Читать книгу: «Resurgence», страница 2

CHAPTER TWO

Virginia, two days earlier

Skyline Drive ran through Shenandoah National Park, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Its course covered 105 miles from Front Royal, the northern terminus, to Rockfish Gap near Waynesboro, where it connected with Interstate 64 and U.S. Highway 50, branching off eastward to Charlottesville or westward to Staunton. Those who hadn’t seen enough trees yet could keep on rolling down the Blue Ridge Parkway for another 469 miles, to wind up in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Mack Bolan wasn’t going that far—or even to Rockfish Gap—in his rented Toyota Prius Model NHW20. He’d be leaving Skyline Drive between Luray and Skyland Lodge, taking care of ugly business on a lovely summer’s morning.

The Blue Ridge Mountains never changed. Thrust upward by cataclysmic forces some four hundred million years earlier, they comprised a rugged spine of granite laced with quartz, sedimentary limestone and metamorphosed volcanic formations.

A motorcycle passed him, doing seventy or better, north of Thornton Gap. On any other morning—any other highway— Bolan wouldn’t have considered it a threat, but trips to Stony Man Farm, home to the nation’s most covert strike teams, were different, demanding even more alertness than he normally applied to daily life.

There was a possibility, however slim verging on nonexistent, that he might have picked up a tail in D.C. or at the previous night’s stop in Falls Church, Virginia. Officially, Mack Bolan didn’t exist. He’d been dead and buried for years, his various dossiers stamped Closed, filed and forgotten after a historic flameout in Manhattan’s Central Park.

But still… He’d been out there with various personas, and in his current incarnation as Matt Cooper, he’d been rather active lately. Most of Bolan’s enemies were well and truly dead, but there were bound to be some stragglers somewhere who had glimpsed his mug in passing, on some bloody killing ground or in some seedy dive. Hopefully, no one was on his tail. He hadn’t spotted anyone as yet.

Bolan turned off Skyline Drive onto the Farm’s single-lane access road. No gates were visible at first. Approaching vehicles or pedestrians had to round a corner first, by which time they had tripped two sets of sensors and were screened from view of any other passing travelers.

Alone, where they could be examined and condemned without an audience.

As soon as Bolan saw the gate, he keyed a pager-size device that would alert the Stony Man Farm team to his arrival. They already knew that someone was approaching, from the hidden sensors, but his signal would prevent a mobilized reaction in defense.

The gate still didn’t open, though. For that, he had to nose the Prius in and power down his window, leaning out to let a hidden camera focus on his face without a layer of tinted glass obstructing biometric measurements. The Farm was far removed from Hollywood in every way—not least among them being that a new arrival couldn’t pass on looks alone.

Bolan supposed there had to be intercoms somewhere around the gate, but no one greeted him by verbal communication. Instead, the steel gate topped with razor wire rolled open on its hidden track, taking its sweet time. He waited, then drove through and saw the gate reverse direction in his rearview mirror, shutting out the world.

It felt like coming home, if any place deserving of that label still remained on Earth, but even Stony Man wasn’t invulnerable. Some years back, a rogue CIA agent had pierced the Farm’s veil of secrecy and mounted an attack that claimed the life of April Rose, Bolan’s love. That debt was paid, but it would never be forgotten.

As he rolled up to the farmhouse, Bolan saw three figures waiting for him on the porch. Hal Brognola, stationed in the middle, was his oldest living friend and overseer of the Stony Man operation, working mostly from his office at the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington. Before the current program was created, the big Fed had been a G-man, hunting Bolan nationwide, drawn slowly into grudging admiration of the Executioner’s technique and its results, then into a covert alliance that could have cost Brognola his pension, if not his life and freedom.

On Brognola’s left stood Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller. Bolan caught her smile as he stepped from the vehicle, returned it with feeling, then turned his attention to the man on Brognola’s right.

Aaron Kurtzman, nicknamed “the Bear” for his beard and hulking size, had been shot in the spine on the same night April Rose died, confined to a wheelchair since then. The chair was low-tech, as Kurtzman had refused a motorized chair.

“You’re early,” Brognola declared by way of greeting.

“Caught a tailwind,” Bolan said, and shook hands all around.

“You need to freshen up, or shall we get to work?”

