“Look out!” somebody shouted from below. Too late.
Lockhart began to turn, raising the spade as if it could protect him, hearing screams and curses from the crowd. Then, all he heard was thunder.
All he felt was pain.
Chapter 1
Glasgow: 10:05 a.m.
Mack Bolan’s flight from New York City landed more or less on time. The jumbo jet had lifted off from JFK eleven minutes late yet somehow beat the captain’s own best estimate for crossing the Atlantic. They’d traveled more than thirty-two hundred miles overnight, across five time zones, and Bolan had done it in coach.
It was good to stretch his legs again, to work the kinks out of his neck and lower back.
He took his time passing along the jetway, following the signs to Immigration and Passport Control. Upon arrival at their destination, Bolan’s fellow travelers formed lines, according to their nationality. The fast lanes were for British subjects, residents of nations in the European Economic Area, and the Swiss. All others joined the lines requiring more detailed interrogation by authorities.
Bolan was ready with his landing card and passport, this one in the name of Matt Cooper from Los Angeles. Mr. Cooper was on holiday with nothing to declare.
The immigration officer who beckoned Bolan forward was a woman, pale and red-haired, with just the barest hint of freckles on her nose. He would’ve had to guess about her figure, since she was wearing body armor underneath her uniform, and her gunbelt had numerous black, bulky pouches.
She checked his face against the passport’s photo, inquired as to the purpose of his visit even though it was already indicated on his landing card, and asked for an address where he’d be staying while in Scotland.
Serving up the truth for once, Bolan replied, “No address. I’ll be traveling and stopping where the spirit moves me, hoping there’s a room available.”
She frowned, then said, “Good luck with that” and slammed a stamp into his passport.
“Next!”
Glasgow International Airport, located eight miles southwest of the city’s center, served more than seven million travelers per year. Most international arrivals passed through the main terminal, where two al Qaeda wannabes crashed a flaming Jeep Cherokee into the main pedestrian entrance on June 30, 2007. The Jeep failed to explode, but one of the men set himself afire and subsequently died in agony. His sidekick was arrested near the scene and pulled a thirty-two-year sentence for attempted murder.
So, security was tighter in the terminal these days. En route to claim his check-through suitcase, Bolan passed by teams of uniformed police in jaunty caps, with H&K MP-5 submachine guns slung across their chests. None of them paid particular attention to him, and he felt no sense of apprehension as he followed more signs to the baggage carousels on a lower level.
It wasn’t cops who posed the main threat to his life from this point on.
His black, generic suitcase took another thirteen minutes to appear, but no one checked his luggage tag as Bolan headed for the kiosk where a hired car should be waiting for him. There, another woman with red hair—younger and more cheerful than the officer who’d stamped his passport—welcomed Bolan, found his reservation and received his California driver’s license with a Platinum Visa, both once again in the name of Matt Cooper.
Bolan replied to the obligatory questions, lying where he needed to and staying vague about the rest. He took the lady up on her insurance offer—Bolan’s rentals sometimes took a beating on the road—and opted for the prepaid “discount” refill of his gas tank when, or if, he managed to return the car.
There was, he thought, no reason why the rental company should eat the cost if something happened to their car while in his possession. The Visa card was solid, false name notwithstanding, and his debts were always paid on time, in full.
The ride selected for him was a gray Toyota Camry with a five-speed manual transmission, front-wheel drive, with a two-liter inline-four engine. Bolan put his suitcase in the spacious trunk and remembered that the driver’s seat was on the right, the stick shift on his left.
As he left the car rental parking lot, with traffic rushing toward him on his right, Bolan quickly got the feel of it, his muscle-memory kicking in from other trips abroad, and he was on his way.
So far, so good. But Bolan couldn’t leap into his mission as he was.
For starters, he was naked—or, at least, he felt that way, without a single weapon close at hand. Airline security made packing weapons on commercial flights unfeasible, and Bolan couldn’t very well comply with standing rules for shipping lethal hardware in the baggage hold. Most of the gear that he relied on was legally off-limits to civilians in the States and the United Kingdom, so he’d traveled light, unarmed except for hands, feet and vast experience in taking life, up close and personal.
But he needed guns, perhaps explosives—and some information, too.
Thankfully, Bolan knew exactly where to find them in the heart of Glasgow, day or night.
IAN WATT WAS a respected businessman. Although he was a product of Gorbals—Glasgow’s toughest slum, located on the south bank of the River Clyde—he’d risen far above his humble roots, like others he could name.
Gorbals owed its name to the Lowland Scots word for lepers, locally housed at Saint Ninian’s Hospital in the fourteenth century and granted begging rights on nearby streets. Alumni of the district included some of Glasgow’s most notorious characters, good and bad.
He had grown up on the streets, in essence, with the likes of Tam McGraw and Frank McPhee, both gone to their rewards now with a host of others who had battled through the ice cream wars and other skirmishes for turf across the years. Watt chose a slightly different path, fencing hot items through a pawn shop that had prospered and expanded into two, then four, then seven citywide. Most of his merchandise was perfectly legitimate.
Most, but not all.
Old friends and new acquaintances still had selected items that required a broker, and they needed other items to defend themselves from competition or the police. Firearms regulation in the British Isles had gone from bad to worse after the Dunblane massacre of 1996, in which sixteen children were killed in kindergarten class by a shooter who then killed himself. But life went on, and hardmen needed shooters all the same.
In Glasgow, many of them bought their wares from Ian Watt.
He had to watch out for the undercover filth, of course, but honestly, how hard was that? A few bob handed over, here and there, bought Watt a warning when the dogs were prowling in his neighborhood, and risks were minimized by dealing mainly with a trusted clientele.
Mainly.
Needless to say, there were exceptions to the rule, but all of them came recommended from another customer who’d dealt with Watt in other situations, with no comebacks. Like the fellow from America he was expecting for a nooner on this very day, referred to Watt by someone who knew someone else, and so it went.
And who was Watt, a thriving businessman, to turn away a foreign visitor in need?
