Toxic Terrain

by Don Pendleton

  “The name doesn’t ring a bell. I’ve encountered him before?”

  “No, but you have had a run-in with one of his associates—Florjan Adamczyk.”

  “Anything else?” Bolan asked.

  “Yeah, we think we may have located a likely destination for the helicopters you saw taking Roger and Bowman away from the Ag Con compound. We didn’t find out anything from satellite surveillance, but we checked the records and Ag Con owns a second facility in the Killdeer Mountains. I’ll text you the GPS coordinates.”

  While he spoke with Kurtzman, Bolan watched Kemp remove her shirt, pour some water in a basin and begin washing off the dust and grime from the trail. When he finished talking to Kurtzman, he went over and joined her.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “We wait for dark,” he said.

  “Then what?” she asked.

  “How far are we from the Killdeer Mountains?”

  “About twenty miles, if we take the highway, but that probably wouldn’t be the smartest route for us to take.”

  “Probably not,” the soldier said. “Are there back routes?”

  “I can get us there without taking any improved roads,” Kemp said, “but it will take us at least two hours. When do you want to go?”

  “Not until after dark,” Bolan said.

  CHEN WAS GROWING tired of chasing Cooper around the state. The hunt was depleting his resources. Worse yet, it was distracting him from the matter at hand. The team developing the prions felt it was nearly ready to put its plans into motion, but with this latest intrusion Chen worried the team may be running out of time and would have to speed up its schedule. That would not be a simple task. The timing of the product had to be perfected. If the prions caused the cattle to become sick before they reached the slaughterhouse, the illness would be detected and the infected meat wouldn’t reach the food supply. And if the infection didn’t take hold quickly enough, the meat wouldn’t be infected when it reached the food supply.

  Chen knew that even if they didn’t time everything just right, simply the threat of a contaminated food supply may be enough to collapse the economy of the Midwest, and in turn bring down the entire country’s economy. The entire corrupt capitalistic system was so fragile that if the U.S. economy went down, the economy of the entire world would implode with it. Not since the decadent final days of ancient Rome had one empire spread its tentacles over such a large percentage of the world’s population. Seamstresses in Pakistan, laborers in Vietnam, even prisoners in Chinese prisons depended on the U.S. economy to provide for their well-being. These fools needed to see the inherent weakness of the basket in which they’d placed all of their eggs.

  The world would see the inequalities and corruption inherent in capitalism when Chen and his comrades brought the U.S. economy to its knees. This extreme action shouldn’t have been necessary. The U.S. economy would have imploded years ago if China hadn’t been propping up the U.S. government for much of the past decade with low-interest loans.

  Chen cursed the misguided leaders of his country. It was bad enough that they provided the funding that allowed the decadent Americans to continue to prosper, but even more than that Chen resented the fact that China had increasingly adopted the corrupt capitalistic economic philosophy of the Americans. He felt fortunate to have hooked up with like-minded individuals who were in a position to reverse the direction his country had taken. Once their plan succeeded, the people of the world would turn their back on capitalism and once again embrace socialism.

  Chen appreciated the irony of the fact that he and his comrades were using capitalism—the very tool they despised—to destroy the American economy. It was their success in the business world that provided the funding to purchase Agricultural Conglomerates. The fact that the Americans had allowed a foreign country to purchase a U.S. corporation that controlled a vast portion of the U.S. food supply provided testimony to the greed inherent in a capitalistic system. The Americans placed more value on the dollars the Chinese provided than on keeping the country’s citizens safe and its society secure. At least China would never allow the Americans to purchase a Chinese corporation that controlled the single largest percentage of the Chinese food supply.

  There had been some uproar about a group of Chinese investors purchasing Ag Con, but the naysayers had been written off as isolationists who failed to grasp the global nature of the U.S. economy. The business community approved of the sale, and the U.S. Congress had allowed the sale without any restrictions whatsoever.

  Chen and his colleagues had already been working to develop a fast-acting prion even before the sale was approved. Once they had control of Ag Con, all the pieces had been put in place, and it was only a matter of perfecting the prion—something his team felt it had very nearly accomplished. The team had been in the process of testing on an isolated herd when the extension agent and the veterinarian had blundered onto the scene.

  That was the first time something had not gone completely according to their plans. When Cooper had shown up a couple of days later, the situation escalated. They had lost two full days battling one man and one woman.

  After the botched attack on the secluded cottage in the Badlands, Cooper and Kemp had disappeared. Liang’s men had scoured the countryside searching for any sign of them, but they appeared to have vanished. Liang had sent both Ag Con helicopters out to hunt for them, but they had found nothing. Chen had given Liang until dark to continue the search. After that he was to pull back and use all of his forces to protect the perimeters of both Ag Con facilities.

  Chen knew that the time for testing was over. The window for implementing their plans was slamming shut. It was time for action. He dialed the number of the Killdeer Mountain lab. “Prepare to disperse the prions,” he ordered.

  Watford City, North Dakota

  GORDON GOULD WANTED nothing more than to kill the goddamned son of a bitch Chen and every one of his goons. No one ordered Gordon Gould around like a house servant. “Go now, please,” the little weasel had said.