“Work’s good,” the Executioner replied.

THE FARM’S WAR Room was a basement chamber, accessible by stairs or elevator. Bolan’s party used the elevator for Kurtzman’s sake, those who were ambulatory taking familiar seats around a conference table built for an even dozen. So far, within the project’s history, there’d been no need to bring in extra chairs.

Brognola sat at the head of the table, with Bolan on his right, Price on his left. Kurtzman took the other end and manned a keyboard that controlled the War Room’s lighting and its audio-visual gear. He dimmed the lights a little, leaving them bright enough to read by without eye strain, and lowered a screen from the ceiling behind Brognola’s chair. Beside him, a laptop hummed to life.

“What do you know about Albania?” Brognola asked without preamble.

“It’s on the Adriatic, in southeastern Europe,” Bolan answered. “Facing toward the heel of Italy. Russia took over after World War II, but then there was some kind of break that pushed Albania toward China in the early sixties. The communist regime collapsed along with Russia and the rest of them, in 1991 or ’92, followed by chaos and violence. It’s one of the poorest, most backward countries in Europe. Beyond that,” he added, “not much.”

“That’s better than average,” Brognola said. “But you forgot the Albanian Mafia.”

“Okay.” Bolan breathed and bided his time.

“Like every other place on Earth,” Hal said, “Albania’s had its share of criminal clans and secret societies throughout history. I know you faced one of its organizations not long ago. They operate under a loose set of laws called kanuni, as you know, similar to the Mafia’s rule of omertà, triad initiation oaths, and so on.”

The big Fed paused, then proceeded when Bolan said nothing.

“Albanian mobsters made their living from vice and black-market trading under the old Red regime. They got their first real boost during the war in Kosovo, which interrupted the flow of Turkish heroin to western Europe through Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia. Rerouting tons of smack through Albania changed the drug landscape. So much heroin passed through Veliki Trnovac that the DEA started calling it the Medellín of the Balkans. Today, the Albanian Mob has active branches in Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia and they’re giving the Cosa Nostra a run for its money in Italy. Scotland Yard’s tracking Albanian operators in the U.K. And—huge surprise—they’ve made it to the States.”

“Sounds like a problem for the FBI,” Bolan said.

“And it would be, if we lived in normal times. By which I mean pre-9/11 times, without two wars in progress overseas and half the G-men in the country eavesdropping on mosques. It’s no great secret that the Bureau shifted its priorities after the towers fell. Hell, it was in the papers and on CNN—twenty-four hundred agents removed from ‘traditional’ investigations to work the terrorist beat, while Mafia and white-collar prosecutions dropped by 40 percent or more. They’re trying to redress that imbalance today, over at the Hoover Building, but they left the barn door open too damned long.”

“So, let’s hear it,” Bolan said.

“Last week,” Brognola said, “a Coast Guard cutter on patrol along the Jersey Coast tried to stop and search an unidentified trawler. The trawler’s captain made a run for it, then set the boat on fire and bailed. He got away somehow, or maybe drowned, with whatever crew he had aboard. The boat—a shrimper stolen from New Orleans six weeks earlier—burned to the water line with nineteen people still aboard.”

Bolan frowned. “You said—”

“That the captain and crew got away. These were passengers.”

As Brognola spoke, photos of a blackened, listing boat began to scroll across the screen behind him. Soon the focus shifted to recovery of charred and shriveled corpses, while the trawler did its best to sink and disappear.

“Illegals,” Bolan said.

The big Fed nodded. “From the autopsy reports, it was eight men, seven women and four children. Cooked alive belowdecks, for the most part.”

“Jesus.”

“Maybe He was watching,” Brognola told Bolan, “but He didn’t lend a hand.”

“They were Albanians?” Bolan inquired.

“Affirmative. Against all odds, the Coast Guard saved some papers from the wheelhouse. Traced a bill for fuel back to a dock on Bergen Neck, New Jersey. Sift through the standard bs paperwork, and you’ll discover that the dock belongs to this guy.”

Bolan watched new photos march across the screen above Brognola’s shoulder. Each image depicted a man of middle age and average height, with an olive complexion and black hair going salt-and-pepper at the temples. His meaty face reminded Bolan of a clenched fist with a thick mustache glued on.

