Patriot Strike

by Don Pendleton

  “Can’t tell,” Jackson said. “Wait and see, with the dome light.”

  The car was a black Dodge Avenger, four door, not an obvious cop car. Haskin puzzled over that, since they were waiting for a cop—a lady cop, at that—but he supposed that she could be off duty, driving her own vehicle. It didn’t matter what she came in, after all, as long as she went home with them.

  The cop...and whoever she was meeting at the Alamo.

  “I still can’t see the driver,” Jackson said, to no one in particular.

  “It’s one of ’em,” said Haskin. “Has to be. Who else would be here when the place is closed?”

  “Damn tourists,” Bodine suggested. “Wanna snap a picture standin’ in the lights.”

  “Parkin’ as far as they can get from anything?” Haskin snorted dismissively. “We got one. Now just keep your eyes peeled for the other.”

  “You figure they’ll be packin’?” Jackson asked him.

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Hell, I am.”

  That was a fact. Between them, they were carrying two pump-action shotguns, one Heckler & Koch HK416 carbine chambered in 5.56 NATO, one AK-101 feeding the same NATO rounds and at least four handguns. Bodine sometimes wore a second pistol in an ankle holster for backup, normally a Colt .380 Mustang Pocketlite, but Haskin hadn’t looked to see if he was packing it tonight.

  They had firepower, anyhow, and horsepower under the hood of their GMC Yukon, with its 5.7-liter turbocharged Chevrolet small-block V8 engine. Haskin wished they’d had a bit more brainpower, but these were good boys, dedicated, all straight shooters. He would work with what he had.

  And how hard could it be?

  Pick up two people from the ever-loving Shrine of Texas Liberty and take them back to headquarters for questioning. It wasn’t like they had to fight John Wayne and Richard Widmark, or even Billy Bob Thornton. Sure, one of them was a Texas Ranger, but she was a woman, for God’s sake.

  One woman then and she’d be packing, but he didn’t know about the other one. Haskin had no idea who else they were looking for—a man or woman; white, black or whatever—but it stood to reason that there’d be at least one other gun against their eight or nine.

  Safe odds, if only they had been allowed to kill their quarry, but that wasn’t in the cards. His orders were to bring at least one of them back alive and preferably both. Headquarters couldn’t question corpses, and if Haskin dropped the ball on this one, it would be his own ass on the charcoal grill. And that was not one of them whatchamacallits. Simile or metaphor, maybe an oxymoron.

  Screw it.

  “Here goes,” said Jackson, as the Dodge Avenger’s driver opened up her door and stepped out. She’d turned the dome light off—smart thinking—but the parking lot was lit for security’s sake, and Haskin recognized her from a photo he’d been shown that afternoon.

  “It’s her,” he said. The lady Ranger.

  “One down, one to go,” said Bodine, like he had just invented math.

  “Suppose the other one don’t show?” asked Folsom.

  “Then we bag this one,” Haskin replied. “Call it a night.”

  “We have to take her straight back?” Jackson queried. “She’s a looker.”

  “Remember what we’re here for, damn it. And remember what you stand to lose, if you screw it up.”

  * * *

  WATCHING FROM THE SHADOWS, Bolan saw his contact step out of a vehicle he took to be her personal ride. Nothing the Texas Rangers would select for chasing outlaws on the open road, and Bolan wasn’t sure if they did any undercover work. He knew the force was small—about 150 officers to police America’s second-largest state and its twenty-six million inhabitants. Not to mention the countless tourists, drifters and undocumented aliens. Only a handful of Rangers were women, and Bolan was looking at one of them now.

  He knew her face from photos he’d received in preparation for the meeting. She, on the other hand, wouldn’t know him from Adam until Bolan introduced himself. Photos of Bolan—with the new face he had worn since “dying” some time back in New York City’s Central Park—were scarce as the proverbial hen’s teeth. He hadn’t bothered changing fingerprints at the same time, since he was dead to the world, and Uncle Sam’s elves had purged every file they could find that contained Bolan’s prints—from the Pentagon and FBI headquarters, to LAPD, NYPD and so on down the food chain.

