Death Run

by Don Pendleton

  Bin Osman hadn't been able to learn anything about Cooper through proper channels, but he'd had better luck going through unofficial channels. CCP Oil had many ties with the Islamic world, including groups that bin Osman counted among his own acquaintances. Through his connections with such groups in Asia and the Middle East, he'd learned that no one within the CCP organization seemed to personally know this Cooper. This wasn't unheard of when it came to an outside sales representative, but bin Osman already knew that Cooper was no peddler of racing fuel.

  Who he really was presented another question entirely. It was as if Matt Cooper had emerged from some chrysalis as a fully formed warrior. He seemingly had no past. This was, of course, impossible, and throughout the evening bin Osman studied the American as if through a microscope. Only one thing was certain; Cooper was dangerous.

  Whatever his name, the man seated across the table from him wasn't sizing him up. Cooper knew for certain what he was dealing with when it came to his adversary; of this bin Osman had no doubt. He knew that this secretive warrior would have no trouble killing him. Rather the big man sized up the situation. Bin Osman admired the man's certitude and his efficiency. He would welcome the chance to practice the art of torture on such a specimen, but he realized that this man was not to be taken lightly. Although bin Osman ached to know how much the man would take before he snapped, he had a mission and this man posed a serious threat to the completion of that mission. No, he would have to deny himself that pleasure and dispatch of this man as efficiently as possible.

  After Cooper left the table, bin Osman produced a cell phone from the vest pocket of his linen suit. "He's left the building," he said into the phone. "Get ready."

  * * *

  Bolan didn't have to wait long before bin Osman made his move. While he stood beside his motorcycle parked outside the restaurant and put on his riding gear, a black Hummer H2 with dark tinted windows rolled by at too slow a pace for the occupants not to be checking him out. With one eye on the slow-moving SUV, the soldier folded his sport jacket and put it in the top box over the bike's rear fender. Then he put on his two-piece riding suit, prepared to draw his weapon and take cover should the Hummer occupants start shooting at him. After the SUV rolled around the corner, Bolan changed from his dress shoes into his riding boots, then put on his helmet and riding gloves. He took his time, watching to see if the Hummer reappeared. Sure enough, minutes later the Hummer rolled by again.

  Bolan waited until it once again rounded the corner, then rode away from the curb. He made a left turn onto Stockton Street and watched his mirrors until he saw the Hummer turn onto the street about three cars behind him. The Executioner made a left turn onto Pine Street without signaling his turn. Traffic was relatively light on the big four-lane street and when the Hummer came around the corner there were no cars between the soldier and the big, black SUV.

  The Hummer accelerated hard, but Bolan jammed on the throttle, hoisting the front wheel of the motorcycle as if gravity had no effect on the big bike. He was doing seventy miles per hour by the time he reached Powell Street. The soldier checked his mirror and saw that the black H2 was driving even faster than he was. Bolan cranked the throttle to the stop, riding like a crazed kid with a death wish — motorcyclists called them "squids" because of the squid-like stains they left on the pavement when they crashed — and was doing ninety by the time he reached Taylor Street. He saw that the light in the intersection had turned from yellow to red. He knew he'd get through before the Taylor Street signal lights turned green, so kept the throttle pinned, sending the speedometer past one hundred.

  By the time the Hummer reached the intersection, the signal light on Taylor Street had been green long enough that cars were entering the intersection. The Hummer ran the red light and nailed the front bumper of an older Chrysler minivan. The bumper flew off as if it had been shot out of a cannon and the minivan spun off the road, landing on the sidewalk.

  When Bolan got to the intersection of Pine and Hyde, he tapped the rear brake, put his foot down and pinned the throttle again, breaking the rear tire loose and sliding out, executing a perfect Super-motard-style right-hand turn, hanging the rear wheel out all the way onto Hyde Street. This left him going the wrong way on a one-way street, so he aimed his bike between two cars waiting at the traffic light and passed between their two lanes, the hand guards on his bike knocking the sideview mirrors off of the cars on his left and right, missing their doors by millimeters. The Hummer screamed around the corners and didn't miss the doors, or any other parts of the cars. Bolan looked in his mirrors and saw the two cars spinning up onto the sidewalks on either side of the road. This slowed the Hummer somewhat, but Bolan still hadn't shaken it off his tail.