“Arben Kurti,” Brognola said. “He runs the Mob on this side of the water, moving drugs, guns, people—anything that he can milk for cash.”

“So, human trafficking,” Bolan said.

“Split two ways. He offers immigrants a new start in the States, complete with bogus green cards, if they pay enough up front. Sometimes they get here and discover that they still owe more. You’ve heard the stories.”

“Sure.”

“The other side of it is purely what we used to call white slavery, before the world went all politically correct. Today its labeled compulsory prostitution. If the Mob can’t dupe women into using their underground travel agency, thugs snatch them off the streets of European cities, maybe some in Asia and Latin America, too. Age only matters if it helps to boost the asking price.”

Across the table, Barbara Price mouthed a curse that Bolan hadn’t heard her use before. Her ashen face was angled toward the screen as Kurtzman kept the pictures coming.

Girls and women being led from seedy rooms by uniformed police. Stretchers employed to carry out the ones who couldn’t walk, either because they had been drugged or used so cruelly that their bodies had rebelled, shut down in mute protest. A couple had the pallid look of death about them.

Bolan wondered whether it had come as a relief.

“Kurti answers to this man, back home,” Brognola said. Another string of slides revealed a somewhat older man, larger in girth if not in height, dressed stylish by southern European standards without working the Armani trend. He was fat-faced, with bad teeth and tombstone eyes.

Bolan wished he could study that face through a sniper scope.

“Rahim Berisha,” Brognola announced, by way of introduction. “Think of him as Albania’s Teflon Don. He’s got the best and worst friends that money can buy, on both sides of the law. Some say he knows the president of Albania, but we can’t prove it. There’s no doubt that he has connections to the Albanian army, moving weapons out the back door for a profit. Double that in spades for the Albanian State Police and RENEA—their Unit for the Neutralization of Armed Elements. Word is that Berisha uses SWAT teams to back up his hardmen when there’s any kind of major trouble.”

“Makes it rough to bust him,” Bolan said.

“So far, it’s been impossible,” Brognola said. “He’s been indicted seven times, but something always goes off-track at the Ministry of Justice in Tirana. Paperwork misfiled, warrants thrown out on technicalities, and so on. As you might suspect, witnesses called to testify against him qualify as an endangered species.”

Once again, no great surprise.

“So, the job would be…?”

“Shut them down,” Brognola stated. “Hell, take them off the map. This pipeline needs to close, for good.”

For good, indeed. And Bolan thought, at least for now.

He harbored no illusions about cleaning up the world at large, saving society or any such high-flown ideal. The best that any soldier on the firing line could do was fight, carry the day in one location at a time and hope he wouldn’t have to win the same ground back again before he had a chance to rest, regroup and savor something of his hard-won victory.

And every victory was transient. There was no such thing as killing Evil in the real world, only in the text of so-called holy books forecasting distant futures that the Executioner would never live to see.

But he was doing what he could, with what he had.

“I’ll need a rundown on the syndicate and major players,” Bolan said unnecessarily.

“All right here,” Brognola said, sliding a CD-ROM across to Bolan in a paper envelope. “You want to check it out before you go, in case you think of any questions?”

“Will do,” Bolan said.

“I’ve got a meeting back in Wonderland, with the AG,” Brognola said. “Barb or Aaron should be able to fill in the gaps, if I’ve missed anything.”

“You won’t have,” Bolan said with full assurance.

“Well.”

“Don’t keep them waiting,” Bolan said, already on his feet.

“They have an auction coming up in Jersey,” Brognola observed. “We don’t have any details, but it’s soon. You’ll find a couple guys on there who might know when and where, in case you want to drop around and place a bid. Or something.”

“That’s a thought.”

They shook hands once again and Bolan trailed the others from the War Room, back in the direction of the elevator. Brognola was talking while he led the way.

“Remember, it’s a different world there, in Albania. Picture the worst bits of Colombia, without the jungle. Their constitution guarantees all kinds of rights, and everybody from the cops to the cartels ignores it. Human rights? Forget about it. The legitimate economy is in the toilet, circling the drain. But hey, you’ve dealt with worse.”

And that was true.

But every time he faced long odds, the laws of probability kicked in. Some day…

Bolan derailed that train of thought before it reached its terminus. Only a would-be martyr went to war anticipating failure. Just as only fools ignored the risks involved.

