Читать книгу: «Dual Action», страница 2
There was only one way to find out.
He had to capture one alive and make him squeal.
“Stay sharp!” he ordered his assembled soldiers. “Cover every corner of the camp. We need—”
Across the compound, at the motor pool, an engine growled and headlights blazed. Before Grundy could snap out a fresh command, one of their jeeps was off and racing toward the gate.
THE JEEP was military surplus, which required no key. Bolan needed a ram to breach the gate, and speed to give him an advantage on Camp Yahweh’s infantry. A mile would do it, if he got that far. He could discard the stolen wheels, then, and proceed on foot to reach his own.
But first, he had to make it out of camp alive.
About the time that his pursuers finished ransacking the CP hut, he slid into the driver’s seat, reviewed the world’s simplest controls and gunned the jeep to life. There was no point in running dark, since they could see him by the light of leaping flames in any case, so Bolan used the high beams as offensive weapons, blinding any troops who stood directly in his path.
There weren’t that many of them. Most had rushed to join their CO at his quarters, or else fanned out to police the camp’s perimeter. Of the dependents in Camp Yahweh, the wives and children of the “Master Race” commandos, Bolan had seen nothing yet and hoped to keep it that way. They were not civilians in the strictest sense, having withdrawn from civilized society to live a racist pipe dream fraught with danger, but he didn’t want them in his line of fire, if it could be avoided.
Wherever they were hiding, none of them emerged as Bolan made his short run toward the gate. He gunned the jeep to its top speed, aimed at the double gates a hundred yards downrange. Two guards were stationed there, and by the time he’d covered half the distance to his target, others were arriving, racing to assist their comrades.
Others still were firing from behind him, peppering the jeep with semiauto fire that struck like ringing hammer blows. A hollow thunk told Bolan that one round had drilled the gas can mounted on the tailgate, but he knew he had fuel enough to get where he was going, and the gunmen would need tracer rounds to set the sloshing gasoline on fire.
Racing across the open camp, he swerved the jeep from side to side, ducking as low as possible while still maintaining visibility across the dashboard. By the time he’d covered fifty yards, the windshield was a pile of pebbled safety glass in Bolan’s lap and strewed around his feet. Sparks flew from glancing bullet strikes, while solid hits drilled through the fenders, flaking paint in perfect circles.
Thirty yards.
The soldiers on the gate were firing at him now, so Bolan aimed his autocarbine through the empty windshield frame and held down the trigger, sweeping its muzzle back and forth in short arcs, left and right. The Colt Commando’s 30-round magazine emptied in less than three seconds, but it lasted long enough to sweep the resistance from the gate and scatter bodies in Bolan’s path. One thumped beneath the tires before the Jeep hit the chain-link gates and powered through.
Behind him, gunfire stuttered on for several seconds, but Bolan quickly killed the headlights and robbed them of their target. It was open country for another hundred yards or so, before he hit tall grass approaching spotty woods. Beyond that point, he had to risk the low beams as he sought a winding path around and through the trees.
Pursuit was possible, since Bolan hadn’t taken time to disable the other vehicles in camp, but it would take some time to organize, and he would see the headlights coming. By the time they found the abandoned jeep, Bolan would’ve found his way on foot back to the rental car he’d stashed a mile due north of Camp Yahweh.
If any of them followed Bolan that far, it would be their last mistake.
He found a place to park, then changed his mind and pushed the vehicle into a ravine with water rippling somewhere near the bottom. There was no point making its retrieval easy on the enemy, he thought. At that point, leaving empty-handed, any inconvenience he could cause was a victory of sorts.
And Bolan wasn’t finished with the Aryan Resistance Movement yet.
CampYahweh hadn’t yielded what he hoped to find, but there were other places he could look, people he could interrogate.
He wasn’t giving up.
The cost of failure was too high, in terms of human lives and suffering.
When Bolan’s job was done, the enemy would know it.
Those, that was, who’d managed to survive.
2
Two days earlier
A coded-access steel door barred them from the War Room at Stony Man Farm. Barbara Price keyed in her access code, then crossed the threshold as the heavy door slid open. Mack Bolan followed, heard the door shut behind him as he scanned the conference table for familiar faces.
Hal Brognola sat at the head of the table, flanked by Aaron Kurtzman in a wheelchair on his left, two empty chairs immediately on his right for Price and Bolan. Next to Kurtzman, facing one of the empties, sat Huntington Wethers, an African/American cybernetics specialist who’d been lured to the Farm team from a full professorship at Berkeley.
