Patriot Strike

by Don Pendleton

  “Something we can do to help you?” Basson asked the map man.

  “I’m afraid we might be lost,” the stranger said.

  “What are you looking for?”

  The man mumbled something Basson didn’t catch. He moved in closer to the van. “What’s that you said?”

  Instead of answering, the stranger raised a pistol with a silencer attached, its muzzle aimed at Basson’s face from six or seven feet away. Basson had time to snarl a curse and reach for his machine pistol, before the bullet drilled his forehead, and his world went dark.

  * * *

  THIS WAS THE TRICKY PART—make that one tricky part—killing the guards and getting them inside the van unnoticed, when for all Mack Bolan knew, the whole perimeter of Lone Star Aerospace could be monitored by CCTV cameras, with reinforcements standing by for just such an emergency.

  The killing was easy, a quick one-two from Bolan’s liberated XD autoloader, and the sentries dropped like puppets with their strings cut. He had gone for head shots, relatively clean, although some stains were bound to mark their clothing. There was nothing he could do about it, and he’d done worse things than wearing dead men’s clothes.

  Shifting the bodies was more difficult, in terms of timing and exposure. They got lucky with the traffic, none approaching as he leaped out of the van and rolled back its sliding cargo door on its runners. Grabbed the nearest body and heaved it into the van by sheer brute force, turning away before the heavy thump of impact registered. The second corpse was heavier by fifteen pounds or so, but Bolan managed to dump it atop the first, slamming the cargo door and jumping back into his seat.

  Granger was ready for him, accelerating with no flamboyant squeal of tires but making decent time. She drove two blocks, then pulled into a warehouse parking lot and cut the gas. A moment later they were both in back with two dead men, stripping the corpses of their jackets, slack and weapons.

  “No peeking,” Bolan warned.

  “No promises.”

  They spent five minutes changing clothes, and while the outcome wasn’t suitable for any fashion runway, Bolan thought it just might get them by. Both guards wore Lone Star name tags without photographs. He had become “J. Basson,” while Granger was more or less transformed into “T. Kastner.” Something less than magic, but he hoped it would do.

  They left the van and walked back to the Lone Star plant, both wearing MP5K shoulder rigs and pistols they’d brought with them to the scene. They also carried long guns—Bolan’s Colt, Granger’s Benelli—close against their legs, and more or less concealed from any passing traffic as they strolled back to the gate that had been left unguarded in their absence.

  No alarms sounded as Bolan led the way past chain-link fencing onto Ridgway’s property. If they were being watched and had been spotted as impostors, he assumed there would be some reaction from the home team to contain them. Since it hadn’t happened yet, the only thing to do was forge ahead.

  But where to start?

  Logic told Bolan they would only get one bite at the apple, and he didn’t plan to waste it. The Lone Star plant and grounds sprawled over several hundred acres, more than enough space to keep them searching well past noon—if they weren’t intercepted before then. Bolan’s quick ground-level scan, combined with what he’d seen from satellite photos, convinced him that their best hope for discovering the rockets lay inside one of the two huge hangars standing on the north side of the plant.

  And likely they would only have a chance to look at one.

  “You want to split up?” Granger asked him.

  Bolan thought about it while they walked. “Better not. We’re pretty well outnumbered as it is.”

  “Okay,” she said, sounding relieved. “Coin toss for hangar A or B then?”

  “If we can get a look inside the first one, it should tell us what we need to know,” Bolan replied. “We see a rocket getting prepped, we’re in the right place.”

  “You’ll observe that both have guards outside.”

  “I see them,” Bolan said, knowing they likely wouldn’t bluff. “They’ll have to go.”

  * * *

  “MAGNIFICENT!” SAID RIDGWAY, as he watched the semitractor couple to the gleaming rocket’s transport-launcher vehicle. The tractor’s fifth-wheel assembly locked into place on the first attempt, and its driver shifted from Reverse to forward motion, while a team of workmen drew the hangar’s massive doors aside.