  In that sense, at least, it was good to be dead.

  The Ranger he had come to meet, by contrast, was very much alive. And Bolan hoped to help her stay that way.

  Adlene Granger was thirty-one years old, five-seven without standard Ranger cowboy boots and Stetson hat, her frame packed with 137 fairly trim, athletic pounds. Green eyes and auburn hair, no known tattoos, although she had a scar inside her left forearm from taking down a crackhead who had pulled a razor in the scuffle. All of that was in her file, together with the fact that she had shot two would-be bank robbers in Brownsville, on a stakeout, killing one of them.

  But now she needed help and couldn’t ask her fellow Rangers. Couldn’t put her faith in local law enforcement, Texas-style. She wasn’t all that keen on trusting Feds—from what Bolan understood—but everybody had to lean on someone, sometime.

  Nature’s law.

  Enter the Executioner.

  His contact—Ranger Granger?—had a tale to tell, and Bolan had agreed to listen. He already knew the basics from his briefing, but he needed more details. Needed to know if it was serious enough to rate his kind of handling and yield a positive result.

  Bolan had known too many dedicated and courageous women of the law to swallow any crap about their runaway emotions, inability to cope with crises or the rest of it. Short of a power-lifting contest in the heavyweight division, Bolan couldn’t think of any field where women did not rival or surpass their male competitors—and he had seen some Russian ladies who could hoist the big iron, too.

  He wasn’t looking for a partner, though. Had no intention of enlisting anybody for his mission, if it turned out that there was a mission here, deep in the heart of Texas. He wanted information he could act on—if it seemed his kind of action was appropriate—while Ranger Granger went back to her normal daily life and put their meeting out of mind as best she could.

  Simple—unless it wasn’t.

  Bolan knew she had a personal connection to the problem, but he didn’t know how far she planned to chase it. He would have to make it crystal clear that he was not recruiting, not inviting her to join in a crusade. She would be briefing him and nothing more.

  He hoped.

  Emerging from the shadows, Bolan showed himself, waited and watched her start the long walk from her Dodge Avenger toward the south end of the Alamo’s facade. She took long, determined strides, an easy swing to her arms. She wore hand-tooled boots with sharply pointed toes, blue jeans, a denim shirt under a thigh-length suede jacket. The jacket was unbuttoned, granting easy access to a good-sized pistol on her right hip, worn in a high-rise holster.

  Here we go, he thought, standing his ground.

  * * *

  “YOU SEE ’IM?” Jackson blurted out.

  “We ain’t blind,” Haskin told him.

  “Let’s get after ’em,” said Bodine.

  “Not yet.”

  “Why the hell not?” Folsom challenged.

  “Look, we know it’s her and likely him, but I ain’t making no mistakes ’cause we got hasty.”

  “What, you think he’s just some random guy walkin’ around the Alamo?” asked Jackson.

  “Making sure don’t cost us nothin’ but a little time. And they ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  “Oh, yeah? Suppose his wheels is back there and they just take off?”

  “We ain’t afoot,” Haskin reminded him. “And Kent didn’t
put you in charge.”

  “Hey, I’m just sayin’—”

  “Shut your piehole, will ya? Lemme see what’s goin’ on.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  At times like this, Bryar Haskin wished he didn’t have to deal with idiots. They were useful, in their way, but Christ, their whining grated on his nerves.

  He watched the woman walk toward the man who had appeared as if from nowhere—meaning that he’d walked up somewhere from the south, maybe approached by way of Crockett Street. Whatever. He was here now, if it was him, and while Haskin had no serious concerns on that score, he was still determined to be sure before he made a move.

