came one on top of the next, impossibly loud in the enclosed space. Bolan covered Delaney with his body, pulling her out of the doorway, and triggered several 3-round bursts from the Beretta machine pistol. SCAR mercenaries moved in from the rear, walking over their dead comrades as they hurried after the pair.
Bolan switched the Beretta to single-shot mode to conserve ammunition. He put a bullet through the forehead of one mercenary and another through the throat of a second. Still, the SCAR hard force kept coming.
“We’ve got to move!” he shouted to Delaney.
Bolan fired the Beretta dry, thrust the empty weapon into his war bag and drew the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. The hand cannon bucked and thundered as he send .44-caliber death down the corridor, scattering the mercenaries and giving him and Delaney time to make the next reinforced doorway. On the other side, the soldier threw the bolts built into the door. Again, it was clear the structure had been designed with defense in mind. The designers simply hadn’t considered the possibility of interlopers. Bullets pinged off the opposite side of the door, but it held. The Executioner knelt and planted another proximity mine before backing away from the doorway.
Delaney gasped.
Bolan turned around—and stopped, amazed.
The large chamber in which they found themselves was another studio, complete with lighting and an illuminated backdrop designed to simulate natural sky. What was amazing about the studio, however, was that it completely simulated the look of an Afghani village. There were sleeping goats that turned out to be stuffed, huts that looked real from the front but were skeletons of plywood and two-by-fours from the back, and even unmoving, fiberglass Humvee props painted to look like U.S. Army vehicles.
Bolan realized, then, what had been nagging at him about the porno set.
“Delaney,” Bolan said, looking around. He holstered his Desert Eagle, dropped the magazine in his Beretta 93-R, rammed home a fresh one, then holstered that weapon, too. “Does any of this look familiar to you?”
“No,” Delaney said. “Should it?”
“Look closely,” Bolan said.
She examined the set, clearly curious as to what he had in mind. When it hit her, i
t hit her hard.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“Yeah.” Bolan nodded.
The set was an exact reproduction of the village depicted in the “massacre” video being played over and over on Trofimov’s cable news network. Or, Bolan thought to himself, it’s not a reproduction at all. This is the village where the video was shot.
“Cooper, you don’t think…”
“That’s exactly what I think,” Bolan said. “Trofimov faked it. That’s why the video is so blurry, and why nobody’s been able to identify the soldiers in it. They can’t be found because they don’t exist. They’re actors or, more likely, SCAR personnel drafted for the role, play-acting the massacre right here on this set.”
Bolan looked around the studio area, hunting for something that might prove useful. Then he noticed the small video-editing shack at the edge of the “village.” It was clearly part of the Vault, not built into the set, and it was labeled.
“There,” Bolan said. “Watch our backs. I want to see what’s in there.”
He took a step toward the video booth.
The door to the studio blew.
The explosion rocked the studio, cracking the plaster facades on a couple of the fake huts. The blast also caused the proximity mine to detonate, but its angle sent shrapnel back out the doorway. At least one of the SCAR mercenaries was caught in the spray of deadly ball bearings. He dropped the M-79 grenade launcher he had used to blow the door.
There was nowhere to go. Bolan dived for one of the fake huts, knowing that its flimsy construction could provide concealment only. Bullets chased him. Delaney sprinted in the opposite direction, blazing away with her MP-5 K and doing her best to drive the enemy back.
Bolan discovered that the huts were all interconnected in the rear, and that there was nothing separating them from one another. Hiding behind the set, he worked his way up the opposite wall of the studio, unseen by the gunners who were tracking Delaney. As they tried to shoot her down, Bolan was able to get behind them.
He emerged from one of the fake huts, his Beretta in his left hand, his Desert Eagle in his right. Leveling both guns, he shouted, “Over here!”
The distraction had the desired effect. The gunners, closing in on Delaney’s position, were thrown off as they turned and tried to track this renewed threat. Bolan triggered 3-round bursts from the Beretta and individual .44 Magnum slugs from the Desert Eagle. The mercenaries were mowed down, screaming their last as the avenging soldier among them took their lives and sent them to their final judgments.
The gunshots were ringing in Bolan’s ears. Delaney suddenly pointed. “Cooper! There!”
Bolan followed her gesture. There was an upper balcony to the studio, set above and beyond the “sky” backdrop. Gunmen were up there, and as Bolan and Delaney dived for what scant cover there was, the shooters opened up. Rifle and handgun bullets peppered the dirt of the simulated earth.
The soldier and the FBI agent, as if by unspoken agreement, took opposite sides. Bolan wheeled left, while Delaney ran right. Splitting the fire of the men on the balcony, Bolan and his ally began firing back.
The man on the far left was hit and fell from the balcony. The man on the far right took a round through the chest and crumpled where he stood. Bolan and Delaney whittled away at the enemy’s numbers, fighting from both edges to the center. When their gunfire converged on the last shooter remaining, the one closest to the center, he was riddled with bullets and fell with a scream to the fake village below.
Bolan worked his way back to Delaney. She put her back to his, and the two of them, with their guns raised, slowly rotated to assess the threat potential they now faced.
There was nothing.