  But when all was said and done, Gould had done as he was told. He also realized that he’d really become a simple houseboy for these people, quite willingly. When Chen had offered Gould $10 million for his services, he would have given the man a happy ending if he had so desired. Ten million dollars would make all of Gould’s wildest fantasies reality. It might even be enough to buy a seat in the U.S. Senate. It would be like college, he mused. When Gould was attending the University of North Dakota, he’d bought himself the presidency of the student body simply by purchasing pizza for everyone living in the dorms. That had cost him a little more than a grand.

  When Ag Con had opened their facilities in the western part of the state, it seemed like the best thing that had ever happened to Gould. Up until a couple of days ago, Chen and his men had never asked anything of Gould that amounted to more than just greasing a few political wheels. That was the sort of thing Gould did every day in his capacity as president of the North Dakota Cattle Raisers’ Association. That included blackmailing Sheriff Buck, but Gould had done the same or worse to several ranchers who opposed the association’s programs.

  He’d known that Linda was stealing meth from the evidence locker. He knew that because he’d bought it from her, through Jason, of course. He knew everything there was to know about meth in that part of the state because he manufactured most of it. He had a ranch up in Williston where he had a crew of Mexican illegal immigrants cooking it up. He’d manufacture the drug, and his partner, and first cousin, Dan Gould would distribute it. Dan owned several car dealerships in the western part of the state. Once a week Dan and his crew would fly down to Minneapolis to attend the auto auctions. His guys would drive the cars Dan bought back to western North Dakota and Dan would then sell them on his lots. What few people besides Gould knew was that Dan got the money to buy the cars by selling the meth that Gould manufactured. It was a lucrative business, but it was nothing compared to the money Gould was earn
ing from Ag Con.

  As Gould drove home from the vet clinic, he wished he’d have been satisfied with the money he earned from his business interests, legitimate and nonlegitimate. It was more than just being berated by the Chinese son of a bitch. Gould had a bad feeling about what was happening. Before Cooper showed up, the Chinese seemed to have everything under control, but the tall stranger had shown him that Ag Con was not omnipotent, despite its army of hired thugs. For the first time, Gould started to worry that he might not have cast his lot with the winning team.

  The bad feelings had intensified when he returned to his house. The sheriff’s car was still out front, but there were no signs of life inside. He went in but still heard nothing, which was odd, since his speed-freak nephew rarely shut his mouth—and he never slept.

  “Is anyone here?” he shouted, but received no answer.

  He needed a drink, so he headed to the liquor cabinet in his family room. The first thing he saw when he entered the room was the sheriff’s bloated carcass sprawled on his recliner, the back half of his head sprayed across the carpet. He looked over at the other side of the room and saw Jason’s body crumpled on the floor in a pool of coagulated blood.

  Then he looked on the floor and saw the empty bottle. “Aw shit,” he said, “not the Blue Label.” He picked up the bottle—definitely empty. He rummaged around in the liquor cabinet and finally produced a bottle of bourbon. He put some ice in a tumbler and poured a generous helping of the whiskey into the glass. He needed a drink badly.

  He sipped the bourbon and looked at the carnage in the room. For the second time that day he had memories of his time in Vietnam. He’d been a tunnel rat, and he thought he’d seen it all in the time he spent crawling through those tunnels, sometimes over the remains of close friends who’d been blown to bits by bunker-buster bombs, but damned if this wasn’t turning out to be worse.

  Not that he was heartbroken over Jason dying. He took his nephew under his wing after the boy’s father, Gordon’s younger brother, had been killed in a car crash. He felt responsible for his brother’s death—he’d gotten him drunk the night he was killed—so he felt obliged to take care of the boy. Since the kid’s mother had died of lung cancer a couple years earlier, Gordon and Dan were the only family members Jason had left.

  Looking back, Gordon had thought it was a nice touch, getting that video of Linda giving Jason head in the truck. He thought it would soften up the sheriff and make it easier to work with him, but apparently he’d gone too far. He had serious trouble on his hands. All those Build & Berg men that Cooper had been slaughtering were easy enough to deal with. Whatever friends and family they had were half a world away and had no idea their relatives were dying in the barren wastelands of western North Dakota. Ag Con could just dig a ditch and bury them, and no one would ever come looking for them. They probably wouldn’t be seen again until years later when some archaeologist came hunting for dinosaur bones.

  Jason wasn’t much of a problem either. He had run with a rough crowd, and this wouldn’t be the first time one of them turned up with a bullet through his head.

  The sheriff was a horse of a different color. Even though he’d clearly shot himself, there was bound to be some sort of investigation. That meant that state law-enforcement agents would come around asking questions Gould really didn’t want them to ask. They might even bring in the Feds. If only Buck had shot himself in his own damned car instead of in Gould’s family room. Inconsiderate bastard, he thought.

  Gould finished his bourbon and dialed a number on his cell phone.

  “What is it?” Chen asked over the line.

  “I got a problem with the sheriff.”

  “You told me you’d handle the sheriff,” Chen said.

  “Well, that just turned into a little bit more of a problem then I’d imagined.”

  “Is he refusing to fill out the report as I requested?” Chen asked.

