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Ripple Effect
Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Nathaniel Hathcock III,

USMC

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Mike Newton for his contribution to this work.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Camp X-ray—Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Lieutenant Jordan Lewis hated meeting with the CIA. He knew the standard rap, of course—brothers in arms, collaborating in the war on terror, all that happy stuff—but there was still something about the Company that set his nerves on edge.

For one thing, it was flat-out wrong for spooks to give the orders—any orders—on a military base run for the better part of a century by the United States Marine Corps. Worse than wrong, it pissed him off.

The job at Camp X-ray was hard enough without demanding that the military personnel on-site kiss Langley’s ass.

And what a job it was, containing several hundred “enemy combatants” snatched from various locales over the past six years, beginning in Afghanistan, proceeding to Iraq, and then some places the civilian public didn’t even know about. Most of the hostiles caged at Camp X-ray would never face a formal charge. Hell, most of them still hadn’t been identified to any court, congressional committee or defense attorneys. They were locked down tight and going nowhere unless Uncle Sam decided, in his own sweet time, that they were clean.

And that was where Lewis found himself compelled to share his space with cloak-and-dagger types who thought the information superhighway ran only one way. The spooks reminded him of leeches. They crept in, latched on to files and prisoners, sucked out whatever they could use, then crept away without a simple thank-you to the men and women who maintained their feeding station. It was damned elitist arrogance, no other way to read it, and it sometimes made Lewis wish that he could punch them out, beginning at the top and working down.

He could’ve borne their snotty attitude a little better if they got results in the real world, but after six years of interrogation, eavesdropping and fudging data, what was the result?

Nada.

Lewis heard the vague pronouncements coming out of Washington, whenever some fat cat believed his job was riding on the line. He’d blather on about the terrorist attacks that had been averted, suspects captured, lives that had been saved—and naturally, all of it was classified.

But Jordan Lewis knew the truth.

He knew that in the years of his assignment to Camp X-ray, there had been no major breaks of any kind. Osama was still out there, and funds kept flowing to al Qaeda from the usual suspects. Most of them, in turn, were cozily in bed with “patriotic” politicians in the States, none of their countries facing any sanctions, threats of military intervention or preemptive strikes.

It was a crazy world, and Jordan Lewis was accustomed to it. He knew that there would always be another war, as long as men could scheme against one another in the halls of power, and he understood his role in that reality. He understood that there were rules, and also times when they were set aside to serve the greater good.

No problem.

He could twist arms with the best of them when it was called for, but he didn’t like some smarmy frat boy from the Ivy League intruding, telling him that he had done it wrong, suggesting that he try another angle of attack or step aside and let them do it, acting all superior while they were showing him the door.

This day, the new arrival was Bob Armstrong, or so he called himself. Lewis suspected that the name was every bit as phony as his smile. Armstrong was roughly the same age as Lewis, spoke with just a trace of a New England accent and was always groomed as if he half expected paparazzi to be waiting for him at the gates.

Some days Lewis thought about trying a change of scene, maybe a tour in Sandland, but he didn’t want to press his luck.

They also serve who only sit with spooks.

To hell with it, he thought. It’s what they pay you for.

And with that thought in mind, Lewis buzzed his orderly. “Corporal,” he said, “show Mr. Armstrong in.”

A moment later, there he was, all styling gel, bleached teeth and Harvard attitude. Wearing a smile as phony as the spook’s, Lewis walked around his desk to shake the agent’s hand.

HASAM KHALED WAS WORRIED, for himself and for the great jihad. A new round of interrogations had begun, and while it had been several months since he was questioned, granting ample time for him to rest, Khaled feared that he might be weakening in custody. He had been too long out of contact with his brothers, and despite his faith in Allah to sustain him, lately there had been no answer to his prayers.

Each time the smug Americans passed by his cage, selecting someone else to grill for information, he was certain they had come for him. Someday they would, and who knew what techniques they would employ this time?