Bolan nodded all around in lieu of handshakes, took his seat and answered the usual small talk about his flight. Even with the chitchat still in progress, he could see Brognola stewing, anxious to be on about the business that had brought them all together.
“We’ve been saddled with a problem,” Brognola began, as if the team had ever been assembled to receive good news.
“I’m listening,” Bolan replied.
“Maybe you heard about the tank incident in Baghdad a few months ago?”
Bolan frowned. “Specifics?”
“An Abrams tank was on routine patrol when it was hit by something that burned through the side skirts and armor on one side, grazed the gunner’s flack jacket and sliced through the back of his seat, then drilled a pencil-sized hole almost two inches deep into the four-inch armor on the turret’s other side. No projectile was recovered. Officially, the incident remains unexplained.”
“And unofficially?” Bolan asked.
“The Pentagon’s as worried as hell. They don’t know what they’re dealing with, who’s got it, how many are out there—in short, they don’t know a damned thing.”
“A secret weapon,” Bolan said. “Each war produces innovations and surprises. Put the SEALs or Special Forces on it. Shake things up. They’ll find a guy who knows a guy and track it down.”
“No luck with that so far,” Kurtzman said. “Top priority or otherwise, they’re pumping dry holes over there.”
“One logical alternative,” Bolan replied, “is a defective weapon of some kind. Guerrillas mix and match. Sometimes they fabricate to meet their needs. New weapons frequently have unpredictable results when they’re first used in combat. Maybe your hotshot was a mistake, and they’ve worked out the bugs.”
“We don’t think so,” Brognola said.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s surfaced in the States.”
Bolan leaned forward in his chair. “Say what?”
“On Wednesday morning, in Ohio,” the big Fed confirmed. “There’s no mistake.”
“Go on.”
“Somebody hit an armored truck en route from Dayton to Columbus, carrying 65 million dollars. Somebody fired twice through the back doors with the supergun—whatever. Cooked the guard back there and spooked the driver, so he rolled it. After that, they used conventional C-4 to pop the doors, iced the witnesses, then made off with the cash.”
“That’s all we have?” Bolan asked.
“Not quite,” Brognola said. “The guards up front got off a radio alarm about the hit. An old gray van, they said, and ‘something weird,’ which pretty much describes the supergun. A couple of state troopers saw the van and started a pursuit.”
“I’m guessing that they didn’t catch it,” Bolan said.
“You’re right. The fugitives lit up a gasoline truck, killed the driver, forced the troopers off the highway, set the fields on fire.”
“The troopers?” Bolan asked.
“One of them’s in a Cincinnati burn ward as we speak. The other didn’t make it.”
“What about the van?”
“Stolen out of St. Louis two weeks earlier,” Brognola said. “Painted and overhauled. They torched it outside Louisville, Kentucky. Wiped out anything forensically significant, but they left stolen license plates from Little Rock, and we could still see how they modified the van inside.”
“Is that significant?” Bolan asked.
“Absolutely,” Wethers interjected. “First, they built a swivel unit where the backseat used to be, then ditched the shotgun seat and fixed the windshield so the right-hand side would lower on a hinge.”
“To fire the supergun,” Bolan said.
“In our estimation, yes. With the arrangement we discovered, they could aim it fore or aft. They made it mobile, and it served them well.”
“Too bad we don’t know who they are,” Bolan remarked.
“I just might have a lead on that,” Brognola said. “It isn’t definite, by any means, but—”
“Give me what you have,” the Executioner replied.
“How much do you know about Christian Identity?” Brognola asked.
“A neo-Nazi version of King James. The Nordic tribes of Israel. Jews are demons, nonwhites are mud people, the usual racist garbage.”
“That’s it, in a nutshell,” Brognola said, “with the emphasis on nuts. It used to be the creed of choice with white supremacists until the 1990s, when a lot of them turned Odinist to claim their Viking roots. The hard core hanging with Identity is more extreme than ever now, maybe to balance what they lost in numbers.”
“If you want to call that balanced,” Wethers said.
“In any case,” Brognola said, forging ahead, “we’ve got a clique of suspects who line up with the events in question geographically. Are you familiar with an outfit called the Aryan Resistance Movement?”
“Not offhand,” Bolan replied.
“Aaron?”
Kurtzman keyed a button from his chair, and Bolan watched a screen descend behind Brognola. From the far wall opposite, a slide projector hummed to life, projecting a map of the central U.S. on the screen. Brognola half turned in his chair to eye the map, as he continued speaking.