  It was interesting that the guy, whoever he was, made no attempt to meet the woman halfway. He hung close to the Alamo, ready to duck back out of sight and under cover at the first suggestion of a trap. A cagey bastard and corralling him could take some doing. Granted, Haskin had three men to back him, odds of two-to-one, but if the man and woman separated, and it turned into a foot chase, they were screwed. He didn’t plan to run around the Alamo all night, like some dumb cluck in one of The Three Stooges comedies.

  And what if someone started shooting? They’d have cops up the wazoo in nothing flat, the very last thing he needed on a job like this. He thought about the shit storm that would rain down on him if he got arrested, and it made his chili supper curdle in his stomach.

  Not a freakin’ chance.

  Haskin clutched his Ithaca 37 shotgun—the Deerslayer Police Special version—in hands that were suddenly sweaty. At first he had relished being in charge of this mission, taking it as a sign of advancement, but now he saw how it could blow up in his face. Spoil everything, in fact. And it would be his fault if anything went wrong.

  Across the parking lot, the lady Ranger was within twenty feet of Mr. X and closing in. They hadn’t started talking yet, as far as Haskin could tell, but he couldn’t swear to it. There’d likely be some kind of recognition signal, or a password, then they’d either start to do their business or the Ranger would bail out, if she discovered the guy wasn’t who she had come to meet.

  The odds of that were nil, but Haskin wasn’t taking any chances.

  Wait and see.

  Now they were close enough to speak without raising their voices, and he wished he’d brought a shotgun microphone to supplement the Ithaca. Something to let him eavesdrop for a little while before they rushed the couple, maybe pick up something useful for the chief, in case one or both of the targets went down for the count or was trained to resist interrogation. It would stand him in good stead, a little extra boost, but thinking of it now did Haskin no damned good at all.

  “We goin’ in or what?” Bodine asked.

  “Hang on a sec,” said Haskin.

  “But—”

  “You heard me!”

  “Jeez.”

  He knew that it was risky, waiting, but he had to do this right the first time. There would be no do-overs. Wishing he’d brought more men or spread the ones he had around the park with walkie-talkies, Haskin scowled into the night.

  “All right,” he said at last. “Hit it!”

  * * *

  “WHAT BRINGS YOU to the Alamo at night, mister?” the Ranger asked when she was twenty feet away.

  “Greetings from your uncles,” Bolan told her.

  “Uncles?”

  “Sam and Hal.”

  “That makes you...?”

  Knowing she had the name and nothing more, he told her, “Matthew Cooper.”

  “I’m Adlene Granger. Sergeant Granger.”

  “Right.”

  “You want to see ID?” She reached toward an inside jacket pocket.

  Bolan waved it off. “Been there, done that.”

  “So there’s a file on me?” she said, half smiling.

  “There’s a file on everyone.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said, shifting gears.

  “Well, here I am.”

  “And you know what this is about?”

  “Not all. The basics,” Bolan answered. “I was told you’d fill me in.”

  “Right here?”

  “Your call,” Bolan said. “We can take a walk, a ride, whatever.”

  “You weren’t followed?”

  “No.” He’d spent some forty minutes driving aimlessly through San Antonio to guarantee it.

  “I guess this is as good as anyplace,” she said. “But maybe we could step out of the light.”

  As if on cue, a set of high beams blazed to life, pinning them where they stood. Bolan made out the hulking shape of what appeared to be a full-sized SUV, charging from its hiding place behind the screen of trees surrounding Alamo Plaza. It hadn’t trailed Granger’s Dodge, meaning it had been in place before the meet, its occupants apprised of when and where to strike.

  “You said—”

  “They didn’t follow me,” Bolan assured her, as his Glock cleared armpit leather.

  Adlene Granger drew her own sidearm, a Heckler & Koch HK45, and raised it in a firm two-handed grip. “I can’t believe I missed them, damn it!”

  “Who says you did?”

  “But—”

  “We should go,” he told her.

  “They’re between us and my ride,” she said.

  “Not mine,” he said. “Come on.”