  “It will be ready on your signal,” Roth assured him.

  “Perfect!” Ridgway checked his Rolex and beamed at everyone around him. “Eighty minutes until air time. Is the linkup ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” one of the technicians answered. “All we have to do is throw a switch, and you’ll be live on every major network, coast to coast.”

  “Don’t wanna drop the ball on that part,” Ridgway cautioned him. “I’d hate to toast a city when nobody knows what’s happening.”

  “You’ll have a captive audience,” the tech assured him.

  “Awright then. Where’s that little makeup gal?”

  “She’s waiting in the office, sir,” Simon Coetzee said.

  “Let’s get it over with,” Ridgway replied, already on the move.

  He didn’t like the ritual involved in getting ready for a TV broadcast, always felt peculiar with his face powdered and painted like some has-been movie star. That was one reason he’d given up on granting interviews some years ago, the other being the way those damned liberal reporters took his comments out of context to belittle him.

  Smart-asses.

  But he’d let them paint him up this time, because it mattered. Ridgway had a message for America and for the world. Things were about to change, and when the smoke cleared, he’d be in the driver’s seat. A big frog in a small pond, maybe. But it would be his pond, and he was sitting on more oil than anyplace outside the Middle East.

  And, hell, the way the Arabs seemed intent on killing one another, riling up the West with threats of World War III, Ridgway just might occupy the catbird seat.

  It all hung on the next few hours. First his speech, and then the shot heard round the world for real, relayed by seismographs and every television on the planet to an audience of billions.

  The makeup girl who waited for him in the office was a pretty little thing, either in awe of him or doing a fair job of faking it. She blathered on about his rocket heading for the moon, the cover story she’d been fed along with everybody else, and Ridgway didn’t bother contradicting her. If she got nervous, he might wind up looking like a circus clown instead of Mr. Big, the Man Who Changed the World.

  Not good.

  Whether he died today or lived another twenty years directing the affairs of his republic, this was no time to appear ridiculous.

  He craved a double shot of Jameson and wondered if that meant he had a drinking problem. Had to smile at that, thinking it was the least of his concerns right now, as he prepared for war against the rest of the United States. An ant tackling a tiger, some might say.

  But this ant had a lethal sting and was prepared to use it in just over an hour.

  Surprise! he thought, and his bark of laughter spooked a squeal out of the makeup girl.

  “Are you all right, sir?” she inquired.

  “Don’t worry, darlin’,” Ridgway answered. “Me, I’m just a happy kinda guy.”

  * * *

  BOLAN AND GRANGER were within a hundred yards of what they’d labeled hangar A when the broad doors began to roll open. They stopped to watch and saw a semitractor nose out, hauling a rocket on top of a specialized trailer. It looked small, compared to the NASA rockets that Americans had come to recognize over the years, but Bolan knew that size could be deceptive with a nuke involved.

  “My God, they’re really going through with it,” said
Granger.

  “Not if we can stop them first,” Bolan replied.

  Bolan saw a troupe of techs and guards trailing the rocket, then scanned ahead of the slow-moving vehicle, spotting a long, low structure he had overlooked before. “Looks like a launching pad to me,” he said.

  The pad or platform lay about two hundred yards west of the hangar that had housed the rocket, maybe half that distance north of where Bolan and Granger stood. He counted eight shooters in the procession following the rocket, flanked by golf carts filled with workmen. At the head of the parade, two men in white lab coats rode in an open truck that Bolan took to be the rocket’s launch control vehicle.

  “That’s Roth, in the shotgun seat,” Granger said.

  “All or nothing,” Bolan told her. “Are you ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” she answered. “Let’s do it.”

  Bolan started jogging forward on an interception course, to meet the semitractor halfway to the launching pad. A shout, off to his right, told him the two guards left behind at hangar A had spotted them. He broke stride long enough to raise his Colt AR-15 and send two rounds down range, the hangar guards collapsing where they stood.