“Safe trip,” he told the big Fed on the farmhouse porch.

And wished himself the same.

CHAPTER THREE

East Keansburg, New Jersey, the present

A shotgun blast shredded the wall two feet above Mack Bolan’s head, frosting his hair and shoulders with a cloud of plaster dust while streamers of wallpaper flapped like dying tentacles. He answered with a short burst from his carbine, saw his adversary lurch and stagger out of sight beyond a corner, but he couldn’t guarantee the kill.

The odds were in his favor this time, since few human beings managed to survive a torso wound from 5.56 mm NATO rounds. The relatively small projectiles started to tumble when they penetrated a medium more dense than air, thereby creating catastrophic wound channels through flesh and bone. While entrance wounds were smaller than a quarter-inch across, inside the target might be virtually disemboweled.

Which didn’t necessarily equate to instant death.

The gunner with the 12-gauge had been moving on his own two feet when Bolan saw him last. Whether he dropped dead after passing out of sight or was prepared to fire again, lying in wait, remained to be discovered.

He hugged the nearest wall, aware that it could offer little in the way of physical protection from a bullet, but concealment had to count for something. Moving in an awkward crouch, Bolan held his carbine in the low-ready position with its butt against his shoulder and its muzzle canted toward the floor at a forty-five-degree angle. The hold facilitated forward motion and allowed “big picture” scanning of the target zone, without sacrificing any significant first-shot speed.

Six feet from the corner, he paused, listening. It didn’t help much, with the shouts and sounds of running feet that echoed through the house from every side, but Bolan didn’t plan to blindly rush around the corner and be gutted by a buckshot charge.

So much to think about.

Besides the unknown number of assailants still inside the house, he had the captive women and their prospective buyers on his mind. Meanwhile, somewhere in the ritzy neighborhood, someone was probably alerting the police to sounds of gunfire from the Cako spread.

East Keansburg had no law enforcement of its own, relying on the county sheriff’s office for protection in a pinch. The internet told Bolan that their 9-1-1 commo center was in Freehold, the county seat, ten miles to the south. That didn’t mean the nearest cruiser would be starting out from headquarters, but it would take some time to organize a SWAT team after first-responders reached the scene and called for backup.

Every second counted, even so.

With that in mind, he made his move. Stepping off from the wall he’d been hugging, Bolan aimed his M-4 carbine at the corner, picked a spot where someone might be crouching if he had an ambush on his mind and fired off half a dozen probing rounds.

It wouldn’t be precision work, by any means, but 5.56 mm rounds were made to penetrate three millimeters of steel at six hundred yards, or twelve millimeters at a hundred yards. Drywall or lath and plaster was merely tissue paper to a bullet traveling more than twice the speed of sound.

A strangled cry rewarded Bolan’s searching fire. He followed it around the corner, found his adversary stretched out on one side and dying with a fresh wound in his chest to match the first one in his shoulder. Bolan kicked the shotgun out of reach and stripped a pistol from the gunman’s belt, dropping the magazine before he pitched it back the way he’d come.

Keep moving. Find the women. Find Lorik Cako.

Simple intentions, but they weren’t so easy in a labyrinthine madhouse with an enemy of unknown numbers now on full alert.

As if in answer to his thought, Bolan heard footsteps slamming down a nearby staircase, soldiers hissing back and forth to one another in Albanian. He’d memorized a photo of the scum who owned the mansion, but that pockmarked face had thus far managed to elude him. Meanwhile, any other male he spotted on the premises was fair game until proved innocent, and Bolan wasn’t in the mood to check IDs.

It sounded like an army coming down the stairs, maybe another on the second floor, and the Executioner still had to reach the women he presumed were quartered in the basement. All the while he had to somehow manage to stay alive and dodge any police who might arrive before he finished up.

A piece of cake.

Bolan angled toward the stairs, letting the carbine lead him, squeezing off a burst when only feet were visible and hearing angry cries in answer. One man tumbled into his field of fire and jerked helplessly as Bolan’s next burst found him, opening his chest.

