Toxic Terrain

by Don Pendleton

  Bolan sighted in on another target and squeezed the trigger, hearing Kemp do the same. He tried to find another target, but the remaining three men had taken cover. He scoped out the area and saw the top of a head poking out from behind some sagebrush. There wasn’t much besides sage to hide behind on the killing fields below, but it might just as well have been nothing. Bolan set his crosshairs just below the tuft of hair and squeezed the trigger. He was rewarded with the sight of the scalp flying skyward.

  The soldier reloaded his rifle, slamming the last of his loaded magazines in place of the depleted one. Kemp had all of their ammo in her backpack. Not counting the men who were probably circling around the butte to attack them from behind, there were only two shooters left. Their opponents didn’t seem to be the best-organized group Bolan had ever encountered, and they didn’t seem used to encountering resistance, but he knew better than to assume they were completely stupid. He scanned the area looking for the remaining two shooters. He didn’t see anyone, but then he heard a shot and saw a blood smear appear along a shallow ridge that afforded one of the few hiding spots in the plain below the butte.

  Bolan heard movement above him. He had no idea how many men were following them, but he knew there were at least five, and he had only four rounds left in his BAR. He slung the rifle and unholstered his Beretta. The sound suppressor was still screwed to the barrel, which suited the soldier’s purpose. He crawled down from the deer stand and started climbing up the side of the butte as silently as possible. He could hear the men above making their way down the switchback trail that led to the stand. Using that route meant that it would take the men much longer to reach the deer stand than it had taken Bolan and Kemp when they slid down through the crevice. As they made their way down the trail, Bolan crept up the side of the butte. At one point the men passed on the path only a few feet above his location. He counted eight pairs of boots treading on the path above him.

  After the last pair of boots passed by, Bolan counted to ten, then pulled himself up onto the path. All but two of the men had disappeared around the next switchback in the trail. The two remaining turned to see what had caused the noise on the trail behind them, but before they could make out the source, Bolan’s Beretta coughed twice, putting a round into each man’s head. A third man appeared on the trail and met the same fate as his comrades.

  Bolan heard a shot from below, the loud boom of a high-powered rifle. It definitely came from Kemp’s .30-06 and not one of the .223s carried by the B&B goons. He hoped her shot had been on target, but he didn’t have a lot of time to think about that because the men below him had opened up. Their rounds flew over his head; the shooters were just taking wild potshots. To get to a position that would allow them to get a good shot at the soldier, they’d have to put themselves in his line of fire, so the mercenaries were just spraying and praying. The men couldn’t get a good shot at Bolan, but at the same time he couldn’t get a good shot at them.

  The soldier was considering his options when he heard the booming report of Kemp’s bolt-action Savage. From the sound, she had to have been coming up the path. The men below him returned fire, and Bolan once again heard the roar of Kemp’s .30-06. He watched the trail below him and saw three men moving backward into his field of fire, their attention focused on Kemp’s attack from below. It was a fatal mistake. Bolan switched his Beretta to 3-round-burst mode and emptied his 20-round magazine into the trio. He heard Kemp’s rifle fire two more rounds, both of which hit the dead bodies lying on the trail below Bolan. After that, the silence that normally enveloped the Badlands resumed.

  Bolan looked at the carnage below him through his rifle scope. No one down there appeared to be alive. After a few moments he heard Kemp shout, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I guess,” she said. “I think we’ve got them all.”

  “Okay. I’m coming down.” Bolan jogged down the trail and rounded the switchback to see the barrel of Kemp’s gun pointed up at him. When she saw him she lowered the barrel.

  “Are you really all right?” he asked.

  “No. I mean, yeah, I’m not hurt. But damn…” Bolan moved down the path until he was beside her. “I’m a doctor,” she said. “My job is to save lives, not take them.”

  Bolan didn’t say anything. People responded to the stress of combat in different ways. Kemp was one of the toughest people he’d ever met, but no one who’d ever taken a life in combat escaped without some psychological scarring. He’d have to keep an eye on her to make sure she didn’t crack under the pressure.

