Executioner 057 - Flesh Wounds

by Don Pendleton

  Bolan was close enough to the rendezvous to ease up on the accelerator. He had made excellent time through the Pennsylvania night.

  He could see the truck stop ahead where Hal would meet him at dawn.

  The Executioner pulled off the road at a lookout. He killed the engine and the lights, and smoked a cigarette while his brain took in the cool night and its mysterious noises. The moon was down past the ridge, shedding a shower of silver light across half of Mack's vision. There was a breeze through the tops of the big pines. For now, it felt good to rest.

  Here he could brood upon the essential loneliness of his life, and on how much he actually preferred it that way. When he had led his combat troops, Able Team and Phoenix Force, into forbidden waters off Cuba to attack the international KGB conspiracy at its most rabid, Bolan knew he was taking himself and his men beyond sanction, beyond the limits of all law, dooming each and every one of them to lives of endless danger from worldwide enemies. He knew, too, that his and his men's actions destined them to outright rejection by those who represented what was acceptable and respectable in society. Sure, it was lonely. But it was real. Their actions had made the stony men truly alive, despite the serious injuries sustained in that vicious encounter with Hydra.

  As Bolan awaited the dawn in the Pennsylvania mountains, he felt the way he had felt during the lonely mission off Cuba. He felt like the falcon that ends up soaring over a cold ocean thousands of miles from the nearest land; with nowhere to light, it must keep winging through the crisp air forever.

  Dawn rolled down the mountain in a gray mist that hung close to the piney tops.

  Bolan swung himself upright from his cat-nap position behind the wheel and saw a Company car parked to one side of the truck stop. Hal was waiting for him.

  The diner's chimney belched smoke into the fog. There were two tractor-trailer rigs in back, one running, the other with its cab curtains drawn. The diner itself was nestled in front of a curved stand of timber where the road dipped, came level, then climbed the side of the next hill. Reluctant to break the velvety quiet, Mack rolled down the empty mountain in neutral and brought his car parallel to Hal's.

  BROGNOLA STOOD ACROSS THE ROOM facing the bar, with his back to Mack. Ordinarily he was no big drinker and Bolan tensed, wondering what made his friend look inside a bottle on this particular morning.

  Hal must have felt Mack's eyes on the back of his head. He turned and said, "Let's talk in private."

  They crossed the room without speaking and sat in a booth in the corner.

  "This much you know already," Brognola began, his voice low but urgent. "The guy you've been scouring the Allegheny Mountains for is J.D. Dante. We needed photos of Dante to confirm his whereabouts and monitor his current activities, so you've been hunting him down where he was last seen. And I've been doing some hunting on my own. And I think we've both scored."

  "What's up?"

  "My hunt was for rumor and gossip and information from interrogations. Let's start with that. I have established that our boy Dante has been tagged as meeting in the United States with Fyodor Zossimov, liaison with Moscow's international terrorism desk. Zossimov would only come here for a specific arrangement. He's a technical adviser. He firebombed a synagogue in Paris, blew up a bridge in Mexico City, shrapneled a school bus in Tel Aviv. Fyodor Zossimov deals out death."

  "I'll try to thank him in person," Bolan said.

  "I hope you'll get the chance. Because right now we've got to find him."

  "Where's April?" Bolan asked.

  "April? I'm not in touch with her," Brognola said, his eyes glinting like chrome.

  Bolan felt a twist in his stomach, like a muscle knotting. "What do you mean, you're not in touch with her?"

  "Let's take it from the top, okay? It'll be clearer that way."

  "I'm listening."

  Brognola nervously shifted his weight on the seat. "Your own hunt has turned up a particular item. We do have a lead. A long shot, really."

  "This have to do with April?"

  "Yes. Her idea."

  Bolan listened, his gaze stone cold.

  "We analyzed the photos of the negs you sent back the first few days you were here in the Alleghenies. There were hundreds of faces to check."

  "Yeah, I shot a lot of pictures. Things were going well till I came across that paranoid doper in Susqua. Probably sleeping it off somewhere this morning."

