Blood Play (Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan)

by Pendleton, Don

  When told Shiraldi no longer worked there, the woman had apparently asked a few pointed questions about the circumstances behind his leaving. And now here she was, back on the reservation, far from the nearest hiking trail, attending a press conference that, like the waste facility, wasn’t open to the public. This time Captain Brown wasn’t about to just let the woman walk away. First, however, she had to wrap things up with the media.

  “Gwenyth Colt and her two-year-old son, Franklin Jr., were apparently not present at the time of the shootout,” she went on. “Their whereabouts at this time is unknown, but we’re making inquiries and hope to have some answers shortly.

  “Also unknown at this time is the motive for the altercation. Yes, we’re aware of Mr. Colt’s alleged abuction, and that’s one of the reasons we had officers dispatched here last night to his residence. Whether they were followed here or if the gunmen they exchanged fire with were already here lying in wait is something we hope to determine upon further investigation.”

  “Last night in Taos there was another incident involving a friend of Franklin Colt’s named Alan Orson,” yet another reporter called out. “You’d have to think there’s a link between the two.”

  Brown stared hard at the reporter and shook her head the way an elementary school teacher would when dealing with a wayward five-year-old. She’d had enough.

  “All right, listen, all of you,” she snapped indignantly. “I watch my share of news conferences on television, most of them involving the same members of the press I’m looking at now. In all those instances, I don’t recall the official giving the conference being bombarded with questions until after he’s had a chance to make his opening remarks. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a woman or a Native American or both, but I have to tell you I find the disrespect being shown here is not just inexcusable, it’s also unacceptable. Given that one of my officers has just arrived with pertinent information on a case that gets colder with each passing second, I’m disinclined at this point to shirk my duties any further to accommodate what I see as little more than a media feeding frenzy. Ladies and gentlemen, this press conference is over.”

  There were instantaneous cries of protest from the press corps. Captain Brown raised her voice slightly and drowned them out. “Furthermore, I need to advise you that on the chance that other perpetrators in this incident are still at large on the property, we will be doing a routine search of all media vehicles as they leave this area. And, insofar as you’re on tribal land, I’m now officially asking you to vacate the premises so we can do our job.”

  Brown turned her back on the media and continued to ignore their renewed onslaught of questions. Over where Officer Walsh had parked the Rhino ATV, the man in the brown suit, RTPF’s Chief Investigative Officer Russell Combs, leaned against his unmarked Camaro as he inspected the contents of Officer Walsh’s manila envelope. As Brown approached the two men she waved over two other uniformed officers loitering near the forensics crew surveying the property gateway.

  “Way to give them hell, Captain,” Officer Walsh told Brown.

  “They were asking for it.” Brown turned to Combs, her closest confidant on the force. Combs was wearing his omnipresent dark-tinted glasses, not as a surveillance ploy so much as to conceal a genetic palsy defect that had left him cross-eyed. “Any chance you have a bug or homing device on you?”

  “Both,” Combs said. “Not on me, but in the glove compartment.”

  “Good.” Gesturing at the arriving uniformed officers, she told Combs, “Take Hayes and Leyva and handle the vehicle searches. Try to get to the lot before everyone starts pulling away.”

  “This is about more than just pissing them off some more,” Combs said matter-of-factly. “Who gets the bug?”

  “A woman with a greenish hat and raincoat,” Brown said. “She was lurking in the back. She’s the one I told you about the other day.”

  “The hiker?”

  Brown nodded. “If you can swing it, follow her, even if you make the plant.”

  “Got it.” Combs handed her the photocopies he’d taken from the manila envelope. “These should work.”

  Combs got in his Camaro along with the two other officers. As they screeched off and raced along the shoulder past the retreating press throng, Brown stayed behind with Walsh and turned her attention to the photocopies. They were all the same, a blown-up freeze frame taken from one of the surveillance cameras mounted outside the Albuquerque International baggage-claim area.

  “Nice job,” she told Walsh.