  4

  Watford City, North Dakota

  “Have a drink, you damned old fool,” Jason Gould ordered Sheriff Jim Buck.

  “I ain’t drinking with you, you little cocksucker,” Buck said.

  “Suit yourself,” Jason said. “Since it’s just me drinking, I suppose I can break out Uncle Gordie’s good stuff.” Jason felt along beneath the counter lip of the liquor cabinet and produced a key. He unlocked the cupboard over the sink, pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label whisky, and poured the liquor into an oversize tumbler he’d filled with ice. He sat down on a couch, drinking from the tumbler in big gulps, barely tasting the expensive whiskey.

  “Might as well make yourself comfortable,” Jason told Buck. “We ain’t going nowhere until Gordie gets here.” Jason produced a small glass pipe filled with yellowish chunks and a small butane torch. “I don’t suppose you want to get high?”

  “Hell, no,” Buck said, “and you ain’t going to be smoking that shit, either.”

  “Hell I ain’t,” Jason said, lighting the torch and holding it to the pipe. After holding the torch to the glass for a few moments, smoke started to rise from the chunks inside it, giving off a horrible caustic smell. Jason inhaled the smoke and held it in his lungs for several seconds, until he coughed it up. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them a few seconds later, he looked even crazier than usual. “What the hell you going to do to stop me? You can’t stop me from doing nothing. You can’t even stop me from getting special favors from your old lady.”

  Buck lunged at the young man, but Jason produced a Springfield XD pistol from a holster that he’d clipped inside the waistband of his jeans. “You really think that’s a good idea, Jim? You really want both you and Linda going to prison? Who’s going to take care of your kids? You’ve seen what happens to kids in foster homes. You really want that to happen to your kids? Now sit your fat ass down and wait for my uncle to get here.”

  Buck sat down in a recliner and watched the young tweaker scratching at the scabby skin on his neck. He still held the gun in his hand and he seemed to intend to aim it at Buck, but his hand shook so hard that it was pointing all over the room. Jason seemed so high that Buck wasn’t sure he knew exactly what was going on. Not that it mattered; the Goulds had Buck by his balls.

  Jason fidgeted with the gun for a few moments, then returned it to the inside-the-waistband holster and returned to drinking his whisky. Buck figured he might as well have a drink himself and went to the liquor cabinet. When he picked up the bottle of Johnnie Walker, Jason said, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Getting a drink.”

  “Not from that bottle. No fucking way. You can drink from the Jameson.” Buck put the bottle down and picked up the bottle of Jameson that sat on the counter. He didn’t even bother with a glass; he took the whole bottle and sat back down in the recliner.

  “Goddamn, look at you,” Jason said. “You are one fat fuck. What the hell is a woman like Linda doing with a man like you?”

  “And you’re a damned drug addict,” Buck said. “What’s she doing with either of us?”

  “She doesn’t seem too particular about who she’s with,” Jason said. “She’ll go out with just about anyone who’s got a twenty-dollar bill when she’s having a bad night at the casino.” If the younger Gould hadn’t been high on meth, he’d have seen that he was pushing Buck to the man’s breaking point, but he
wasn’t known for his good judgment even during the rare moments when he was sober. All Jason saw was a fat man drinking whiskey straight from the bottle so he kept right on talking.

  “She’s had more pricks in her than a porcupine.”

  Buck kept listening and drinking, until he was no longer listening and only drinking. He kept drinking until he lifted the bottle and nothing more came out. He looked at the scrawny, scab-faced tweaker sitting across from him and saw his mouth moving, but he heard nothing except the rushing of blood in his head.

  He’d known that Linda had a gambling problem, but he never knew the extent. He hadn’t known she was stealing drugs from the evidence room, and he had no idea that she’d been unfaithful to him. He knew she stayed out late at the casino, but he hadn’t wanted to think about that too much. He preferred to believe her when she told him she’d had a little too much to drink and had stayed with a friend.