  It went to hell from there, the way things have a tendency to do in combat. Bolan nailed the semitractor’s driver with a head shot, but the rig kept rolling, despite veering off course and slowing to a crawl.

  Granger was rapid-firing toward the eight guards with her twelve-gauge, running forward as she peppered them with buckshot. Bolan joined her, dropping one of them before the launch control vehicle started gaining speed, racing to catch up with the semitractor. Roth was shouting something at his driver, pointing toward the rocket on its trailer as it lost momentum.

  Ridgway’s men were firing back now, automatic weapons chattering, their slugs buzzing around the Executioner like angry wasps. He heard a yelp from Granger, but she kept on running, fired another blast from the Benelli, then discarded it and tore her captured MP5K submachine gun from its shoulder rig. Bolan kept firing with his carbine, spotting targets on the move, veering to intercept the launch wagon.

  If someone took him down before he caught it, there was nothing to prevent the rocket being sent aloft. Nothing to stop Ridgway from taking out whatever city he’d decided to obliterate. It came down to a case of do or die, and Bolan was committed either way.

  As usual.

  * * *

  “WHAT IN THE holy hell is that?” Ridgway demanded, bolting from the makeup chair, whipping the towel free from his neck.

  The crack and rattle of gunfire, coming from somewhere outside, was clearly audible in the small office that had been transformed into a dressing room for Ridgway’s televised address. The noise had spooked the makeup girl so badly she’d dropped her supplies onto the concrete floor. Ridgway was on his feet now, powder crunching under his shoes. He nearly fell when a makeup brush rolled out from under his left heel.

  “Goddamn it!” he blurted, sagging until Simon Coetzee caught his elbow, holding him upright. “What is that?”

  “I’ll find out, sir.” Coetzee turned as if to leave him there, but Ridgway quickly clutched his arm.

  “Hey, not so fast!”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s those bastards!” Ridgway said, making the only logical connection in his mind. “They’ve found us, and they’ve brung in reinforcements!”

  Coetzee frowned at that. “I don’t think—”

  “No, you don’t! I do the thinkin’ around here. And what I think is that it’s time for us to get the hell out.”

  “Sir—”

  “I mean right now, goddamn it!” Ridgway bellowed.

  “Of course, sir.” Coetzee turned to the soldiers clustered near the office doorway. “We’re leaving,” he snapped. “Prep the chopper.”

  They had helicoptered out to Lone Star Aerospace from George Bush Intercontinental after flying from Dallas—why not, if you could afford it?—and the whirlybird was waiting for them, fifty yards from where they stood, between the hangar and the larger plant. It was an AgustaWestland AW189, with twin General Electric T700 turboshaft engines and a top speed of 173 miles per hour. Call it three minutes air time, from takeoff to landing at Houston’s main airport, then off in the Learjet 60 to...where, exactly?

  Ridgway decided he would think about that later. Once aboard the Lear, he could fly some twenty-seven hundred miles before landing again. It was only some eight hundred miles from Houston to Mexico City, about twelve hundred to Nassau, a hair over two thousand to Maracaibo, Venezuela.

  Hell, the world was his oyster.

  He’d have to shift some money, pronto, before the Feds froze his Stateside accounts, but even if they’d beat him to it, there was nothing they could do about the tens of millions he had stashed in Switzerland, the Caymans, the Bahamas, and in Curaçao. Even if all his assets in the States were seized, Ridgway would never come up short for cash.

  Provided he left right now.

  “Let’s go!” he snarled, at no one in particular, and Coetzee started shoving flunkies left and right, his soldiers joining in, clearing the Big Man’s way. This was a case where money talked and walked, leaving the little people in its dust. What happened to the ones he left behind was their problem. Ridgway was in command, all right, but he’d be damned if he was going down with any sinking ships.

  The hangar had a back door, naturally, and they exited that way, an easy jog to reach the AW189 with Coetzee and his men surrounding Ridgway, covering him with their automatic weapons. It surprised Ridgway to find that he was not frightened. The feeling he experienced was closer to excitement, tempered by the rage and disappointment of his grand scheme going up in smoke.