“They’re a neo-Nazi outfit, as you might imagine from the name. Still clinging to Identity theology, against the far-right trend. They have a compound here.” He pointed to the northeastern corner of Arkansas with an infrared beam. “You’ll find their background information in the file I brought you, but to summarize, they started in Missouri, then moved south, and they’ve been getting more extreme—more militant—as time goes by. Nonsense about the call to topple ZOG, and so on.”
“That’s the Zionist Occupation Government,’” Barbara Price reminded him. “Otherwise known as the U.S. of A.”
Bolan nodded, familiar with the term from other contacts on the fascist fringe. He waited for Brognola to continue.
“Anyway,” Brognola said, “geography.” The pointer danced across the broad projected map as he continued. “Here we’ve got the ARM, holed up in what they call Camp Yahweh. A hundred miles to the southwest is Little Rock, source of the stolen license plates. Due north, St. Louis, where the movement got its start—”
“And where the van was stolen,” Bolan finished for him.
“Right, you are. Ohio, where they made the hit on Wednesday, is a straight shot, more or less, from northern Arkansas along the interstates. And coming back, there’s Louisville. Stop by and torch the van that’s served its purpose.”
“It’s suggestive,” Bolan said, “but it’s also circumstantial.”
“Granted, but we’re looking for a weapon, not preparing for a trial.”
“Okay,” Bolan replied. “Convince me.”
“Right. For starters, three known members of the ARM were once associated with the Phineas Priesthood and the Aryan Republican Army.”
Both of those groups, Bolan knew, had robbed banks and armored cars across the United States in the 1990s to finance a scheme they liked to call Racial Holy War. Some members had been prosecuted and were serving time, but others wriggled through the nets for want of solid evidence connecting them to a specific crime. Broader sedition charges filed against both groups had been dismissed on grounds that anyone in the U.S. was free to advocate destruction of the government, as long as they made no attempt to pull it off.
“All right, we’re closer,” Bolan said.
“It’s apparent from the new group’s publications that they idolize the Phineans and ARA,” Brognola added, “but their straight-up heroes are Bob Mathews and The Order.”
In the early 1980s The Order—also called the Silent Brotherhood—had blazed a path of mayhem across the Pacific Northwest. Its membership was never more than twenty-five or thirty diehards, but the group had declared war on “Red America” and financed its campaign with a series of daring armed robberies that netted several million dollars from banks and Brinks trucks.
“You’re looking for a blueprint,” Bolan said.
“Already found it,” Brognola replied. “It’s right there in The Turner Diaries.”
Bolan nodded, frowning. While he hadn’t read the novel, self-published in 1978 by a former physics professor turned Nazi guru for a pack of dim-witted disciples, Bolan knew the basic plot: America, enslaved by “ZOG,” is rescued from the brink of race-mixing and social chaos by a band of vigilantes called The Order, who rob banks, hang “race traitors” and finally demolish Congress with a huge truck bomb. The Diaries had inspired a host of homegrown terrorists over the past quarter century, from Mathews and the real-life Order to various Klansmen, militias and the Oklahoma City bomber.
Playing the devil’s advocate, Bolan noted the obvious. “They’re not the only bunch of redneck psychopaths who have the Diaries memorized. I’m guessing you could point to six or seven other groups right now, within the same half-dozen states.”
“You’re right again. I could. But only one of them has been in touch with this guy. Aaron?”
On the screen, a grinning face replaced the map. The man was bearded, sunburned, appearing to be an Arab. He looked vaguely familiar to Bolan.
“Wadi Amal bin Sadr,” Brognola declared. “He’s an Iraqi Shiite cleric, presently in exile. We’ve had sightings from Tehran to Paris, but the only one confirmed so far was here.”
The picture changed again. This time, the man stood with two Caucasian males. Flat desert and a small adobe building could be seen in the background. All of them were smiling for the camera, apparently delighted to be there.
“Wadi again,” Brognola said, aiming his pointer at the second face in line. “This one is Curt Walgren, self-styled supreme commander of the ARM, and on his left is Barry James, his second in command.”
They didn’t look like much to Bolan, though they could’ve been a pair of Gulf War veterans in their desert camouflage fatigues. Bush hats concealed what might have been evidence of skinhead sympathies, or simply military-style buzz cuts. They had no visible tattoos, and sunglasses concealed their eyes. About all he could judge from the group photo was their strong, white teeth.
“When did they meet?” Bolan asked.
