sheath strapped to the outside of his right calf.
The man some called the Executioner didn’t know if he would actually need the weapons he carried, but he had been walking the hellfire trail too long to approach any mission unrepared. Despite the tranquil appearance the Irish countryside offered, a CIA agent had lost his life three nights earlier, and, to Bolan, that made the area a combat zone. More than once, Bolan had seen supposedly cold spots turn unexpectedly hot in seconds. He hadn’t survived all these years by being careless. Parking his rental car more than two miles away and coming in on foot was only the first precaution.
The Irish coast near the Ulster border was rugged country, with narrow, winding roads twisting through bowl-shaped contours of land extending from Lake Erne to Donegal Bay. In the daylight, views, at times, were nothing short of spectacular as the trails meandering through barren moors suddenly emerged upon sheep-studded pastures, so intensely green they were almost blinding. Immediately south of the moors, where Bolan had parked his car under the cover of a thin stand of hickory trees, the way became treacherous, perilously clinging to the sides of cliffs rising straight up from the sea where, hundreds of feet below, angry surf pounded the craggy coastline. Small religious shrines were carved at irregular intervals into the side of the rock walls to commemorate locations where fugitive priests had celebrated Mass during the British repression.
The trouble here had started, as so many conflicts in the history of man have, over religion. Protestant against Catholic, both sides killing for Christ, with the escalating violence over a period of more than two generations spawning the Orange Order, the IRA and twenty or thirty splinter groups, each with its own vision of tomorrow’s Ireland. For the most part, the rest of the world had ignored the conflict. A bunch of Irishmen killing each other on their tiny island way up in the North Atlantic didn’t threaten world stability the way an outbreak of war in the oil rich Middle East would.
Under normal circumstances, a man like Mack Bolan wouldn’t have been the one called into Ireland for a CIA find-and-retrieve mission, but the communiqué had been sent straight up the chain of command to the director of Homeland Security, who’d immediately alerted the President of its contents. The chief executive had decided he wanted someone with no traceable ties to a government agency, The call had gone out on a secured line to Hal Brognola at the Justice Department.
“They have to take it seriously,” Brognola had said later that day when he’d met Bolan on the National Mall in the shadow of the Museum of Natural History. They’d been walking west along Madison Drive, the domed Capitol building at their backs gleaming a brilliant white in the light from the afternoon sun.
The big Fed had continued. “This is much more than just an agent getting murdered, Striker. A terrorist group threatening to assassinate cabinet members? Jesus. The President wants someone to help assess how credible these people are.”
Brognola was fully aware of the Bolan’s arm’s-length relationship with the government, but he also knew that the soldier had never refused a request from his old friend. Brognola’s agenda usually was in tune with the Executioner’s. But Bolan would decide on his own whether or not to accept the mission.
Bolan had remained silent, studying the transcript he’d been reading as they’d walked.
“What’s this about another 9/11?” he asked.
“That’s the part that has the President most concerned,” Brognola answered. “The CIA doesn’t need any help dealing with these guys if they’re just a bunch of crackpots trying to make a statement. But, if what we’re up against is an organized terrorist cell with the capability to carry out those threats, we have to know who they are, and we have to know it now. All the President wants you to do is to get the CIA pointed in the right direction.”
It had been the part about another September 11 that had convinced Bolan to take the assignment.
He had met with Edmund Fontes, the director of CIA activities in Ireland, who’d reluctantly given him Steven Oxford’s final field report. In it, the late agent had described Cypher and the terrorist cell the mysterious man was forming, but there was no mention of any targets other than Catholic organizations in Ireland.
“He was one of my best,” Fontes had said tersely while handing Bolan the report, “and, if it was up to me, we’d go in and get him, ourselves. This is our job, and we don’t like someone else doing it.”
Bolan took no umbrage at the CIA man’s resentment. The way he received missions all but guaranteed that he’d be treading on someone else’s turf from the minute he showed up. He’d go in, get the microchip for Brognola, the one Oxford had in a back molar, and see what developed from there.
Now, twenty-four hours after saying he’d take the assignment, he was on-site, closing in on his objective.
An animal howled in the distance, and Bolan paused to take his bearings. Close by, a freight train rumbled over tracks on its way to the industrialized areas to the north.
The homing signal’s beat suddenly picked up, and Bolan’s senses went on full alert. With the terrain’s undulating dips and swells dotted with sparse patches of tall bushes and wind-blown hickory trees, the area was perfect for an ambush.
Bolan walked quickly, his eyes scanning the darkness, his free ear processing a steady flow of sounds. Noise carried well over the moors. Not as well as over water, where the crack of a gunshot could carry for miles.
He heard them before they were aware of his presence. A metallic click lasting no more than a millisecond rode to his ears on the night’s currents. It might have been the sound of a buckle that hadn’t been taped, or a snap fastening someone’s top collar against the breeze, but to a soldier with Bolan’s honed senses, it just as well could have been a bullhorn announcing their location.
Dropping to one knee, he reached into the pouch on his web belt containing his night-vision goggles. As he adjusted the goggles on his face, Bolan turned off his earpiece. He’d deal with the ambush first, then locate Oxford. From the signal he had been getting and the direction he thought the errant sound came from, his greeting party appeared to be positioned close to his objective.
Bolan focused the goggles, bringing the moors into sharp relief. There was a flurry of movement off to his left as a pair of jackrabbits dodged and sprinted their way through the underbrush. He scanned from left to right, pausing at every patch of bushes and trees, watching for unnatural movement. A halo of light flared briefly, the flame of a cigarette lighter magnified tens of thousands of times as its photons passed through the photocathode tube of his goggles.
Amateurs, Bolan thought. Undisciplined, untrained amateurs.
He switched the goggles to infrared mode, and the scene before him shimmered slightly as he painted the landscape with IR. Three men were positioned in a clump of trees about a hundred yards off to his right, their figures clear and distinct against the cooler foliage. A slight spiral extended upward from the man who was smoking, his cigarette heating the air directly above him.
Bolan removed the goggles and returned them to their pouch. The men waiting for him obviously knew that Oxford was wearing a transmitter that would lead someone to his remains. Did they also know that he had been a CIA plant? And, if they did, what were their intentions now for the man who came to retrieve him?
Regardless of what they had been planning, the Executioner thought they were about to get more than they’d bargained for.
He rose into a crouch and set off, as silent as an owl swooping from above to snatch unsuspecting prey. When he finally got to a point about twenty yards behind them and they became visible