  “We nearly did it!” he called out to Coetzee, shouting to be heard above the helicopter’s whipping rotors.

  “Yes, sir! Maybe next time!”

  “That’s a thought,” Ridgway agreed.

  Why not? He’d lost his grip on Texas, granted, but there was a whole wide world out there, just ripe for picking. Maybe he could find himself an island, take it off the market and declare himself a king.

  Ridgway was smiling as the chopper lifted off, and humming “Dixie” to himself.

  * * *

  BOLAN SHOT THE driver of the launch-control vehicle, saw him slump over the wheel and heard the truck’s engine begin to sputter, threatening to die. He overtook the vehicle, running like the world depended on his speed, and leaped aboard to drag the dead man from the driver’s seat. George Roth, blood-spattered now, was lunging toward his own door as Bolan caught him by the collar of his lab coat, hauled him back and slammed his head into the dashboard.

  Stunned, the rocket man slid halfway into the knee well on his side, while Bolan revved the clumsy vehicle and gave chase to the creeping semitractor with its lethal payload. Catching up to it, he gave his steering wheel a hard twist to the right, collided with the left-front fender of the barely moving truck, and brought it to a halt, its diesel mill still rumbling.

  Rising in his open vehicle, Bolan looked back along the short course he had followed, seeking Granger. She was still there, firing short bursts from her submachine gun, taking down another one of Ridgway’s shooters, while the civilian workers tried to scrambled clear.

  Another glance at Roth, still moaning in his huddle, the Executioner made a move to help her out. He caught one of the Lone Star shooters circling around to Granger’s left and nailed him with a 5.56 mm round from sixty feet, putting him down before he had a chance to fire.

  The shot from Bolan’s rifle seemed to rouse Roth from his stupor. He struggled upright in his seat and barked, “You can’t do this! It’s destiny!”

  “It’s launch time,” Bolan said, and leaned past Roth, opened his door from the inside, and shoved him from the cab, a jarring six-foot drop. Before the scientist cou
ld rise again, Bolan was at his side, hauling him erect, the AR-15’s muzzle hammed beneath his chin. “What does it take to launch this bird?”

  Roth gaped at him as if he were insane. “The firing stand...”

  “Forget that,” Bolan said, shooting a glance down range. “It’s aimed already.”

  Roth followed his captor’s gaze and blanched, seeing his rocket aimed directly at the hangar it had come from, and beyond that open building, toward the Lone Star plant itself.

  “No! That’s—”

  Another jab from Bolan’s weapon silenced him. “It’s going home to roost,” Bolan advised him. “You can set it up, or die and leave the job to me.”

  “Ignition cables,” Roth gasped out. “They have to be connected.”

  “Do it!”

  More shots crackled from the spot where he had last seen Granger, Bolan glancing back in time to see her take another Ridgway soldier down. Roth moved as if entranced, hauling a pair of heavy-duty cables from their spool at the rear of his vehicle, attaching them to the base of the forty-foot rocket. He fumbled the first try, then fixed it with Bolan’s Colt pressed to the base of his skull.

  “There. That’s it.”

  “And the trigger?”

  “Inside the truck’s cab. The red button.”

  Bolan kept him covered as he backtracked to the cab and crawled inside. He couldn’t miss the vehicle’s command console, with its red plastic button labeled Fire. He had a finger on it as he turned back toward the Lone Star plant and saw a helicopter lifting off behind what he’d called hangar A, circling and climbing swiftly out of rifle range.

  Ridgway. It had to be.

  One problem at a time, thought Bolan, as he poised to press the button. “Granger!” he called back to her. “Clear out! Fire in the hole!”

  She bolted from the rocket’s flight path, just as Roth made one last desperate attempt to foil the launch, lunging to disconnect the cables he’d attached just seconds earlier. Bolan depressed the firing button then flung himself clear of the launch-control truck, rolling on the pavement as a searing blast of flame shot from the rocket’s engine.