  "Nope," Brognola sighed, shaking his head. "I just ran a check through the local sheriff. He went to this Grayson Strummer's cabin. Empty. Except for some bloodstains."

  "Could have been from our fight."

  "Too much blood."

  Bolan frowned. "I don't get it."

  "Me neither. And it gets worse."

  "Tell me about it."

  "Your surveillance pattern has been an extended loop, starting down around Lock Haven and moving northwest higher into the Alleghenies, then swinging back through Treetop, Pineridge, and Susqua. You took hundreds of candid shots of men fitting the vague description we've got of Dante. You even got some damn fine telephoto shots of the people on farms and living back in the woods. None of them turned out to be Dante."

  "There'd better be a 'but' in here soon."

  "But," Brognola nodded, "there was one face that we made. At least April did."

  "Whose?"

  "A man called Byron York."

  "Wait a second. That's the guy—"

  "Right. The guy Grayson Strummer wanted to take you to."

  Bolan leaned across the table, his eyes ablaze. "What's going on, Hal? Who is this guy and what's April have to do with him?"

  Brognola cleared his throat. "She knew him from college, Striker. Seems they were, uh, engaged for a short time, until Byron York went his way and April went hers. The romance ended abruptly. She was strong-willed even then, knew what she was about. Meantime, York drops out of sight, bums around campuses organizing rallies, then disappears altogether a few years ago. Until you snap this photo and April recognizes him."

  Brognola produced an 8 x 10 recon print. Bolan had taken the picture with a telephoto lens, so it was somewhat grainy. It was a shot of ten or twelve men watering their horses at a stream just a few hundred yards down a hill where Bolan had been snapping shots of a farmhouse. Bolan had clicked off a few shots of the riders and went back to focusing in on the farmhouse.

  Now he studied the proffered photo with a frown.

  Byron York had a thick gunslinger's mustache, but otherwise he was clean-shaven. His hair was close-cropped, barely an inch long all around. His face looked hard. He looked like a man living with a great change within him, or with a great loss.

  "Okay, Hal," Bolan said, looking up. "You've given me enough deep background. Now tell me where April is."

  "She went after him. Byron York."

  "You sent her out on a field assignment?"

  "I didn't send her, she sent herself," Brognola said.

  The waitress had materialized at their booth. "You boys aren't arguin' over a girl now, are you?" Bolan's hard face shifted from Brognola to a plump middle-aged woman with winged rhinestone glasses and a pink waitress cap. Her name tag declared her as Doris.

  "No reason for you to fight over a woman, boys," she continued. "'Specially you, cutie," she said to Brognola. Doris's wink dissolved some of Hal Brognola's lethal mood. "I brought'cha coffee, boys, now I'll take your orders. You can have anythin' you want, long as it's the special."

  "Ham and eggs, sunnyside," Brognola muttered.

  "The same," Mack said.

  "Well, now," intoned Doris, "two specials. Ain't that convenient." The two men smiled bleakly. Doris was obviously pleased. She leaned on the table in front of Hal and whispered, "What's long and hard, honey?" The Fed's jaw dropped. Doris laughed. "I don't know where your mind is, fella. I was talkin' bout third grade!"

  Doris left them with a chuckle to fetch their orders. Hal's smile lingered for a moment, then he turned to Bolan and held up his right hand t
o prevent Mack from speaking. "Okay, okay. Here's the goods."

  Bolan listened as Hal described how April recognized her former fiancé, the onetime SDS activist Byron York, friend to J.D. Dante. According to Hal, it made operational sense for April to go in pursuit of York.

  "Makes sense, does it?" Bolan said, his eyes as friendly as a night in Siberia.

  "Yeah, dammit, it does."

  "But something's wrong. What?"

  "We're expecting her to call," confessed Hal. "But it's just not happening."

  "How long, Hal?"

  Brognola recognized the arctic quality in the voice, from the old days when Bolan had treated him like any other inconvenient cop—a stranger at best, more likely an enemy. "How long?"

  "In another three hours she'll have been out of contact for one day."