  He supposed he really had known, maybe not the full magnitude of what was going on, but at least that something wasn’t right. He just preferred to believe Linda because he’d been too afraid to confront his deepest suspicions. He was afraid he didn’t have the strength to handle it, and he was probably right. Now that he knew the truth, it was more than he could take.

  He turned the bottle of whiskey upside down and a few drops dribbled on the floor. He dropped the bottle, walked over to the liquor cabinet and picked up the bottle of Johnnie Walker.

  “I told you not to drink from that bottle,” Jason said. “Put it down.”

  Buck just looked at him and took a pull from the bottle. The young man stood up and walked toward the sheriff, who responded with another drink of whisky.

  “I said put it down, you fat fuck.”

  Buck put the bottle down and Jason relaxed. He turned to go sit down, but before he’d reached the couch, Buck had drawn his sidearm. “Jason,” he said.

  “What?” The young man turned and when he saw the gun pointed at his face his mouth went slack and his jaw dropped to his chest. Before Jason could utter a sound, Buck squeezed the trigger and a crater appeared in the center of the man’s forehead. When Jason fell to the floor, the sheriff admired the symmetrical pattern of sprayed brains and blood on the wall behind where Jason had been standing. He took the bottle and sat back down in the recliner. He drank the remaining whisky in the bottle, then put his service pistol in his own mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Trotters, North Dakota

  JOZEF KOLODZIEJ, the man in charge of the Build & Berg mercenaries hired by Ag Con, winced as the Chinese commander chewed him out in Kolodziej’s native Polish. Liang spoke perfect Polish, with very little hint of an accent. Liang’s command of the language was strong enough to call Kolodziej a matkojebca, which, roughly translated, suggested Kolodziej had carnal knowledge of his own mother.

  Under normal circumstances Kolodziej would not have let anyone abuse him in that manner, but in this case there was nothing he could say in his own defense. He had lost over twenty-five percent of his men, apparently at the hands of a single man and a veterinarian. Twice he had sent what should have been overwhelming forces after the pair, and twice those entire forces had been wiped out. Liang had every reason to doubt the man’s competence, so Kolodziej suffered the verbal assault from the man in silence.

  “We are spending a great deal of money to procure protection from Build & Berg,” Liang said. “And we expect performance commensurate with your fees.” The colonel stopped short of threatening Kolodziej or B&B. Both men knew that such threats would be empty, since Ag Con’s master plan was too far along to make wholesale changes at this point. Kolodziej didn’t know what that plan was, but he hadn’t been assigned to find out. His job was simply to provide the brute force that Ag Con needed.

  Liang was not going to fire B&B, but that didn’t mean Kolodziej would escape unscathed once his superiors at B&B learned of his men’s multiple failures in capturing the tall American whom Ag Con had deemed a threat. Build & Berg had rewarded him handsomely for services rendered in the past, but he’d seen them deal with failure on the harshest possible terms. A B&B severance package didn’t consist of several months’ worth of wages—it consisted of the disappearance of the person being severed.

  When Liang finished berating Kolodziej, the man retired to his office to try to find some information on his mysterious American opponent. He had contacts in various European intelligence organizations, and it was time to call in some favors. His life just might depend on it.

  KEMP PILOTED the Rhino down an ATV trail used by local ranchers to monitor their herds. Four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles had almost entirely replaced horses as the mount of choice for ranchers, though the ranchers who had grazing land mixed in among the roughest terrain still had to rely on horses to reach some of their herds. Kemp once again demonstrated her tactical acumen by using these existing trails; there was no way that the B&B mercs would be able to distinguish their tire tracks from the dozens of other identical tracks pounded into the path.

  Kemp had loaded the utility box on the back of the ATV with camping gear, food, water and ammo. He trusted her to find a safe hiding place in the vast grasslands, and they had enough supplies to hide out practically indefinitely. But hiding wasn’t going to rescue Grevoy or Bowman, and it wasn’t going to help Bolan find out what Ag Con was up to. He’d need to plan some sort of an offense, but so far he’d been too busy playing defense to develop one.