  When Bolan crested California Street he caught nearly a foot of air and landed on the back tire. He kept the throttle pinned as he roared up Hyde Street, which went back to being a two-way street after it intersected with California. Bolan rode at triple-digit speeds down Hyde Street, keeping just ahead of his pursuers. He rode over the Broadway Tunnel and saw a car coming at him on Broadway Street. If he kept his speed up, he might make it through before the car entered the intersection so he kept the throttle twisted. He ran the Stop sign and squeezed through ahead of the car, but again the Hummer wasn't so lucky. It sheared the car in two; the passenger compartment skidded through the intersection while the front clip disintegrated beneath the Hummer's mangled bumper.

  The Hummer looked like a wreck. Its headlights were gone, its fenders crumpled and torn, but judging by the lack of steam, the radiator was intact, probably thanks to the gigantic brush guard on the front of the truck. It had driving lights on the roof that lit up the night much brighter than any headlights. Bolan rode as fast as he dared without hurting any innocent bystanders, but if he kept this up, the Hummer bearing down on him was either going to kill him or kill someone else. The soldier had to bring this to an end. With Lombard Street, San Francisco's famous narrow road that switchbacked down toward the sea, coming up on his right, he formulated a plan to do just that.

  When he neared Lombard Street, he slowed a bit to let the Hummer close in on him. With its prey in its sights, the Hummer sped up to run down the Executioner, but just as it neared him, Bolan swerved to the right and jammed on the brakes. On most bikes it would have been the start of a terrible crash, but because of BMW's anti-lock brakes Bolan was able to stop almost instantly while the Hummer sailed past him. Physics were on the soldier's side; six hundred pounds of motorcycle stopped much more quickly than six thousand pounds of sport utility vehicle, and Bolan was able to hang a hard right onto Lombard Street and fly down to the intersection with Leavenworth Street as the big Hummer screeched to a stop halfway down the block. Bolan threw the big motorcycle from right to left to right like an overgrown BMX bicycle and was past the turn onto the Montclair Terrace, a dead-end street that T-boned Lombard Street about halfway through the switchback section between Hyde and Leavenworth, by the time the Hummer started descending the wildly twisting street. Bolan could hear the Hummer crashing into parked cars and banging off the short concrete retainer walls that ran alongside the street as he rode to the bottom of the hill.

  At Leavenworth Street, Bolan hung a hard right and rode up on the sidewalk. He parked the bike and ran to the edge of a garage on the street corner, drawing his Desert Eagle on the way. He leaned up against the edge of the garage, waiting for the Hummer to crash its way down. As the cab of the Hummer appeared in his field of vision, the Executioner lined up the sights of the gun right about where he figured the driver would be sitting, compensating for the change in angle that the spalling of the glass would cause. He emptied a magazine into the glass. His calculations must have been fairly accurate because the Hummer ran through the intersection and crashed into the corner of the building on the northeast corner of the intersection.

  Bolan ran toward the wreck, reloading on the way. He hoped to find a survivor, but before he reached the vehicle a man stepped out of the
rear door, which had flown open on impact with the building, and raised a SAR-21 rifle, a bull-pup-style rifle built in Singapore — and never legally imported into the U.S. market. He fired. The man could barely stand, and his shaky stance made his shooting inaccurate. The 5.56 mm NATO bullets from the stubby gun went wide. Bolan raised the Desert Eagle and drilled a 240-grain hollow point through the shooter's forehead. Bolan kept the gun trained on the open door in case anyone else inside the vehicle might try to attack him.

  When he got to the truck, he could see no one was going to cause him any problems. No one in the cab had worn a seat belt, so the air bags that deployed in the front seat hadn't been much help to its occupants. Judging from the .44 caliber hole in the driver's temple, he hadn't been alive when the air bags deployed. The front-seat passenger must have been holding a SAR-21 between his legs because the combined force of the crash and the airbag deployment had driven the stubby barrel into his throat, burying it all the way up to the plastic foregrip. It had hit the jugular and the man had bled out before Bolan reached the Hummer.