  Bolan's eyes narrowed.

  Brognola's attention shifted to a large man in work boots strutting toward their booth. The trucker was unable to see Mack. His eyes were fixed on Brognola.

  The trucker rested his huge hands on the table in front of Hal and leaned into the Fed's face. The guy wore a nasty leer. Across the table Mack could smell the reek of chewing tobacco. He knew Hal was getting a face full of the stink. "These seats are for truckers only, son," the giant boomed. "My rig's the only one sittin' in the yard. So move."

  It had taken until this moment for Mack Bolan to realize the kind of stress Hal Brognola was under. He saw Hal's worry for April surface into anger on the Fed's face. He wondered how the trucker remained unimpressed. The outsized dumbo had just stepped into the crater of a seething volcano.

  Bolan rested his left palm on the man's right hand and anchored it to the table. "We're busy, friend," he said, in what at first appeared to be a reasonable tone. The man turned to Bolan for the first time.

  Bolan caught his eyes and waited for the true threat beneath his words to penetrate. The man's expression began to change. He realized he could not move his arm.

  "Yer jest gonna have to stop socializin' and let these boys to their breakfast." It was Doris. Mack admired the way she inserted her body between the trucker and the table. She gave her hips a little gyration and pressed herself against the trucker. Mack released the hand and its owner left, muttering.

  "Don't be bothered 'bout that one," Doris chattered at them. "He comes through here every week and causes a little stir every time. Never anythin' major, y'unnerstand—jest a fart in the overall thunderstorm." She set the platters before the two men and disappeared.

  "Everyone around here is crazy," Hal reflected to no one in particular. "Look, Mack, I didn't tell you over the phone because we needed some info from Washington, which took a while to get. I didn't want you to be working blind."

  "What was the problem?" Bolan asked.

  "The ISA again. Not the boys themselves but some file clerk. He refused to release anything about Zossimov's recent appearance in the U.S., nor would he confirm new ideological trends in Dante's crowd, including York."

  For Bolan, Brognola's statement summarized the dangers of waging a war that had become too impersonal. Yeah, Bolan had heard of the ISA. They were military—the Army's Intelligence Support Activity. They were first put together under the Carter administration to augment the efforts of both the CIA and DIA in collecting info for the ill-fated attempt to free the American hostages.

  Most recently they had been running supersensitive missions against KGB-backed terrorists in the current political hotspots of Central America. Mack Bolan knew some of those men in Nicaragua and El Salvador. They were good men. But to Bolan's knowledge, even the best men in an impersonal war were hamstrung by the strange workings of bureaucracies.

  This was not Stony Man's first foul-up involving the ISA. Weeks before, Mack Bolan had been bumped—bumped!—from an already guaranteed position in the intensive Russian immersion course at San Diego Naval Base. No satisfactory explanation had been given, but Hal Brognola had not been content to let it rest. Using his influence as presidential adviser, he had been able to pry into the military's internal affairs just enough to catch a rumor that ISA personnel had first dibs on the military's Russian courses, for now and for time to come.

  Mack Bolan could not blame or hate the brave men of the ISA. But if April Rose was harmed as a result of this recent delay, he would pay a short visit to the file clerk.

  "What did you get, Hal?" Bolan said carefully.

  "Just the location of York's camp." Hal had a slight smile for this solitary bit of good news. "Oh, yeah," he continued, "I forgot to mention, I authorized a flyover. Those cameras on the C-103s sure can do miracles. Anyway, we've got a fix on April's jeep."

  "In the camp?"

  "Yeah, but no April outside and no Dante."

  "Then this soft probe has just gone hard."

  Brognola motioned for the bill, and Doris brought it fast. "Hope to see you boys back real soon," she said. Bolan saw there was a handwritten phone number on the chit that she handed to Hal. The Fed shot her a puzzled look, but Bolan noticed he left a big tip.

  3

  The sentry spun just in time to see the moonlight skate along the thin steel blade a second before it punctured his left eye.

  His sawed-off Browning shotgun dropped from his hands as thick globs of blood squirted out into the night.