The M-4’s magazine had to be running low. The soldier ducked into an open doorway, seeking cover while he switched it out, releasing the mag with two rounds left inside and swapping it for a full one. He was about to feed the hungry carbine when a wheezing figure rushed at Bolan from his blind side, strangling hands outstretched.

Bolan reacted without thinking. He slammed the carbine’s butt into his attacker’s ribs and dropped the magazine, drawing his trench knife as he turned. He swung the weapon butt-first, cracking his opponent’s forehead with the short spike on its pommel, smashed his teeth in with the knuckleduster built into the grip, then drove the six-inch blade between the stunned Albanian’s ribs.

One twist, and it was done.

He sheathed the knife, scooped up his fallen magazine and checked it, seated it into the carbine’s receiver and got himself back in the game.

PANIC WAS WEAKNESS, and in many situations it was fatal. Lorik Cako didn’t plan to die this evening, but he had a great deal more to think about than simply getting out alive without a pair of handcuffs on his wrists.

His customers, for one thing, and the women who were living, breathing evidence against him, capable of sending him to prison for a hundred years simply because of their existence in this time and place.

Above all else, he had to think of Arben Kurti and the men behind him, what they’d do to Cako if he failed them, or if they suspected that he might cooperate with the police to save himself from jail. On balance, Cako realized that he’d be better off exactly where he was, shot dead, than carried to some slaughterhouse where Kurti could interrogate him and dissect him over time.

Regis Bushati met him as Cako reached the ground floor, with sounds of automatic gunfire echoing around them.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Cako demanded.

“Intruders!” Bushati replied.

“How many?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well, find out, for Christ’s sake! And call out the cars. Have them come to the back door at once.”

“Yes, sir!” Bushati responded.

While Bushati ran off to obey his instructions, Cako hesitated in the corridor, smelling gunsmoke. His first instinct told him to go and meet his enemies, destroy them all, but he also had to think about his customers downstairs. If they were killed or injured in his care, there would be hell to pay from their respective syndicates.

Not only in New Jersey, but beyond.

That thought made Cako wish that he could flee the house and simply keep on running. But where could he go? Where in the world would he be safe, once Arben Kurti and Rahim Berisha started hunting him?

Nowhere.

Turning back to the stairwell behind him, he retraced his steps, descending once more to the basement. Qemal Hoxha met him, looking anxious, holding one of the AKM rifles.

“They want to get out of here, Lorik,” he said.

“Can you blame them?”

Cako returned to the theater, where the first nearly naked woman still stood under spotlights, her eyes glazed from the drugs she’d been given to keep her in line. She reminded him of an animal caught in a car’s charging headlights, paralyzed with fear.

The buyers started shouting at him all at once. Despite their babel, Cako got the gist of it. They wanted explanations for the noise upstairs—and more important, as Hoxha had already said, they wanted out.

“Gentlemen, please! I can’t respond if all of you are shouting!”

Cako gave them two full seconds to quiet down, then took a backward step and raised his shotgun, squeezing off a blast into the basement’s ceiling. Shattered fragments of acoustic tiles rained down over his guests as they flinched from the weapon’s roar.

And shut their mouths in unison.

“As I was saying, cars are being brought around to take you safely out of here. You’ll be protected on the way, and I sincerely hope you will accept my personal apology for the disruption. At a later time, the merchandise will be available for bidding at substantial discounts, as my compensation for the inconvenience. Now—”

“What is happening?” one of the Japanese demanded, cutting Cako off.

“It seems there are intruders on the property,” Cako replied. “I’m taking steps to deal with them, but in the meantime it is best for you to leave, before police arrive.”

That got them moving when the gunfire might have kept them rooted where they stood. When Cako turned to lead them up the stairs, they crowded on his heels, jostling one another for position in the line. Bringing up the rear, came Qemal Hoxha to cover their escape.

IN RETROSPECT, Bolan couldn’t have said exactly when he felt the tide turning against him. He’d been headed for the mansion’s basement, accessed through a kind of study where the books lining three walls appeared untouched except for weekly dusting, but had found the stairs too late. The place was empty, though a smell of sweat and perfume told him that it had been occupied quite recently.

He had a look in the control room, saw the empty gun rack on one wall and double-timed to check backstage. There was a kind of dressing room—perhaps undressing room was more appropriate—with scraps of lingerie strewed here and there on furniture that didn’t match the pricey tone out front, and stronger perfume in the air.

