what was probably a vain attempt to stanch the bleeding. The bullet wound in his shoulder wouldn’t let him raise his left arm, but as long as he was seated on the ground, it was easy enough to try to hold the wound together. He also kept the knife in, since that was actually doing more than his hand was to keep the femoral artery from leaking out all over Mohonk Mountain.
It also meant he couldn’t really move from this spot. The woman had had enough time while Bethke was dealing with the fat man to do any number of things, including possibly reload her .38.
Then the woman appeared before him. The muzzle of her erstwhile partner’s Glock was staring Bethke right in the face. This close, Bethke could see the way she had modified her boots in order to hold knife sheaths. But she wouldn’t even need those knives. Bethke toyed with the notion of raising his S&W, but she’d blow his head off before he could even start moving his arm.
Since he was pretty obviously dead anyhow, he tried to at least find out one thing. “Why?”
The woman shrugged, her ponytail bouncing. Bethke realized that he wouldn’t get an answer. She and her two dead partners were probably hired assassins who were given a target. Such people were almost never told the why, only the who. If they were caught, they couldn’t give any specifics to law enforcement.
Not that that was likely to be an issue for Bethke. He’d really hoped to climb Mount Kilimanjaro some day.
1
Mack Bolan peered through the Pentax Lightseeker XL scope on his ArmaLite AR-50 .50 BMG rifle. The scope was equipped with a Twilight Plex reticle that was designed for fast target acquisition and low light. It was currently in night-vision mode, not to adjust for darkness—since it was midafternoon—but to detect heat signatures on the other side of the steel plating of the warehouse.
To the general public, the warehouse in this suburb of Detroit, Michigan, was used for meat storage by the Hash & Cox Meat Packing Company. The inside was kept at thirty-eight degrees, so the presence of a ninety-eight-degree human being would stand out like a beacon in the scope.
At the moment, the warehouse was empty of everything other than the meat and assorted tools and storage units.
The Executioner knew that would change soon.
The warehouse wasn’t exactly a front—Hash & Cox was a legitimate business that served as a middleman between suppliers and retailers—but it was used to mask a much less legitimate business. The warehouse was used for drug merchants who supplied cocaine and heroin for many of the dealers working in Detroit. All attempts by the Detroit Police Department to bring the business down had been stymied by Hash & Cox’s CEO, Karl Hash—the brother-in-law of the DPD police chief. Attempts to bring in the DEA or the FBI were equally stymied by the influence of a state senator, who had received numerous campaign contributions from Hash & Cox and its satellite companies. Hash & Cox’s COO, Charles McPherson, was also the nephew of a Michigan congressman who was on the committee that controlled the DEA’s funding.
All this made Hash & Cox off-limits to legitimate law enforcement.
That was where the Executioner came in.
Bolan would bring the company down because nobody else could. He’d learned that McPherson and Hash were meeting at the warehouse to make sure that the place was cleaned out of all narcotics in preparation for an FDA inspection the following day. When Bolan had talked to a friend of a friend in the FDA to get the inspection to happen, he’d been hoping for this result. Hash and McPherson had too much riding on this warehouse to risk trusting underlings. They’d want to check the place themselves, make sure it would pass inspection.
He planned to take out the pair of them as soon as they showed up by taking up position on the roof of another warehouse on the same backstreet. With the pair of them dead, the path would be cleared to legitimately bring down the drug operation.
A limousine pulled up to the warehouse gate. The driver hopped out and fumbled with a set of keys before inserting one into the padlock that secured the chain holding the gate shut. The padlock snapped open, and the driver pulled the chain out and tossed it aside. The gate slowly creaked open on its own, leaving the way clear for the limo to continue inside, once the driver got back inside.
Once the limo pulled up to the side entrance, the driver again hopped out, opening the door to let the other occupants out: two white men in pinstriped suits who matched the pictures of Hash and McPherson in Bolan’s dossier. At first, the Executioner was concerned that the driver might go inside as well, but he got back into the car once he closed the back door behind the two men. The scope couldn’t differentiate people inside the warehouse, just heat signatures, and the warehouse had no windows.
He could have taken them down outside, but it was better to wait for them to be inside, so that the driver would remain in the dark for as long as possible. The driver himself aided in this by turning on the limousine’s sound system at a very loud volume.
The Executioner had been waiting on the roof for these two to show up for four hours. He could hold off another minute.
After they went inside, Bolan waited until he saw two heat signatures. First one entered his sights, and he squeezed off a round. The rifle had been in his hands so long, it was like an extension of his arms, and firing it barely required a conscious effort on Bolan’s part.
The .50-caliber bullet easily penetrated the thick metal of the wall and blew off the head of either Hash or McPherson. The formerly upright heat signature fell into a crumpled mess on the floor.
It took only a second for Bolan to adjust his aim slightly and take out the heat signature of the second person, who hadn’t yet registered what had happened to his colleague. The bullet whistled through the air and pulped the head of the target.
When the second body went down, Bolan continued his vigil, making sure the heat signatures didn’t move and the driver didn’t respond to the loud report of two rifle shots being fired. After a while, the signatures got cooler as their body temperatures went down, accelerated by the low temperatures inside the warehouse.
But Bolan still didn’t move.
The limo sound system had been going for four songs before the driver turned it off. Seconds later, he bounded out of the car, a cell phone at his ear and a concerned look on his face, and ran to the entrance. Bolan assumed that Hash and McPherson had only expected to be a minute or two inside, and that the delay had the driver worried.
As well it should have.
Only then did the Executioner remove the scope and head for the roof entrance.
After making his way down the stairs of the warehouse to the street, he placed the rifle and scope in the trunk of the Chevrolet Aveo he’d rented, got behind the wheel and drove toward Interstate 94. Using his secure sat phone, he dialed the number for Stony Man Farm, the base for America’s ultracovert counterterrorist organization.
Within seconds, he was put through to Hal Brognola.
“Both men have been taken care of,” Bolan said without preamble, and without specifics.
“Good work, Striker. Your ride’s waiting at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base to bring you back here. We’ve got a big one.”
Bolan’s original plan had been to drive south on I–94 to Detroit, where he’d hole up in a motel room for the night, but instead he headed to Selfridge.