  The last man in the cab was still alive, but just barely. Like the others, he was a Filipino, and Bolan saw the telltale question mark tattoo on the bare shoulder that showed beneath his dirty wife beater undershirt. He was conscious, but blood ran from his mouth, nose and ears, and he looked like he was fading out. Bolan grabbed his shirt and gently slapped his face, trying to get him to wake up. The man's eyes opened and he smiled. Then he spit blood and tooth fragments at the soldier and laughed.

  "Who are you working for?" Bolan asked.

  "Fuck you, man," the man — he was really just a kid — said, then laughed again.

  "You working for Botros?" The kid said nothing, but a look of recognition crossed his face when Bolan said the name. "Do you know where they've taken the plutonium?"

  "What are you talking about plutonium?" the kid said. "You white boys need to lay off that meth."

  "Didn't you know?" Bolan asked. "Your boss has brought enough plutonium into the country to build a bomb so big it could blow up this city and take Oakland with it. He's not even going to have to pay you what he owes you because he's going to kill you. He's going to kill your homies, your mother, your sister, your baby momma, and everyone you've ever known. You fools are helping to get your own families killed."

  "Man, you keep talking that shit, I'm gonna cut you." The kid kept talking tough, but Bolan could see real fear in his eyes. He'd seen or heard something that convinced him there was truth to what the Executioner said.

  "Go ahead and try," Bolan said. "But I'm not the person who's going to kill your entire family. How does it feel to help someone kill everyone you've ever known?"

  The man spit again, but this time he didn't spit at Bolan. Instead he just cleared his mouth and tried to speak. "I saw it," he said. "In the warehouse. We unloaded the cask."

  "You saw what?" the Executioner asked. "Where?"

  "The cask. We helped unload a heavy steel cask."

  The kid choked and coughed up a lot of blood. Bolan knew he wasn't going to last long.

  "Where? Where is the cask?"

  "Santa Cruz." The kid coughed up more blood, but this time he couldn't clear his throat. "Near the railroad tracks." He coughed a couple of times, desperately trying to catch his breath, and finally dropped his head, silent. Bolan checked his pulse and found none. He could hear sirens fast approaching. He ran back to his motorcycle and roared down Leavenworth Street towards the freeway.

  * * *

  "Bear, I need you to access a spy satellite for me," Bolan said to Aaron Kurtzman. "Something going over Santa Cruz." The soldier had contacted the Stony Man Farm computer expert the moment he'd returned to his hotel room in Monterey after his trip to San Francisco.

  "I can get photography at twenty-three-minute intervals," Kurtzman replied. "Unless whoever you're looking for knew the exact orbits of our satellites and had perfect timing, I should be able to find something. What am I looking for?"

  "Some guys unloading a heavy cask or container from a van or truck at a warehouse."

  "Are we looking for a Type B container filled with ten kilos of plutonium 239?"

  "Something along those lines," the soldier replied.

  "I need something more," Kurtzman said. "There aren't a lot of warehouses in Santa Cruz, but what you just gave me could describe almost every delivery to every single one of them.

  "Look near the railroad tracks." The soldier had taken a detour through Santa Cruz on his way back from San Francisco and he'd identified several likely warehouse facilities that were along the railroad tracks that ran through town just south of the Cabrillo Highway — California's famous Highway One, also known as the Coast Highway. He gave Kurtzman the GPS coordinates of the prime candidates.

  "Anything else that could help me?"

  "This might be a long shot, but look for a black Hummer H2 with dark tinted windows."

  "That's not much."

  "Do your best, Bear."

  The sun poked up over the hills to the east when the Executioner finally laid down for some sleep. Less than two hours later, a sharp rap at the door woke him up. He threw on the large robe the hotel had provided, sliding a Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife into the sleeve in case he needed it. Then he grabbed a wire hanger from the closet, untwisted it and used it to hold a black shirt in front of the peephole as he stood to the side of the door. When no shots came through the door, he chanced a look through the peephole.

