to signal the Farm for a cleanup crew.”
“Standing orders on that just came through from Barb,” Grimaldi said, referring to Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller. “She has a blacksuit contingent on hand to liaise with local law enforcement, make sure the dead bodies get written up the right way.”
“Another drug deal gone wrong?” Bolan asked.
“Or something like that,” Grimaldi said. “Maybe swamp gas, a weather balloon…”
“Or a classified training mission,” Bolan supplied. He could hear Grimaldi chuckling in his earbud.
“Yeah,” said the Stony Man pilot. “You’ve got it exactly.”
“All right. Give me a minute to finish up here. Then we’ll hit the second safe house.”
“I assume negative contact?”
“Correct,” Bolan said, his voice carrying a hard edge of irritation. “He’s not here.”
It had been a toss-up determining which of the two safe houses to hit first. This one was farther out than the second, which stood in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Alamogordo. Bolan had opted for the more remote location first, hoping that, with Shane Hyde in custody, it wouldn’t be necessary to risk a firefight in a more populated area. Now they would have to take that step, and quickly. Vermin had a way of relaying word to one another, even where no apparent means of communication existed. Mack Bolan suspected that all criminals and predators shared, if not a sixth sense, then a heightened cunning that made them wary of situations and scenarios out of the ordinary. Losing contact with the crew here at the safe house would tip off Hyde’s Twelfth Reich terrorists nearby. Of that Bolan had no doubt. He and Grimaldi were already on the clock.
Bolan removed his secure satellite smartphone from one of the pouches on his blacksuit web gear. The phone was equipped with a high-resolution camera, which he used as he moved from corpse to corpse, still cautious, expecting no resistance but prepared to be surprised. At each one, he either leaned in and toed the body over or grabbed a hank of hair and pulled the head back, photographing each dead man—and the dead woman—for Stony Man’s files.
The images would be relayed automatically through the smartphone’s data link to Stony Man Farm, where Kurtzman and his cybernetics team would run them through facial recognition software. These would be cross-referenced with the Farm’s sometimes extralegal databases linked to multiple law-enforcement systems, including those of Interpol. The Farm’s files on the individual terrorists, where appropriate, would be updated to reflect their new status as “deceased.”
Each bit of information was, Bolan knew, a potential puzzle piece to solve future problems. Even data that closed doors was useful, for it helped draw boundaries in the Stony Man sleuths’ search for what was missing.
The frame of the safe house began to rattle, causing dust to filter down from cracks and crevices in the ceiling. The throb of the chopper’s rotors was as familiar as a heartbeat to Bolan, who had made his bones on battlefields far removed, but no less deadly, than this one. The machine that Grimaldi brought in for a landing was, at first glance, the familiar Army Black Hawk. The careful observer would know, however, that the helicopter was anything but.
Bolan’s ride was, in fact, a highly modified HH-60G Pave Hawk, itself a heavily upgraded version of the Black Hawk. The chopper’s fuel capacity had been effectively doubled with the addition of external fuel tanks. Its integrated inertial navigation, global positioning, Doppler navigation and satellite communications systems had the latest Stony Man augmentations, including the encryption technology Grimaldi needed to exchange data and voice with the Farm without fear of being intercepted.
Grimaldi had explained to Bolan, during their flight to the safe house, that the Pave Hawk had an automatic flight control system, including forward-looking infrared enhancement for low-light and night ops. The chopper’s ancillary equipment included a six-hundred-pound hoist with a two-hundred-foot range, full infrared jamming and electronic countermeasures, including chaff and flares, color weather radar and an automatic anti-icing system.
More importantly, one of the two crew-served
7.62 mm machine guns had been replaced with an electric M197 Gatling gun. The three-barreled automatic cannon fired 20 mm rounds at rates of fire up to 650 rounds per minute, all controlled remotely from Grimaldi’s seat. While the Pave Hawk wasn’t as heavily armed as the Cobra and Apache gunships Grimaldi had often flown in support of Bolan and other Stony Man personnel, both men were confident the chopper’s offensive capabilities were sufficient to this mission. What Bolan needed, more than airborne firepower, was the speed and range of the Pave Hawk. Its large extra tanks fueling twin General Electric T700-series motors, each pushing almost 2,000 horsepower, would get him where he needed to be as quickly as was practical.
Bolan boarded the Pave Hawk as the machine started to lift into the air once more; the runners barely had time to kiss the ground. As he piled in, Grimaldi looked back from the cockpit.
“Forgive the observation, Sarge,” he said, “but you look absolutely pissed.”
“I am,” Bolan said. He strapped himself into one of the seats. Shifting the FN P90 on its sling, he looked the weapon over, removing the magazine and checking the action. He had spent a lot of time rolling around on the floor of the safe house, fighting in close contact. He needed to make sure his weapons would function when he called on them. The FN seemed none the worse for wear for riding along with him through the misadventure.
“Are you injured, Sarge?” Grimaldi called back. His earbud transceiver broadcast his words to Bolan despite the noise of the rotors overhead. He looked worried.
“It’s not my blood,” Bolan said. The front of his blacksuit and portions of his web gear were stained darker than the rest. He picked several splinters from the latter and from the crease of his canvas war bag before removing, from the bag, a compact cleaning kit. Then he turned his attention to his pistols.
John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Farm’s armorer, would give him grief for the gouge in the 93R’s slide. He could almost hear the man’s commentary now. Each of the weapons Bolan was issued had been combat-tuned, in most cases by Kissinger’s own experienced hands. The goal was always to increase accuracy while enhancing reliability, goals that too often might seem mutually exclusive. Having spent years responsible for selecting and maintaining his own hardware, Bolan was no stranger to the demands on the Farm’s armorer. He appreciated the support Kissinger provided.
The Beretta had, after all, saved his life.
Grimaldi called out their estimated time to the second target zone. He looked back at Bolan again. “Sarge,” he said, “you okay?”
“Yeah,” Bolan muttered. “But I’m mad, Jack. We’ve just left a trail of corpses behind us, and we’re not much further along. Hyde may or may not be at the second safe house. If he’s not, we keep moving through our priority list.”
“That’s the plan,” Grimaldi said. He looked at Bolan as if unsure where the soldier was going.
“They’re wasting lives,” he explained. “Hyde and his hate-filled kind. Terrorists, predators of every stripe. They have motivations, Jack, and while they’re all equally deserving of being put down, as Hal put it, some make more sense than others.” He cleaned the Beretta as he spoke. “Hyde and his ilk want power, sure, but they’ll never hold it. Power is an abstract to them. They wouldn’t know what to do if they were suddenly in