  “He ain’t going to be filling out too many reports from here on out. He shot himself in the head.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Most certainly,” Gould said, looking at the corpse, which was already starting to swell up.

  “How is that a problem?”

  “He’s dead in the middle of my family room.”

  “Then let me rephrase my question—how is that my problem?”

  “Because there’s bound to be an investigation. The powers that be tend to get all bent out of shape when a cop dies, even a fat moron like Jim Buck.”

  “It seems to me that you would be wise to remove the body from your house then,” Chen said.

  “I was hoping to get a little help with that.”

  “All my men are busy at the moment,” Chen said. “I suggest you utilize other resources. Your nephew can help you.”

  “About that,” Gould said. “It appears Sheriff Buck shot Jason just before he shot himself.”

  “I see,” Chen said. The connection remained silent for a moment and Gould was afraid he’d lost the call, but just as he was about to hang up and redial Chen said, “I understand the gravity of the situation, but we really cannot spare any men at the moment. Besides, we are paying you handsomely to handle the sheriff. So handle him. Perhaps you should enlist the aid of your partner in the drug business, the car salesman.”

  5

  Kolodziej’s request for intel on Matt Cooper had hit a stone wall. There was little of interest to be found. The leader of B&B knew he was on thin ice with his superiors. He didn’t know exactly what the price for failure would be, since he’d never failed yet—he didn’t want to find out now. Liang had split his forces into four-man squads, and they were beating the sagebrush looking for Cooper and Kemp. Kolodziej’s men were doing the same, though he preferred to keep his people in larger squads. He’d seen what Cooper and Kemp could do to twenty men, so he wouldn’t risk sending his men out in groups smaller than ten.

  Kolodziej had selected his nine best people for his personal team. Usually Kolodziej didn’t go into the field, but the circumstances had evolved too far away from the norm to afford him the luxury of staying behind at the Ag Con facility. He had personally recruited all the men in his squad from the ranks of the UOP, and all of them had proved themselves under fire. So far most of those who had died lacked real combat experience. Many of the mercenaries that B&B recruited were killers, but most of the people they had killed had been unarmed villagers in some remote part of the world. Large mining and oil-drilling corporations often hired B&B to remove anything and everything that stood in the way of their operations, and on occasion that included obliterating entire villages.

  But this time their prey was fighting back. Kolodziej suspected that many of the people under him had no experience with an adversary who fought back. The men he’d selected for this squad had a very different story to tell. The men in this squad weren’t simply bullies who preyed on the helpless—this was a group of trained soldiers.

  Not that it mattered, since the odds of any of the squads stumbling across Cooper and Kemp were almost infinitesimally small. It embarrassed Kolodziej to have to resort to this sort of unprofessional and unorganized search-and-destroy mission, but when it came to devising a better plan, both he and Liang were at a loss. They had been given until the end of the day to complete their task, and neither man was willing to accept failure. If they had been able to come up with a better plan, they would have gladly implemented it, but there seemed to be nothing more to do except pick the haystack apart straw by straw in search of the needle.

  With such low expectations, it came as something of a shock when he finally did catch a glimpse of the so-called needle. He and his men had been walking down a creek bed that opened into a small canyon in which about thirty head of cattle grazed on the grass along the creek. He’d signaled his men to stop while he crept ahead and scanned the area through his binoculars. On the first pass nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but on the second scan something caught his eye. It was a patch of black. Nothing in nat
ure was black—even a coal seam had a brownish tint to it if you saw it under the sun. Black indicated that a person was looking at some sort of man-made object.

  After peering at the black spot for a moment, Kolodziej could make out a couple of perfectly straight horizontal lines. Just as nothing in nature was a true black color, nothing in nature was perfectly straight. He looked at the lines and at the spot of black, and slowly he began to make out the shape of the ATV vehicle in which Cooper and Kemp had escaped. The vehicle had been camouflaged with brush and branches so well that Kolodziej had almost missed it. After studying the surrounding area, he identified a small pile of brush that likely concealed a tent. He’d found his quarry.

  Kolodziej studied the terrain and formed a plan of attack. Since there were only two people in the tent, a frontal assault should have sufficed, but his men had tried that tactic twice already, and both times it had ended in devastating failure. They needed a new plan. If they used the creek bed for concealment, his men could get to the cliff wall on the far side of the meadow and make their way toward the encampment along the cliff, where it would be impossible for Cooper and Kemp to see them approach. He’d leave a couple of sharpshooters at this end of the meadow as backup, in case they failed and Cooper and Kemp tried to get away. He quietly ordered the two sharpshooters into position and began to work his way toward the other end of the meadow with the rest of his squad. Kolodziej looked forward to the chance to redeem himself by killing the troublesome pair.

  THE SOLDIER AWOKE with a start. He wasn’t sure what had awakened him, but his instincts told him something was wrong.

  “Wake up,” he whispered to Kemp. She started to say something, but he gently placed his hand over her mouth and whispered, “Something’s not right.” He donned his holsters and other gear and carefully crept through the tent door, which was facing away from the small meadow. He was careful not to disturb the branches and brush with which they’d covered the tent.