They waited twenty minutes, all told, wondering if there would be further waves of soldiers. They were deep enough inside the Vault that if the police had cordoned off a perimeter around them, they wouldn’t know it. Bolan decided that none of that mattered. There were more immediate needs.
“Cooper?” Delaney asked.
“Yeah.”
“You all right?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Never better.”
“It’s not over yet,” Bolan said.
“No?”
“No.” Bolan pointed to one of the digital video cameras. “Can you operate that?”
“Can’t be that hard,” she said.
“Keep an eye out. We don’t want to get caught by surprise.” He surveyed the village. It had sustained some damage, but it was still very recognizable. There was, he thought, a certain irony to the fact that this place, designed to simulate a battle, had itself been the scene of a real one.
Bolan judged the angle as best he could based on his memory of the “massacre” video. He positioned himself in the center of the frame.
“Cut my head off,” Bolan said.
“What?”
“I don’t want my head in the video,” he said. “Get my voice, but don’t record my face.”
“All right,” Delaney said.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Roll,” Bolan said.
When he was certain the camera was running, Bolan began to talk.
“Hello,” he said. “I am an authorized agent of the United States government. I am here in the company of an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It’s very important that you be made to understand that a video you’ve seen, purporting to show the massacre of innocent Afghanis by American troops, is a complete hoax.”
He moved aside so that the camera could get a good view of the “village.”
“You will recognize this village,” he said. “It is identical to the one in the video, down to the last detail, because this is the set where the video was faked.” He walked slowly forward, allowing Delaney time to adjust to keep his face out of the frame. Then he grabbed a portion of the nearest hut and pulled it free. He reversed this, showing the skeleton of plywood underneath.
“As you can see,” he explained, “these buildings aren’t real. The men who appeared in the video, pretending to be U.S. military operatives, haven’t been identified because, within the legitimate United States military, they do not exist.”
He moved back into his original position. “I call on every media outlet in the United States and abroad to do whatever is necessary to spread the word of this hoax. The United States military isn’t perfect, but its members are not the mindless perpetrator of atrocity you have been led to believe. Thank you.”
He stopped and waited for Delaney to stop recording. Then he took the camera from her, uncoiled a USB cable from it and attached that cable to his secure phone. After transferring the video file, he transmitted it to the Farm and pressed the speed dial.
“Striker?” Barbara Price answered. “What’s this?”
“Take a good look,” Bolan said. He waited. He could hear, over the connection, the sound of the video he had just recorded, as Price played it on her workstation.
“Striker, is this… Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack,” Bolan told her. “See what Bear’s team can do with this. Maybe a side-by-side comparison with the original tape, so people can see that they match. I’m thinking we can have this all over the Internet and disseminated to the major news networks in just a few hours.”
“I know we can,” Price said. “Striker, this is brilliant.”
“I don’t know about that,” Bolan said. “Someone could claim the set itself was built after the fact. But this should go a long way toward correcting the worst of it.” He closed the connection.
“The worst of it?” The voice had an Irish accent. “Boy-o, you don’t know the half of it.”
Bolan turned. A large, bald-headed man stood there, one arm wrapped around Delaney’s throat, his free hand holding a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle pressed against Delaney’s temple.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Twain,” Bolan said.
“Aye,” Gareth Twain said. “Got the dro
p on you, didn’t I? It wasn’t difficult. Hard to save the world when you’re too busy to watch your own backtrail, yeah?”
“Put the weapon down, Twain,” Bolan said.
“And where would be the fun in that?” Twain gestured with the Desert Eagle, the triangular snout of which moved from the side of Delaney’s head to behind her back. “This bitch and me, we have a history, don’t we? You just keep yer guns in your holsters, boy-o.”
“It’s over, Twain,” Bolan said. “The whole operation. Your company, SCAR, is finished. Your men are dead.”
“Aye,” Twain said. “Knocked my headquarters over right nice, you did, and you uncovered all of Trofimov’s dirty little secrets to boot.” He looked around at what was left of the “village.” “You’ve got to admit,” he said with a laugh, “that parts of all this were brilliant. Had the whole country, the whole world going, he did.”
“No lie can live forever, Twain,” Bolan said. “The truth will out.”
“Sure,” Twain said. “But what is the truth? It’s what people want to believe.” He smirked. “I’ve never understood you hero types. Never will. What do you get out of it, big man? Does it feel good, running around, trying to take in people like me? Does it get you off, yeah? Make you feel like a big shot?”
“You’re a predator, Twain.”
“You got that right.”
“You’re not fit to breathe the same air that honest citizens breathe,” Bolan told him. “You’re a plague. A germ. Stamping you out helps everyone. Removing you promotes everything that is good in the world.”
“A bit harsh, don’t you think?” Twain said, indignant. “I want to know who you are, big man.”
“That’s not important.”
“Oh, come on,” Twain said. “You know all about me. Got a folder, don’t you? Gareth Twain, Irish terrorist, blah, blah, blah. Who are you, big man? What is it that gets you out of bed in the morning?”
“I’m just a man, Twain,” Bolan told him. “Someone trying to do the right thing.”
“The right thing, yeah?” Twain scoffed. “Well, that’s me, isn’t it? Mind me own business, don’t I. Look after number one.”
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