other men came out of the guarded barn dragging something that eliminated any doubts Bolan might have still harbored regarding the nature of the Ag Con operation—two figures, a male and a female, both with their hands and feet zip-tied together and black hoods draped over their heads. They had to be Pam Bowman and Roger Grevoy. Seeing the two captives was all the evidence Bolan needed to turn this into a shooting war.
Though he was well-armed, the Executioner could see no way to turn this soft probe hard without endangering the captives. Bolan had taken on more people than were guarding the compound and lived to tell about it, but if he started shooting now, there was no way he could take out all the enemy before they executed Bowman and Grevoy.
He watched as the prisoners were loaded onto one of the helicopters and flown from the compound. The Bell had a maximum range of 225 nautical miles, but since it hadn’t refueled, its destination was likely much less than that. The helicopter headed northeast and was soon followed by the second helicopter. There was no cell phone service this far into the Badlands, but Bolan had brought a satellite phone in case he needed some help from Stony Man. Bolan punched in Kurtzman’s secure number, but before he heard the big man’s gruff voice answer, he felt a gun barrel touch the back of his head.
“Put down the phone,” a voice behind him said.
Bolan, still in a prone position, started to put the phone down in an exaggerated slow-motion movement. Hoping that the man’s attention was on his arm, the soldier swept his leg around behind him where he estimated the man would be standing. His calf hooking around the other man’s leg told the soldier that he had guessed correctly, and the man fell to the ground. Bolan felt the barrel of the gun slide away from the back of his head at the same time he felt the man fall. The man squeezed the trigger an instant after the tip of the barrel left the back of Bolan’s scalp and he felt a hot line sear across the back of his head. The bullet didn’t hit him with enough force to cause any concussive damage, but the report from the rifle deafened the soldier—all he could hear was loud ringing.
But he didn’t have time to worry about any permanent hearing loss. He flipped upright and drew his Desert Eagle before the man hit the ground. There was no point bothering with the silenced Beretta, since the soft probe had already gone hard. Bolan aimed and fired. The big 240-grain bullet put a crater the size of a walnut in the man’s forehead and took half his skull with it on the way out.
Bolan still couldn’t hear anything but ringing, but he knew the bad guys would be coming at him in force. He rolled back over and scanned the compound. By this time the sun had gone below the horizon, so he turned on the FLIR thermal imaging sight he’d mounted on the DPMS rifle. Sure enough, all four ATV riders were headed his way, as were a number of foot patrols from inside the compound. Bolan fired a shot at the ATV rider nearest the butte, hitting him in the gap between his full-coverage helmet and the chest protector of his motocross body armor. The .260 round would easily punch through the ABS plastic of the man’s riding gear, but Bolan, who was used to fighting foes wearing antiballistic body armor rather than protective riding gear, instinctively aimed for open flesh. His shot was dead-on and a gaping wound opened in the man’s trachea. The bullet sheared the man’s spine just below the base of the skull, and he tumbled from his vehicle.
Before the man hit the ground, Bolan had already fired on the ATV rider who was next in line. He didn’t have a clear shot at the man’s neck, so he punched a round through the man’s goggles.
The two ATV riders who were behind their fallen comrades both reacted in different ways. The rider who was farther back stopped and tried to get behind his vehicle for cover, while the closer rider opened up his throttle and came bouncing toward Bolan at top speed. The soldier put a round right into the armpit of the man who was clambering off his ATV, and the guy fell from sight. Then Bolan targeted the rider coming at him on the ATV. It took two shots to stop him. Since he was so close to the butte, Bolan had to shoot almost straight down at him, taking him out with a shot through the top of his helmet.
All of this took place in a matter of seconds, but it was long enough for the shooter in the cupola atop the barn to start firing at Bolan’s position. Bullets started knocking up chunks of dirt all around the Executioner, and at least a dozen armed men had left the compound and were running toward him. Bolan scooped up the sat phone, scrambled back to the far edge of the butte and leaped over the edge, half falling, half running down the steep embankment. When he reached the bottom he ran toward his horse. He knew the terrain would be too rough for anything but foot travel or horseback, so he ran at top speed through the bottoms of the maze of washes and gullies that made up the Badlands, knowing that he could keep ahead of the Ag Con goons.
The ringing in Bolan’s ears had finally subsided. He regained his hearing just in time; voices in the brush ahead told Bolan that he also had to worry about what was in front of him as well as what was coming up behind. He could make out two distinct voices speaking with each other in the far end of the wash. He was still a good mile from his horse.
As quietly as he could, the soldier climbed to the top of the wash and took cover in a shrubby growth of juniper trees. From his vantage point he could see four armed men through his FLIR sight. A quick scan in the other direction showed Bolan that the armed men from the compound who were spread out and combing the area looking for him were closing in.
He pulled a pin from an M-67 fragmentation grenade and lobbed the bomb toward the men in the wash, then ducked behind a pile of rocks and clay. Though he was out of the kill radius of the grenade, he was still close enough to be wounded by flying shrapnel.
One of the men in the wash had time to utter, “What the…” just before the grenade detonated. Bolan also heard the sound of other guards coming down the path he’d just made through the shrubs, but before he could identify his trackers, the bomb went off. When the Executioner scanned for survivors after the blast, all he saw was the brightly colored thermal signatures of a leg and a couple of arms amid the less brightly colored signature of the bloody mist that was all that remained of the four men.
He did make out another five-man patrol heading toward the sound of the explosion. Bolan once again broke into a full-speed run through the rough terrain and made it to his horse. He didn’t take time to scan for his pursuers with the FLIR, but he hoped they were still combing the area and not making nearly as good time as he was. Bolan untied the horse and led it out of the draw as quietly as possible. After about a quarter mile he reached the trail he rode in on. He could hear his pursuers closing in by the time he mounted the horse and gave it his heels. The horse broke into a run just as a man emerged from a stand of junipers at the rim of a ridge that ran parallel to the trail. The gunner fired a full-auto burst at the fleeing soldier, but Bolan had already put enough distance between them for the shots to fall short. The horse was given its lead and it ran until Bolan was certain he’d gotten far enough away from his pursuers.
2
Chen Zhen erupted from the barn door before the report from the first shot had quit echoing off the distant buttes. He watched as the ATV-mounted patrols were mowed down as they descended on the shooter’s position on the butte to the east of the ranch. They were supposed to be good—they’d chosen Build & Berg Associates because of their reputation as the best private military contractor available—but so far they hadn’t impressed Chen as especially competent.
At least he had his own men upon which he could depend, troops handpicked from among the very best the People’s Liberation Army had to offer, and Yao Rui, the sharpshooter manning the cupola, had been one of the PLA’s finest snipers. Before Chen could make out the exact location of the shots coming from the butte, he heard Yao’s Barrett M-98 unleash several rounds. The booming of the powerful .338 Lapua Magnum rounds rang through the Badlands like the sonic boom from a jet fighter, but Chen couldn’t see any sign that they’d hit their target.
Chen