“This was taken in October,” Brognola replied, “outside of Ciudad Juarez. That’s just across the Tex-Mex border from El Paso.”
“Been there,” Bolan said.
“Oh, right.”
“Stop me if I’m mistaken, now,” Bolan began. “Our theory is that Sadr passed the supergun along to these yahoos, so they could—what? Rob armored cars? Raise hell at random in the States?”
“We can’t ask Sadr,” Brognola answered. “Rumor is the Israelis vaporized him with a rocket attack in Jordan, last week, but I doubt that we’ll ever confirm it. Motive-wise, there’s not much difference between his sect and what passes for Christianity inside the ARM. They both hate Israel and believe that Jews are children of the devil. Both regard the U.S. government as a Satanic instrument. Walgren would spit on Sadr for the color of his skin, but if the Arab helps him hit the Jews, he’d play along. You know the old saying—‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”
Bolan nodded. “It’s logical enough,” he said. “You think they’ve got the weapon stashed at their compound inArkansas?”
“When we connect the dots, that’s where they lead.”
“No inside information, though?”
The man from Justice shook his head. “So far, the ARM has been impervious to infiltration. Strict security, including polygraphs for all prospective members and alleged initiation ceremonies that would compromise a law-enforcement officer.”
“Participation in some criminal activity,” Brognola said. “The rumors range from strong-arm robbery to murder.”
“No defectors? Rejects who tried out but didn’t make the cut?”
“None we’re aware of,” Price replied. “It makes us…curious.”
“Okay,” Bolan said, nodding toward the fat manila folder resting on the table. “I’d better read that file.”
BROGNOLA HAD FLOWN back to Washington after the briefing, leaving Barbara Price and her team at Stony Man to answer any questions Bolan had after he’d read the dossier on Walgren and the ARM.
Bolan had one question that he wouldn’t have asked Brognola, in any case. “What do you really think about this mission, Barb?”
She frowned and told him, “Everybody from the Pentagon to Pennsylvania Avenue has been looking for this supergun. It wasn’t high priority while they were looking in Baghdad, but now someone has brought the war home to the States. Right now, the ARM is what we’ve got, in terms of leads. It’s something, and we need to run it down.”
“I see the group’s suspected in a string of cases, going back to its foundation, in Missouri.”
“Right.” She nodded. “Stickups in the early days. Some bombings—an abortion clinic, gay bars, a Missouri synagogue. Some deaths and disappearances. No charges ever stuck.”
In fact, as Bolan knew, few charges had been filed. Two members of the ARM had been indicted for the synagogue attack, but jurors had acquitted them after a witness changed her testimony. Several deaths and disappearances had been connected to the group—including the peculiar “suicide” of Walgren’s predecessor, hanged with hands duct-taped behind his back—but no indictments had been filed.
“Could be a hornet’s nest,” he said, “or a wild-goose chase.”
“You don’t like to waste the time.”
“It’s not a waste if it pays off. But I’d feel better if we had a pair of eyes inside.”
“The Bureau tried, back in the day,” she said.
He’d seen that in the file. One of the missing persons theoretically connected to the ARM had been an FBI informant who dropped out of sight soon after he applied for membership. Headquarters still suspected Walgren’s people had disposed of him, but they had never found the body, and their spy had also irritated heavy hitters from at least two other far-right paramilitary groups along the way. His death could be attributed to any of those enemies.
No evidence, no case.
“I guess there’s only one way to find out,” the warrior said at last.
“When are you heading out?” she asked.
“First thing tomorrow. Have a look around the place tomorrow night, then pop in for a visit the day after.”
“What’s Plan B, if you don’t find the supergun?”
“I’ve got some names and addresses,” Bolan said. “If I can’t grab someone from the compound for a chat, I’ll work my way around the circuit. It’s a small world, on the fringe.”
“Still easy to get lost in,” Price said.
“I’ll light a candle,” Bolan told her. “Maybe leave a trail of bread crumbs.”
“Just so you come back.”
“That’s always in the plan.”
She didn’t tell him what they both already knew, that best-laid plans often went sour during life-or-death engagements with the enemy. She didn’t have to say it, since that message was tattooed on Bolan’s soul, and on her own.
“Tomorrow early, then,” she said.
“The proverbial crack of dawn. I’ve got a flight out of Fort Pickett at seven o’clock, to Camp Robinson outside North Little Rock.”
“You need your rest, then.”
Bolan shrugged. “I don’t mind sleeping in the air.”
“I think you ought to be in bed.”
His smile was cautious. “Do you want to go upstairs?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