  “No problem, Captain,” the officer replied. “I ought to tell you, though. Somebody else was asking about footage from the same time frame.”

  Brown furrowed her brow. “APD?”

  “I don’t think so. They said it was classified. I only found out by accident. They wanted footage from the parking lot cams, too.”

  Brown considered the possibilities. If it’d been BIA she would have heard about it already. Most likely, she figured, it had to be the FBI, since Colt’s abduction was officially on the books as a federal offense—kidnapping. In the same thought, it occurred to her that the woman she’d just seen might be with the Feds, working undercover. If that was the case, she didn’t even want to try to fathom the implications. She could only hope she was wrong. Until she found out for sure, however, she knew it was imperative to get as much done here as she could in as quick a time as possible.

  Brown thanked Walsh again, then ventured past the forensics crew to another pair of officers watching from just inside the gate to Colt’s property. One of them echoed Walsh’s praise about the way she’d put the media in its place then added, “You didn’t tell them the Feds had somebody here during the shootout.”

  “Must have slipped my mind,” Brown said. She ignored the officer’s knowing smirk and went on. “I have reason to believe one of the shooters is still on the property somewhere. He might be wounded or maybe he’s just hiding out waiting for a chance to make a run for it.”

  “Which is why you’re having their cars searched,” the other officer guessed.

  Brown nodded. “That’s a long shot, though, so we need to search the grounds.”

  “Is that him?” the first cop said, gesturing at the photocopies.

  Captain Brown nodded again and handed over the copies. “Track down Romano and Covina to help you. Nobody else. Start at Colt’s place and work your way outward. Cover the whole reservation if you have to. Take this guy alive if you can, but we’ve already lost four men today, so if it seems necessary, don’t hestitate to take him out.”

  “How’d you find out about him?” the other cop asked.

  “An informant,” the police chief said.

  Captain Brown’s informant was Frederik “the Butcher” Mikhaylov.

  The slightly blurred photos were of Mack Bolan.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  Eager to distract themselves from dwelling on Bolan’s uncertain fate, the assembled cybercrew was firing on all cylinders at the Annex Computer Room. Although the Taos Police Department as well as the local County Sheriff’s Department had declared Donny Upshaw the prime suspect in the murders of his father and Alan Orson, Kurtzman’s team had decided to more thoroughly explore the theory that the missing groundskeeper had been framed, likely by whomever had supplied him with the heroin found in his guest quarters. Their primary focus was a search for possible links between the Taos murders and the incidents to the south stemming from Franklin Colt’s abduction.

  In hopes of making a connection, Akira Tokaido had taken up Barbara Price’s directive to follow the money and was culling through databases for more details on Alan Orson’s business dealings, especially with recent clients who may have been privy to information about the inventions he’d been planning to bring to the New Military Technologies Expo. Carmen Delahunt had returned to the Farm and was working the heroin angle, checking with law-enforcement agencies throughout New Mexico in hopes she could tra
ck down an active trafficking network that might have recently moved a large shipment of smack through the upper part of the state. Huntington Wethers, meanwhile, was looking into Franklin Colt’s life during the years he and John Kissinger had drifted apart. He’d already come across references to Colt’s antidrug speaking engagements, which raised obvious questions about what role he might have played in Alan Orson’s decision to invite Donny Upshaw to live on his property. He’d yet to find out how Colt and Orson knew each other, but there was a brief item on Rosqui Pueblo’s Web site about Colt’s wedding three years ago and Orson had been listed as best man at the ceremony. Colt’s name had come up elsewhere on the site, where three separate times he’d been named the Roaming Bison Casino’s Employee of the Month.

  Barbara Price had just received confirmation that Jack Grimaldi had picked up John Kissinger in the borrowed Skycrane and was en route to the reservation with Detective Lowe and another APD officer to begin searching for Bolan. Resigned that there was nothing more she could do on that front, she was now simultaneously monitoring pertinent police investigations in Taos and Albuquerque as well as fielding an update from Carl Lyons on Able Team’s mission in upstate Washington.

