spotted it prior to picking the lock, but still the Executioner chided himself for the oversight. I should have known, he thought to himself angrily.
Bolan fought off the urge to flee. Instead he tapped his earbud transceiver as he moved deeper into the enclosure, directing the beam of his palm-sized flashlight onto the crates stored against the far wall. There were more of them than he was anticipating—nearly a dozen in all—but only a few bore stenciling that linked them back to the Aberdeen proving grounds. By the time Jack Grimaldi’s voice crackled in his ear, Bolan had honed in on one of the stenciled crates and pried the wooden lid open.
“What’s up?” Grimaldi asked.
“I tripped an alarm,” Bolan reported, even as he was staring down at the cache of missing weapons he’d come to the fantasy camp looking for. “The good news is I found the rocket launchers. All but one, that is.”
Secured within custom-cut, foam-lined compartments inside the crate Bolan had just opened were three Army-issue M-136 AT-4 rocket launchers, each loaded with an 84 mm warhead capable of piercing nearly 400 mm of rolled homogenous armor, a thickness surpassing that found on most tanks and concrete bunkers. There was a conspicuous cavity in the molded foam where a fourth launcher had once rested.
“Forget the damn launchers,” Grimaldi snapped. “I’m coming in. Get your ass out where I can see it!”
“Will do,” Bolan said, “once I find something better than Cowboy’s popgun to defend myself with.”
Bolan clicked off the earbud and hurriedly inspected the contraband stored in the other crates. By the time the first glimmer of Jason Cummings’s headlights shone through the open doorway of the shed, Bolan had found what he was looking for.
“I KNEW IT WAS A MISTAKE to move that stuff here and sit on it!” Jason Cummings seethed as he gave the Hummer more gas. “We should’ve stashed it all off-site somewhere!”
“Hind-fucking sight doesn’t help us!” Mitch Brower snapped in response. He knew Cummings was right, though, and was furious with himself for having insisted they keep their cache of stolen weapons close by until they’d brokered deals to sell them. There was still a chance this would prove to be a false alarm—something as benign as rats tripping the sensors or one of the campers out snooping around—but in his gut Brower knew better. They were in trouble.
The Hummer’s front tires squealed in protest as the retired sergeant rounded the curve leading to the workout area. The Uzi was cradled in his lap. Brower sat next to him with a slightly larger 9 mm L-34 A-1 Sterling, the mainstay subgun of Britain’s Royal Marines. Glowing in the rearview mirror were the headlights of the Jeep that Marcus Yarborough was driving.
Eddie Chang was riding shotgun alongside Yarborough in the rear vehicle, having ignored Cummings’s orders to stay behind with Joan VanderMeer, Louie Paxton and Xavier Manuel. Having no idea what was at stake, the martial-arts expert was treating the whole affair as a lark. He was unarmed and assumed that Yarborough’s Uzi was loaded with blanks.
“C’mon, admit it,” Chang shouted over the roar of the Jeep’s engine. “This is one of those improv exercises, right? Like that time the sergeant hired those Green Berets to barge in pretending they were armed robbers fleeing a bank job.”
“Zip it!” Yarborough yelled back, eyes fixed on the road ahead. He took the next turn sharply, staying close behind the Hummer. Up ahead, he thought he could see a figure charging out of the storage shed. Yarborough thought back to earlier in the day when he’d grudgingly helped Mitch Brower haul several weapons crates into the shed from the back of a Ford pickup. He wondered if he’d gotten himself caught up in some kind of government sting operation, and as he quickly scanned the surrounding grounds, he half expected to see a SWAT force materialize out of the shadows. What he got instead was the sudden, blinding glare of a flash grenade that had just detonated on the road in front of the Hummer.
“What the hell?” Eddie Chang raised a hand before his face, but the grenade had already left him temporarily blinded.
Yarborough was similarly stricken, and he feared Cummings and Brower had probably been blinded in the Hummer directly ahead of him. He figured Cummings would go for his brakes and did likewise.
The Jeep’s tires screeched, and Yarborough felt the vehicle go into a skid. Any second he expected to slam into the rear of the larger vehicle.
“We’re dead,” he muttered.
BOLAN KNEW the incendiary flash was coming. Before the grenade burst forth with its blinding light, the Executioner turned his back to the explosion and cast his eyes downward, locking them on the 7.62 mm Belgian FN FAL carbine he’d wrested from one of the crates inside the storage shed. He’d already fed a 20-round cartridge into the breech and cleared the weapon for firing. The grenade had tipped the balance in his favor, but only for a moment. Bolan knew he was outnumbered. If he didn’t act fast, any second he would be outgunned, as well.
Once he heard the crunch of colliding metal, Bolan turned back toward the road and drew a bead on the Hummer, which had slewed sideways and skidded halfway off the road. The vehicle was so large it was difficult to even see the Jeep that had rear-ended it. Not that it mattered. Bolan’s focus was on the men in the front seat of the Hummer. He could tell that Brower and Cummings were still half-blinded, but they both had their subguns in view and would likely start firing once they could see their target.
Bolan wasn’t about to let it come to that. Finger on the trigger, he cut loose with the assault rifle, raking the Hummer’s front windshield with a concentrated autoburst. The glass shattered and the men inside the vehicle shuddered as the rounds slammed into them, killing them both before either could get off a shot.
By now the afterglow of the flash grenade had dissipated, leaving the grounds even darker to the eye than before the explosion. Far behind Bolan, past the tree-lined knoll, the Executioner could hear the first cries of the fantasy campers as they rushed from their barracks, drawn by the blast. Bolan suspected guards from the main gate would also be racing to the scene any second, joined perhaps by more men from the main building. No one had yet emerged from the Jeep that had crashed into the rear of the Hummer, but Bolan wasn’t about to waste precious seconds moving forward to engage them. He wasn’t about to stand around waiting on the arrival of Jack Grimaldi, either.
Bolan had taken a second grenade with him when he’d left the storage shed, this one an avacado-sized M-61 fragger. Once he’d stepped several yards to the edge of the man-made pond, he thumbed free the safety pin, then lobbed the projectile back toward the shed. He’d left the door wide open, and the grenade sailed clearly through the opening. Bolan couldn’t recall exactly how much of a delay the grenade was equipped with, but he took advantage of what little time he had, casting aside the carbine and diving into cold, murky depths of the training pond. By the time the grenade detonated, he’d clawed his way inside the half-submerged sewer pipe.
THE INITIAL BLAST of the frag grenade was fierce enough. But when shock waves and incendiary bursts ripped through the weapons carts and triggered secondary explosions, the shed was turned into the equivalent of one large bomb. For a second it looked as if the sun had briefly awakened from a nightmare, as the shed gave off a glow far more baleful than that of the flash grenade.
Off in the distance, the campers who’d rushed from the barracks clutched at the nearby magnolias to keep from being thrown to the ground by the earthquakelike trembling beneath their feet. Downhill, the shock waves were even more intense, rocking the Hummer sideways and sending it tumbling on top of the Jeep, which had already been rendered inoperable after rear-ending the larger vehicle.
Eddie