  When Kemp turned onto a trail that led into a narrow pasture bordered on two sides by steep cliffs, Bolan estimated that they’d been on the trail for approximately seven miles, given the Rhino’s top speed of forty-five miles per hour and the nine minutes that had passed. At the far end of the pasture Kemp turned into a wooded draw and drove the ATV deep into the brush.

  “Help me cover this thing up,” she said and began gathering juniper branches and sage, using it to camouflage the Rhino. “I don’t know what in the hell is going on here, but these people seem adamant about finding us.”

  “How do you think they found your cabin?” Bolan asked. “Who else knew about it besides you and Bowman?”

  “No one,” Kemp said. “We never mentioned the place to anyone.”

  “Did Bowman ever bring anyone else out here?”

  “No. She’s seeing some chick from Denver. She’s never had her out here, though. I’ve never met her. I don’t even know her name. There’s no way she knows about the cabin and probably doesn’t even know Pam’s been abducted.”

  “So the only way they could have found out about the cabin is if Ms. Bowman told them.”

  “I can’t believe Pam would ever do anything to hurt me,” Kemp said.

  Bolan knew that her captors could extract whatever information they needed regardless of how stoic Bowman had been. He suspected that Kemp was well aware of this, too, but just didn’t want to think about her former lover being tortured.

  When they were finished covering the ATV, they set up a tent and covered that with brush and branches, too. They’d just finished and were putting their supplies inside the tent when Bolan’s sat phone vibrated.

  “Striker, I’m glad to hear you’re still alive,” Kurtzman said. “I have something for you about Roger’s samples. The prions he found were nasty little buggers. We’ve never seen anything like them. They can cause mad cow disease in a matter of weeks, not years. He was wrong about their being mutations, though. The samples he supplied show signs of being genetically manipulated.”

  “Do you know who did the manipulating?” Bolan asked.

  “No, but I can guess.”

  “So can I,” Bolan said. “Our Chinese friends bankrolling Ag Con. Have you found out anything more on them?”

  “Nothing certain, but I think the process of elimination indicates that they’re our culprits. And if their intent is to poison the country’s food supply, these prions will do the job. If these things get into cattle headed to the slaughterhouses, we’ll start seeing Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease hittin
g thousands, maybe millions of people within a month or two.”

  “How would they get it into the food supply?”

  “Ag Con is the biggest distributor of cattle feed in the Midwest,” Kurtzman said. “They supply most of the large-scale industrial feedlots in the country. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to spike the feed with prions.”

  “Are you certain they haven’t already done it?” Bolan asked.

  “No, but so far we haven’t seen any outbreaks of Creutzfeldt-Jakob. Our research indicates that anyone consuming meat infected with these prions would start to show symptoms within two to four weeks.”

  “Are you checking the slaughterhouses for infected cattle?”

  “We’ve got teams of scientists posing as FDA inspectors hitting the slaughterhouses as we speak, but that’s like hauling water in a wicker basket.”

  “Have you got contingency plans in place in case this stuff hits the food supply?”

  “Hal’s been keeping the President briefed about the situation, but he doesn’t want to put a ban on beef unless he absolutely has to.” Kurtzman was referring to Hal Brognola. “The President thinks that banning the sale of beef would send the rural economy into a tailspin from which it might never recover. With all of the other economic challenges the country’s currently facing, that would be enough to send our entire economic system into total collapse.”

  “He’s probably right, but if this stuff gets out, he might have to choose between total economic collapse and the deaths of millions of people.”

  “Either way,” Kurtzman said, “Ag Con wins. Unless you can shut down Ag Con before they get the chance to spike the feed supply with the prions.”

  “That’s the third option, but that’s not looking like a simple job at the moment. I could use a little help. What else have you got for me?” Bolan asked.

  “The head of the Build & Berg operations at Ag Con is a man named Jozef Kolodziej.”