opened his mouth to scream when the Hummer loomed above him like some pouncing beast. The scream died in his throat, however, as he was crushed by the three-ton juggernaut. Marcus Yarborough was spared a similar fate, as he’d been thrown sideways out of the Jeep during the initial impact. He’d landed hard on one knee, then passed out when his head struck the asphalt.
When he came to moments later, roused by the trembling of the road beneath him, Yarborough’s first impression had been that someone was shaking him awake. Disoriented, a din in his ears and his field of vision swarming with blips of light that zoomed about like errant spaceships, Yarborough groaned and slowly sat up. A shiver of pain radiated from his bruised knee. The Hummer had come to a rest on its side only a few feet away, and he could see Mitch Brower’s bloody corpse dangling halfway out the shattered windshield. The nearby Jeep had been left half-flattened, its tires blown out, Eddie Chang crushed nearly beyond recognition.
By the time Yarborough had fully regained his wits, a handful of fantasy campers were on their way down the slope leading to the workout area. Their eyes were not on the sharpshooter, however, so much as on the fiery crater where the storage shed had once stood. Nothing remained of the structure but a few chunks of foundation and smoldering bits of cinder block lying in the surrounding grass. Recalling the weapons crates he’d helped transfer into the shed earlier in the day, the sharpshooter began to realize what had just happened.
Before the campers could reach him, Yarborough heard the bleat of a car horn. Turning to his right, he saw the BMW Z3 pull up alongside him. Its lights were off, and he couldn’t see who was behind the wheel until Joan VanderMeer leaned over and swung open the passenger door.
“Hurry!” she urged. “Get in!”
Yarborough grabbed hold of the door and stood up, then tumbled into the front seat next to VanderMeer. He barely had time to close the door before the woman had shifted the car back into gear. She drove off the road long enough to circle around the other two vehicles, then returned to the asphalt and accelerated as she headed back toward the camp headquarters and the mountains that loomed behind it. As she switched on the headlights and gave the sports car more gas, VanderMeer told Yarborough, “We’re outta here!”
THE HALF-SUNKEN SEWER PIPE Bolan had crawled inside withstood the concussive force of the blasts that had neutralized the storage shed, but the pond had been showered with debris. When he emerged from the concrete tube and stood, drenched and shivering in the waist-deep pond, the Executioner was surrounded by floating bits of shrapnel, some of it giving off wisps of smoke. He’d lost his earbud somewhere in the pipe and wasn’t about to go back searching for it. Instead, he slogged his way to the steep embankment and pulled himself up to level ground.
Bolan quickly surveyed the aftermath of the mayhem he’d unleashed, then glanced skyward, alerted by the sound of an approaching helicopter. Soon he could see the aircraft sweeping past the magnolia treetops. He wasn’t sure if he was still giving off a GPS signal, so he made a point to wave his arms. If Grimaldi was looking his way, Bolan figured the pilot would be able pick up his silhouette backlit by the still-blazing crater.
One of the campers thought Bolan was signaling to him and waved back, shouting, “I see you, man! What the hell happened?”
“Is this for real?” another of the campers said, eyes fixed on the bodies ensnarled in the overturned Hummer and the half-crushed Jeep. “Hell, those guys look like they’re fucking dead!”
Bolan paid no heed to the questions. He’d shifted his gaze back toward the administration building and the hills behind it. He could see taillights up on the mountain road, and once he checked the parking lot next to the building, he knew that someone was fleeing in the BMW. He also knew that by the time Grimaldi picked him up, it would likely be too late for them to give chase. Just on the other side of the mountain was the main highway, as well as the residential sprawl of Sykesville. Too many escape routes, too many places to hide.
As he waited for Grimaldi to land the chopper, Bolan glanced back at the crater. At least he had the satisfaction of having destroyed the weapons cache before it could be put to use by enemies of the state. Even that realization was tempered somewhat, however, as Bolan couldn’t help wonder what had happened to the one rocket launcher left unaccounted for. It was still out there, he realized, like a proverbial loose cannon.
1
McLean, Virginia
Edgar Byrnes’s breath clouded in the chilled March air as he brushed snow off the woodpile and gathered a few logs for his evening fire. It was dusk. The moon was out, a thin, waxing sliver poised like a scythe above the dark storm clouds rolling in from the Atlantic. A faint breeze stirred through the forest of elms and sycamores surrounding the four-acre farm Byrnes called home. Leaves were budding on the trees despite the late frost, but through the branches Byrnes was still able to glimpse the outline of a monolithic building located a quarter mile away on the other side of the woods. It was the only visible trace of modern civilization, and in another week or two Byrnes knew the trees would fill in, obscuring the structure from view entirely.
We can’t wait much longer, Byrnes thought to himself as he carried the logs past a weathered lean-to shared by three cows, two horses and menagerie of pigs, chickens and sheep. One of the horses, a sturdy roan with a jet-black mane and tail, was out in the corral, snorting as it paced back and forth through the mud.
“Sorry, Jefferson,” Byrnes called out. “Too cold to go riding tonight.”
Once he reached his small one-room cabin, Byrnes freed one hand to let himself in, then kicked the door shut behind him. Last month, shortly after he’d been hired to work the farm, his first job had been to patch cracks in the mortar between the hand-hewn logs that formed the cabin’s four walls. He’d done a good job but such crude insulation could only keep out so much of the cold; inside it was still freezing.
After setting the logs onto a bed of kindling in the large stone fireplace, Byrnes blew on his hands and rubbed them over the lone flame of an oil lamp he’d left burning on a nearby table. Once the feeling came back to his fingers, he plucked a few hay straws off the dirt floor and used the lamp to light them, then crouched before the stacked wood. The straws’ flames crackled as they took hold of the kindling and began to spread. Soon the logs had caught fire as well, sending smoke up the chimney.
Byrnes pulled a wooden rocker close to the hearth and sat down. His workday, which had begun nearly twelve hours ago at the crack of dawn, was finally over. He smiled tiredly, filled with a sense of accomplishment.
It would soon be a full eight weeks that Byrnes, a thirty-two-year-old Gulf War veteran, had been working at the Michael Conlon Farm, a state-owned Colonial homestead painstakingly maintained to reflect what ordinary farm life had been like back in the days of the country’s founding fathers. For Byrnes the experience had been a joyful revelation, so much so that there had been times when, for days on end, he had forgotten the true reason he’d come to work here. He’d learned so much in that time: how to make soap from tallow; how to tan animal hides and use the leather to make shoes and clothes; how to spin wool from sheep; the best way to fetch water from nearby streams and boil it with fresh vegetables from the garden to make a nourishing stew.
The past few weeks in particular, when he’d come to be the sole caretaker living on the premises, had been like heaven. Having the place to himself most days, he exulted in the solitude and isolation, the sense that he had indeed been transported back to a time when America was the home of those who were self-reliant and bound by high ideals—a time before values had eroded in the face of complacency and the government had grown into what Byrnes felt was a festering cancer eating away at the foundation upon which the nation had been built.