  She almost seemed reluctant not to stay and fight it out, but turned and followed Bolan at a sprint, the SUV roaring across the parking lot behind them. The headlights tracked them until they cut around the rear end of the Alamo and ran into another line of trees.

  “What about my car?” she called to Bolan.

  “We’ll come back for it,” he said. Skipped the obvious, not adding, if we can.

  A twelve-gauge blast echoed out behind them, buckshot chipping the flagstone walk that had been laid around the old mission-cum-fortress. It was hasty, not a good shot, but they couldn’t count on someone with a shotgun missing them consistently.

  Bolan was grateful for the cover when they reached the tree line, doubly glad that architects and landscapers hadn’t designed any access to the property on this side of the Alamo. Unless the SUV was supercharged, with a bulldozer blade attached, its driver would be forced to turn around and circle north or south around the plaza to pick up their trail.

  It was a lucky break, but nothing more. They still had two long blocks to cover before they reached his rental on Crockett Street. The shooters could reverse their course and gain some ground, but they’d be confined to streets, while Bolan and the Ranger could run in a straight line, due south to his ride.

  “Jesus!” Adlene Granger gasped, close on his heels. “If they knew I was coming here—”

  She didn’t have to finish it. Prior knowledge meant a leak somewhere. It meant someone on her short list, one of the people she trusted, had no place there. Bolan, reasonably certain the tip hadn’t originated from his side, wondered how far the lapse would set them back.

  Or whether it would get them killed.

  They made it to the RAV4. Bolan keyed the automatic locks from half a block away, hearing the chime, seeing the taillights flash once. He slid behind the wheel, let Adlene take the shotgun seat and gunned the straight-four 1AZ-FSE engine. Peeling out on Crockett, eastbound, he saw headlights racing down Alamo Plaza, then turning to follow him.

  So much for shaking the tail.

  “Are you ready for this?” he asked Granger.

  Half turned in her seat, pistol still in her hand, she replied, “Bet your ass.”

  There it was then. Game time.

  Chapter 2

  Washington, D.C.—Earlier

  Mack Bolan stood before the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, considering its four bronze lions—two male
and two female—guarding a pair of cubs. Beneath each brooding cat he found a carved inscription. Tacitus, from ancient Rome, stated In valor there is hope. The Book of Proverbs reminded Bolan that The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are as bold as a lion.

  He wasn’t sure about the second part, having known some so-called righteous folks who didn’t have the courage of their own convictions. He could buy the first bit, though. The wicked could run, but they couldn’t hide.

  At least not from the Executioner.

  Bolan’s visit to Washington, and to this memorial in particular, was not a matter of coincidence. He wasn’t a casual tourist and most emphatically was not on vacation. He had come to meet one of his oldest living friends, a certified member of an endangered species, to discuss a matter of the utmost urgency.

  Or so Bolan had been told.

  This friend, Hal Brognola, had an office nearby, in the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Bolan had not seen it from the inside, and he likely never would. Although no longer wanted by the Feds and physically unrecognizable to those who’d hunted him during his long one-man campaign against the Cosa Nostra, Bolan knew that strolling through the halls of justice would be deemed a breach of etiquette. How could he be there, anyway, when he officially did not exist?

  So, when he got an urgent call from Brognola, they either met at Stony Man—a working farm and the nerve center of the clandestine operation Bolan served, sequestered in the Blue Ridge Mountains—or at some public location in or near D.C. Crowds kept the pair of them anonymous, while they discussed their bloody business with a modicum of privacy.

  Hiding in plain sight.

  Today Bolan perused the names of fallen heroes who’d been shot, stabbed, bombed and bludgeoned while defending those in peril. Some had died in car crashes, during hot pursuits or when their aircraft had plummeted to earth on a surveillance mission. Others had succumbed to strokes or heart attacks on duty. Buildings had collapsed on some, as in New York on 9/11. Some had been cut down by friendly fire.

  It was a war out there, as Bolan knew too well from personal experience.

  He would have liked to say the good guys were winning, but each day the news refuted it.