  "Oh hell," Bolan said to himself when he saw the two conservatively dressed Americans at the door. Their dark suits, unstylish neck ties and humorless demeanor meant one of only two possibilities, and since they were too old to be Mormon missionaries they had to be the FBI agents Kurtzman had warned him about earlier.

  Bolan opened the door. "Can I help you?" he asked.

  "Federal Bureau of Investigation," the taller of the two men said. "I'm Agent Smith and this is Agent Kowalski." They both showed Bolan their badges. Bolan inspected the badges so he could be reasonably certain they were legit before letting the two men into his room. "We'd like to discuss yesterday's events," Smith said.

  "Did I leave something out of my report to the police yesterday?" the Executioner asked? "I believe I was thorough."

  "We've read the report," Kowalski, the shorter of the two said. "You were very thorough."

  "Is there a problem?" Bolan asked.

  "No problem," Kowalski said. "We just have some questions to help us tie up a few loose ends. Why were you looking for Eddie Anderson when he was kidnapped?"

  "I'd had a conversation with him prior to attending a meeting earlier in the morning."

  "A conversation about what?" Smith asked.

  "About his late brother," Bolan said. "The young man seemed upset."

  "Why did you care that he was upset?" Kowalski asked. "You have no chance of sponsoring a major team like the Ducati factory squad. What does Anderson mean to you?"

  "He is a great racer, and I'm a fan. And he seemed to be in a great deal of pain over the loss of his brother. As I said, he seemed upset. I didn't have another meeting until the evening and Mr. Anderson had no practice sessions until today, so I thought I'd pay him a visit."

  "Lucky for him that you did," Smith commented, prompting Kowalski to glare at his taller partner.

  "Our files say that you work for CCP Petroleum," Kowalski said.

  "Correct," Bolan replied. "Is that a crime?"

  "No," Kowalski replied, "but killing four men might be."

  "I don't understand," Bolan said. "Those men clearly meant to kidnap or kill Eddie Anderson, and they tried to kill me. That doesn't justify the use of lethal force?"

  "It certainly does," Smith said. "I don't think anyone here is implying that you have committed a crime of any kind. As my partner said, we're just trying to tie up a few loose ends."

  "So you said. Gentlemen, I've given all the information I have to the authorities. I've had a very difficult day and I still
have work to do. I'll be glad to answer any questions, but please, let's not go around and around. Please get to your point."

  "We have no point, Mr. Cooper," Kowalski said. "We just need to tie up a few loose ends."

  6

  After wasting nearly two hours with the FBI agents, Bolan made his way to the track where he found Eddie Anderson in the middle of Friday morning practice. This was the young American's home race, and he'd already won countless races on this track when he was racing Superbikes in the U.S. His lap times reflected his familiarity with the track and before the first session was over, not only had he set the fastest times, he'd unofficially broken the track record. Tomorrow he would almost certainly break the official record for a qualifying lap and he would likely set a race lap record during Sunday's main event. If he lived that long.

  While the youngster circled the track, Bolan watched for Osborne, the blacksuit who was supposed to be watching Anderson. Either the man was very good or he was absent because the soldier found no sign of him. He hoped Osborne was that good but he doubted it. If the man had been present, Bolan would have found some trace of him. It was not a good sign.

  When Anderson finished his session, Bolan met him as he walked back to his motor home. "Hey," the young man said by way of greeting.

  "Hey," the Executioner responded in kind.

  The young rider looked the soldier up and down. "I still can't figure out what your story is," he said. "You sure ain't no fuel salesman."

  "You want to see my credentials, perhaps speak with my director?"

  "Whatever," Anderson said. "At least you ain't no pervert, near as I can tell, anyway."

  "I do my best," Bolan responded.

  "So what is your story? What I saw you do yesterday, I've never seen anyone do something like that before."

  "I've had a little martial arts training," Bolan said.

  Anderson seemed to buy that. "I take it that yesterday wasn't the first time you killed a man with your bare hands."