  The dying man sank to his knees.

  Bolan scampered up the incline and ducked behind a thick pine tree. He slapped the knife back into its sheath, engaged the Beretta 93-R's folding carbine stock plus modified sound suppressor and flash hider, and loaded the machine pistol with a 15-round box magazine.

  His tight nightsuit blended him into the cool darkness.

  This had not been a hasty operation, just a speedy one.

  That morning, Brognola had punched a lot of phone numbers to keep a few expensive Washington computers humming, and finally he got what he was after: data about Byron York and what the man was doing in the backwoods of Pennsylvania.

  The answer had confirmed all the worst suspicions.

  York had abandoned his previous left-wing radicalism years ago, exchanging it for a far-right radicalism.

  Instead of floating about the countercultural underground, he had become leader of a group of fanatical survivalists. Sixty-three of them, including some with families, had set up their own makeshift camp, where they lived as much as possible off the land and waited for the financial and / or military collapse of the United States.

  Bolan watched from the shadows.

  He saw that every man, woman and child walking around the camp carried a gun. At least half of them looked anxious to put their weapons to use.

  The camp itself was well planned, nestled in a clearing surrounded by thousands of towering pine trees.

  Within the clearing, a dozen or so log cabins were visible, constructed in a semicircle; another dozen were under construction to complete the circle. Those people not yet installed in cabins made do with tents of various sizes huddled within the circle.

  Directly in the center of the camp was a large firepit, alive with a pulsating fire the size of a municipal water fountain. This was no ordinary survivalist camp. This was an extreme fringe, the furthest reach of a political passion, cold in its steely determination, and crazed in its extremity.

  Bolan spotted the primer-painted new Hummer jeep that April had checked out of the Stony Man Farm's motor pool. The light from the campfire revealed the crowd of bullet holes that had chewed up the rear left fender and half of the driver's seat.

  Bolan dropped to the ground. Within seconds the nightfighter was clawing across the dirt and dried pine needles, the 93-R cradled against his chest.

  These people were about to receive their final exam in survival.

  And most of them would fail.

  4

  "I think he's gonna kill her."

  "Huh?"

  "Kill her. Byron's gonna have to kill her."

  The man made a quick slashing motion across his throat. He mouthed the
word "kill."

  The second man was wearing a Sony Walkman headset clamped over his Red Sox baseball cap. He nodded understanding and smiled. He had an M-16 slung over one shoulder and was peeling an orange in the darkness, dropping the peels on the ground as they walked.

  Mack Bolan was crouched behind a thick bush, ten yards from April's bullet-riddled jeep. Unknowingly, they blocked his approach.

  But not for long.

  "I wouldn't throw them peels around, Jeff," the first man warned. "Byron'll have your ass:* "Huh?" Jeff said.

  The first man grabbed one side of the headset and bent it away from Jeff's ear. "I said, Byron'll have your ass."

  "No way," Jeff grinned. "Not as long as he's got hers." He leered toward the cabin behind them.

  Bolan's muscles burned, hungry for movement.

  The first man leaned his XM-10 semiautomatic against the jeep and pulled out a pack of Camels, shaking one out of the pack and sticking it in his mouth. He lit it, flicked the match into the dark. It trailed smoke like a comet. "Byron'll kill her for sure," he repeated, now that Jeff had removed the headset.

  "I doubt it."

  "He killed that big ox, didn't he? Grayman."

  "Grayson. He didn't, that friend of his did. The weird dude with all the guns."

  "Still, she saw us burying the chump's body, which makes her a witness. And the rest of us accessories to murder. She can finger us."

  Jeff snorted, shoved a section of orange into his mouth. "You picked up a lot of law in prison, man."

  "Enough to know she's gotta die. And if Byron don't wanna do it, some of us will. Gladly."

  "Yeah," Jeff grinned. "I'd like to get it into her—"

  Bolan sprang from the bush, the Beretta's stock wedged against his shoulder. The two men stared at the apparition with the camouflage smears striping his face. The first guy's cigarette dropped from his mouth and bounced down the front of his shirt.