  That left Kurtzman.

  The former Rand Corporation brainstormer was combing through the airport surveillance footage he’d accessed shortly before RTPF’s Officer Walsh had shown up at Albuquerque International seeking the same on the men Colt had met with just prior to his abduction. Unlike Captain Brown, however, Kurtzman was less concerned with photo images of Bolan and his Stony Man colleagues. His initial hope had been that one of the airport cameras had captured Colt’s abduction. Unfortunately, the parking lot surveillance cameras were not fixed but rather swivel-mounted, panning back and forth at regular intervals. The skirmish between Colt and his captors had taken place out-of-frame, and by the time the camera had panned its way to Colt’s Nova, the panel truck was already pulling away.

  “Damn,” Kurtzman swore in frustration. He let the footage continue to play out as he finished his cup of coffee. He was setting down the cup when his spirits suddenly spiked. The camera had just panned back to the Nova, capturing the moment when the Chevy muscle car had backed into the luxury SUV whose driver was about to become the first known fatality linked to the kidnapping. Kurtzman wasn’t able to get a clear look at the man driving the Nova, but the fleeting glimpse prompted him to cue up footage from yet another surveillance camera: the one mounted at the pay station. It proved to be an inspired hunch, as a few minutes later Kurtzman had footage of both the panel truck and the Nova as they were speeding through the checkpoint. In the case of the panel truck, its tinted windows prevented Kurtzman from getting a look at its occupants, but when the Nova came barreling down on the parking attendant moments later, the camera clearly captured the man behind the wheel.

  “Yes!” Kurtzman cried out. When the others looked up, he apprised them of the breakthrough, adding, “I’ll have to go back and check the footage from outside the baggage area, but I’m pretty sure this same guy’s lurking in the background while Colt’s talking with our guys. He must’ve hightailed it to the Nova once all hell broke loose.”

  “Nice going, Aaron,” Price said, glancing up from the unassigned computer station where she was multitasking. “How clear is the footage?”

  “I’ll need to do a little photo-enhancing,” Kurtzman confessed, “but I think if I tweak the clearest freeze frame I’ll have something to run through Profiler.”

  “Good idea.”

  The Farm’s high-tech answer to police station Indenti-Kits, Profiler was a wide-range software program capable of doctoring facial images with alternative appearances and then running all the variants through existing databases from more than a dozen worldwide law-enforcement agencies in search of potential matches. The program was far from foolproof, but countless times in the past it had, in a matter of seconds, produced results that, years before, would have required days or even weeks of legwork and bureaucratic wrangling.

  Kurtzman was retracing the surveillance camera footage frame by frame when Sensitive Operations Director Hal Brognola strode into the Computer Room. He nodded to the cyberteam members as he made his way to Price.

  “Still no word from Striker?” he asked.

  Price glanced up and shook her head, then pointed at her headset to indicate she was in the middle of a call. As he waited for her to finish, Brognola took off his trench coat and draped it over a nearby chair. When she wrapped up her call, he was tempted to offer some kind of encouragement but knew the words would ring hollow. Instead, he gave her the first option to respond.

  “That was Carl,” she said. “Able Team just took down the Takoma operation. Four killed, two arrested and one’s already looking to plea bargain.”

  “And our side?”

  “Pol and Gadgets were banged up, but it doesn’t sound serious,” Price reported. Rosario “the Politician” Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz were Carl Lyons’s Able Team colleagues. “They’ve been admitted at Takoma GH and Ironman says Pol might wind up being kept overnight for observation on a possible concussion.”

  “But Lyons is good to go?”

  “There might be some loose ends to tie up with the authorities, but other than that I think so.”