Baiting the hook.

An elevator served the dressing area, its small car built to carry four passengers, tops. Call it seven trips for twenty young women, if someone rode the elevator up and down with them.

Bolan admitted to himself that there’d been time to clear them out since his first gunshots, but would Cako send them back upstairs into a firefight? Never mind humanity. It sounded like a risk of valuable merchandise, and any living witness could be used against him if she fell into the hands of medics, cops and prosecutors.

Since they hadn’t been exterminated in the dressing room, it followed, then, that Cako had removed them from the premises. Or he was trying to. They might be going with the buyers, in the fragile hope that he could still log sales despite the interruption of his little show.

No time to waste.

Bolan was turning toward the stairs once more when he heard shooters coming down to join him. He couldn’t guess their number or determine how well they were armed, but once he dropped the first of them the rest could hold the stairs forever with a single gun, keep Bolan bottled up below until they either smoked him out or the police showed up to make things infinitely worse.

Long years ago, Bolan had vowed that he would never drop the hammer on a cop. Occasionally he had broken that rule when faced with an extremely brutal, or murderous law enforcement officer. He regarded everyone who wore a badge as soldiers of the same side in his war against the predators. He would help honest cops arrest their dirty comrades, but would never kill an everyday officer to save himself.

If the cops found him here, with no means of escape, he’d surrender. Face trial yet again, with no help from Brognola or anyone else at the Farm. And beyond that?

The end.

He fired a short burst toward the stairs, discouraging the enemy advance, then looked around his prison. He could take the elevator up a floor or two, but if the shooters knew he was downstairs, they would cover all the stops, automatic weapons poised to smother him with fire before the door was fully open.

What, then?

If Cako’s buyers and their merchandise had left the house without going upstairs, there had to be another exit somewhere in the basement. Something Bolan could discover, given enough time.

But time was one thing that he didn’t have to spare.

“Start looking, then,” he muttered to himself.

It had to be right there. Somewhere.

With grim determination, Bolan started searching for a way to save his life.

FIVE MINUTES LATER, Bolan found it. There was yet another staircase hidden at the southwest corner of the house, disguised as storage space. The door was still ajar when he reached it, peered inside and saw steep stairs ascending to ground level. When nobody shot his head off, the soldier forged ahead, mounting the stairs and wondering where he’d wind up.

Fresh air washed over Bolan as he cleared a ground-floor doorway, hesitating long enough to verify that no gunmen were waiting for him to emerge. Maybe the housemen didn’t know about the stairs. Maybe they’d just forgotten.

When the Executioner emerged, a minicaravan of limousines was rolling off along the driveway that would take them out through Cako’s wrought-iron gates and off to anywhere they pleased.

Unless he stopped them first.

Bolan triggered a short burst toward the final car in line and saw his bullets spark off armored steel. He guessed the limos would have run-flat tires, as well, but even if they didn’t he was bent on stopping all of them, not just the train’s caboose.

Which meant he needed wheels.

Some fifty yards away he saw a seven-car garage standing with doors wide-open, as if all those shiny toys inside were left on permanent display. As for ignition keys, he’d have to work that out.

But first…

Below him, Bolan heard his trackers penetrate the basement, shouting, firing, drawing closer by the heartbeat, closing on the staircase that they couldn’t miss.

Scowling at the retreating limos, Bolan primed another frag grenade and waited until he heard footsteps on the stairs below him, then released the spoon and counted off four seconds. He dropped the lethal egg with only two seconds remaining on its fuse, and ran like hell.

He barely registered the blast, was focused solely on the long garage and cars inside it. On arrival, Bolan spied a small space off to one side where a wall rack held assorted automotive tools.

And keys.

He snagged one for a Rolls-Royce Phantom, dropped into a driver’s seat that felt more like an easy chair and gunned the 6.5-liter V12 engine into snarling life. After releasing the parking brake, the soldier stood on the accelerator and roared out of the garage.

He was in time to see a line of gunmen spilling from the exit he had used, a couple of them looking wobbly on their feet. Bolan had no time to examine them for wounds, determined as he was to catch the limo caravan, but they saw him and moved to intercept the Phantom as he powered out along the driveway.