in now, Red Leader. Rendezvous in three hours. Mark.â
âRed Leader to Blue Leader, out.â
He turned off his radio and reset his stopwatch. Three hours to the second. The carefully planned raid proceeded as flawlessly as it had so many times before. He stepped back over the annoying corpse drawing flies in the small lookout tower and spiraled down the stairs, taking them three at a time in his hurry. There was little enough time to skirt the fires his team had set and reach the rendezvous where the real backbreaking work would begin.
1
No matter where Mack Bolan looked, fire devoured the land. Trees exploded hundreds of feet below him, sending fiery sap close to the V-22 Ospreyâs rotors. Looking out over the Idaho forest convinced him that nothing could survive down there. The fire was too intense and spread likeâ¦a wildfire.
âWhere you want to land?â The voice in his headphones might have been either the pilot or the copilot. Bolan couldnât be sure, and it really didnât matter. It took both menâs skill at the controls to keep the tilt-rotor aircraft from being buffeted to pieces in the fierce superheated air currents caused by the fire.
âNot down there,â Bolan said. His keen eyes studied the raging inferno and found nothing. No landing zone was possible when the very earth itself appeared to be on fire. Besides, Salmon-Challis National Forest was not the spot he was most interested in. It might have been the first place to be torched, but he found the other side of the spiny ridge more interesting. More than his gut feeling, the powers that be back at Stony Man Farm agreed. The real evidence of who set the fires was not here but over near Shepard Peak.
âWeâre running low on fuel, sir.â
This time Bolan knew who spoke. The pilot leaned back and looked over his shoulder at his unexpected passenger. Bolan had been high up in the Rockies north of Leadville at the end of a mission when Aaron âthe Bearâ Kurtzman had contacted him. Bolan had been looking forward to a much-needed break, possibly taking time to climb Mount Elbert for the solitude it offered and, for a while, simply not worry about someone shooting him in the back.
The V-22 had been dispatched from the 58th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to pick him up. The altitude near Leadville made helicopters unstable to operate, and the V-22 afforded a quick method of transport. For all the fly-by-wire technology involved in the vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, Bolan was more interested in speed. It duplicated the helicopterâs vertical capability and added an airplaneâs range and ability to move him to his target at more than three hundred miles per hour.
âHead due west,â Bolan said.
âThe other fire?â
Bolan nodded and the pilot went back to his controls. The Osprey banked sharply, giving Bolan another look at the devastation below. Kurtzman had sent a video taken by a commercial airline pilot who had happened to be above the forest when it erupted in flame. Careful examination of the low-resolution video by the Stony Man analysts had given a chilling view of the first seconds of the fire. Bolan recognized the sudden wall of flame for what it was: detonation of a long string of explosives, probably dat cord. The second fire had erupted almost exactly ten minutes later, showing coordination and intent.
The charred stench made his nose wrinkle as he leaned out the doorway and peered down. Intense heat like a mile-long blast furnace seared his face, but Bolan saw only the courage of the firefighters below risking their lives to keep the fire from spreading and devouring more untold square miles of the tinder-dry forest.
âSir, weâre here,â the pilot said. Bolan tapped his earpiece. The static interference almost deafened him. âBut we got a problem. We canât land down there.â
Bolan saw the problem immediately. The fire west of Shepard Peak had devoured too much of the forest for him to get into the spot where he believed the second, more important fire had been set.
âWe could get down, but we might never get back into the air. Iâm not risking a seventy-million-dollar aircraft, even if the SecDef himself ordered me down.â
Bolan knew the pilot held some resentment toward him personally for being sent on this mission. The orders had come down fast from on high to deliver a single passenger of unknown affiliation to the middle of a forest fire.
âWhatâs your operational ceiling?â
âTwenty-six thousand.â
âTake me up to fifteen, then you can go home.â
The engines changed pitch as the pilot started an upward spiral. Bolan began getting into his gear. He had to hand it to Kurtzman. The man had anticipated everything. The parachute included with the pack on board when he rendezvoused with the V-22 was exactly what he needed.
âWhat do you want me to do?â
The pilotâs words spilled from the earpiece dropped onto the deck. Bolan was already out the door and tumbling through the turbulent air above the Boise National Forest. He got a good look at the terrain and how the fire had burned from the obvious line where the blaze had started. It looked as if someone had taken a fiery razor to the ground.
More det cord.
Turning slowly as he fell though the heated air, Bolan arrowed his way toward the seared meadow just to the west of the first ignition point. When he was only five hundred feet from the groundâdefinitely HALO to avoid the worst of the heated updraftsâhe pulled the rip cord. The jerk as the parachute deployed caused his teeth to clack together. Then he hit the ground hard. His knees bent and he rolled in the blackened grass, tangling in the shroud lines as they collapsed rapidly. He finally scraped to a halt and got to his feet. A few minutes later, Bolan had the parachute gathered and weighted down under a rock so it wouldnât blow around in the hot wind all around him.
It was time for the Executioner to go to work.
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
AARON KURTZMAN LOOKED up from his computer console to see the mission controller, Barbara Price, standing in the doorway. The dark circles under her eyes told him she hadnât slept much in days. She said nothing and didnât have to. Kurtzman felt the weight of her unspoken question.
âNothing yet,â Kurtzman said. âStriker has just dropped into the Boise Basin and is doing a quick recon.â
âHave you filled him in?â
âIâm still gathering intel,â Kurtzman said, glancing at his screen. He looked back up. âWhat more can you tell me?â
âNot much more,â she admitted, heaving a deep sigh. âIt seems more and more like an outright attack on the U.S. economy. All the gold was earmarked for delivery to the government to bolster the dollar on world markets. Thereâs no doubt that the last attack was done by a PMC.â
âIdentified?â
Price shook her head and looked even grimmer.
âHow many private military companies can there be on the loose within U.S. borders?â