  “Good,” Brognola said. He stared across the room momentarily, his gaze falling on the far-wall monitors. Their images were lost on him, however, as his mind was elsewhere. The situation in New Mexico was now a Farm priority, and much as the big Fed had faith in both Jack Grimaldi and John Kissinger as interim field agents, with Bolan still missing, Brognola had to consider the possibility that he was either incapacitated or, worse yet, that his War Everlasting had come to a permanent end. In either case, a clear chain of command needed to be maintained so long as the mission was active. With Phoenix Force entrenched halfway around the world, there were too many time constraints to even consider flying one of that team’s members back to the States to fill in for Bolan. That left only one feasible option. Much as Brognola was loath to give Price cause to fear the worst, he turned to her and passed along his decision.

  “Get back to Carl,” he told Price, “and see how fast you can get him on a plane to New Mexico.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Rosqui Pueblo, New Mexico

  Once the morning sun cast its first ray into the craggy depths of Healer’s Ravine, Mack Bolan stirred. He opened his eyes briefly, then shut them to block out the bright light. He was disoriented and feverish, his body wet and shaking beneath what felt like some sort of damp blanket. Weakened, as well, he drifted back into a fitful sleep. When he awoke a few minutes later, he began to remember where he was and how he’d gotten there.

  Thinking back, he recalled clinging to a section of the battered gristmill waterwheel once it had bobbed back to the surface after knocking him into the icy river running past Franklin Colt’s property. He’d been too dazed to do much but hold on and keep his head above the frothing water as it carried him along its winding course.

  A seeming eternity had passed before the he’d come to a sharp bend near the ravine and the waterwheel had snagged itself amid other debris trapped by a long-dead tree that had toppled into the river. Bolan had abandoned his makeshift raft and used the tree to drag himself ashore, where he’d collapsed, exhausted. Once he’d gathered his strength, he’d ventured deeper into the ravine and found it cluttered with old, rain-soaked mattresses, rusting appliances and other household items apparently dumped from the edge of the precipice far above him. Shivering, he’d begun to roam through the trash, hoping to make some sort of lean-to to help shield himself from the cold. The likeliest prospect was a discarded cast-iron bathtub resting on its side near an old bicycle missing its front tire.

  Bolan was scraping mud out of the tub when he’d heard a stirring in the brush growing up around the heaps of refuse just off to his left. Drawing his borrowed 9 mm Browning pistol, he’d ventured forth and discovered a large
male bison lying on its side, blood trailing from its mouth. Bolan figured the beast had to have strayed from the herd during the stampede and tumbled over the precipice. Beyond its obvious internal injuries, the bison had broken at least two of its legs in the fall and was clearly near death. Bolan had tried to put the creature out of its misery with his pistol, but his downriver sojourn had left the gun inoperable. Bolan had backtracked to the trash heap, where he’d recalled seeing an old steel-legged chair as well as a rusty, long-discarded tree saw. He’d broken off one of the chair legs and brought it back along with the saw. The chair leg had been sharp enough where he’d snapped it free that, with considerable effort, he’d been able to pierce the bison’s hide and gouge through its chest until he reached its heart. He’d twisted his crude tool until the beast stopped moving, then had cast the chair leg aside in favor of the saw, using the last of his strength to partially skin the animal. The last thing he remembered was dropping alongside the bison, leaning into the still-warm carcass and drawing a section of the skinned hide over him.

  Now, hours later, the beast’s flesh had gone cold but Bolan realized the scavenged hide had likely saved his life.

  As his senses slowly came back to him, Bolan smelled smoke and could hear the distinctive crackle of a nearby fire. On his guard, the Executioner slowly rolled away from the carcass and reached for his web holster, only to find it empty.

  A long shadow suddenly fell across him, blocking the sun from his eyes.

  “Looking for this?”

  Bolan blinked and stared up at the man looming over him. He was middle-aged and dressed in rags, his long, bedraggled black hair streaked with gray. Judging from his ruddy features and dark eyes, Bolan figured he was from the reservation. In one hand the man was holding Bolan’s handgun. In the other he clutched a gleaming bowie knife with a nine-inch blade.