Before, they had progressed from stilted courtesy to bullying and threats, suspension of his so-called privileges. Diet could be adjusted in proportion to collaboration with the enemy, so Khaled lost weight. He didn’t mind the sacrifice of flesh, content to know that Paradise awaited him.

But if he broke, what then?

The whispered rumors frightened him. In place of simple tactics—insults, threats, sleep deprivation—it was said that more effective methods soon might be employed. Torture, perhaps, or forced “repatriation” to some allied country where interrogators weren’t as squeamish as Americans. Or drugs, the kind that robbed even a dedicated warrior of his wits and his determination to resist.

Hasam Khaled was frightened of the drugs. Torture was fearful, but he thought—hoped, prayed—that he could weather beatings, possibly electric shocks, without soiling his honor. Drugs, however, stole a victim’s will and left him helpless, babbling everything he knew to agents of the Great Satan.

And once Khaled began to talk, how could he stop?

There had to be something he could do.

Khaled recalled his training, exhortations that prepared him to give up his life for God’s holy cause. He had been lucky so far, stunned in an explosion that inflicted only minor injuries but killed his two companions and a number of civilians. The Americans weren’t entirely sure whether Khaled was a combatant or a bystander, but they had shipped him to Cuba anyway. Uncertainty had given him a way to dodge their questions, up to now, but if they came at him with drugs…

There was one obvious alternative. He could become a martyr to the cause, not unlike those who strapped explosives to their bodies and then detonated them where it would do the most harm to their enemies. His self-inflicted death, while not as grandiose as an explosion in a market filled with Zionists or U.S. soldiers, still could serve the cause and bring great honor to his name, his family.

Khaled’s imam had been explicit on that subject. Any death in God’s service was commendable. He didn’t have to kill a hundred enemies, or even one. It was enough that he intended to destroy the infidels, and by his death prevented God’s enemies from gaining an advantage in the struggle. If by dying he could snatch salvation from the fingertips of targets marked for death by his comrades, Khaled would be a hero.

And his place in Paradise would be assured.

That vision made him strong—or stronger than he might have been without it.

Escape wasn’t an option, Khaled realized, and while some other inmates of the camp had been released to satisfy the Red Cross or the media, once he was questioned under medication there would be no possibility of freedom. Once they heard his secret, Khaled might be whisked away to the American mainland for further questioning, until the heathen bastards satisfied themselves that they knew everything.

And would it be enough to save them?

Possibly.

Khaled couldn’t be sure. He knew only a name, a fragment of a rumor shared by comrades in the dead of night. He had no details of the master plan itself, but once the name was given to his enemies, the rest might be superfluous. The scouring of dossiers and databases would begin, and ultimately they would have the man himself.

Khaled couldn’t permit it.

There were no weapons in his cell, of course—or none, at any rate, regarded by his captors as a weapon. But the simple cotton robe he wore could serve him as an instrument of suicide.

And when he’d finished with it, they could use if for his shroud.

There was no privacy in Camp X-ray, but neither was Khaled exposed in fact to round-the-clock surveillance. When he pulled the plain white robe over his head, no one except the occupants of two adjoining cages saw him do it. Neither spoke as he stood tall on tiptoes, double-knotting one sleeve of the robe to bars that formed the ceiling of his cage.

Neither adjoining prisoner called out for help as Khaled tied a makeshift noose around his neck and pulled it tight. They offered no objection as he checked the simple hang-man’s rope for length, then climbed the nearest barred wall of his cage for altitude.

The bars were slippery. He almost lost his grip and tumbled back, but that wouldn’t provide enough impact to stun him and prevent his hands from rising to the noose as he began to choke. In case his will to live proved stronger than his faith, Khaled was banking on a sharper drop to render him insensible.

A few more inches now. That should be high enough. The floor seemed far below him, like the bottom of a canyon. All illusion, in his present agitated state.

With one last prayer, Hasam Khaled released his grip and plummeted toward Paradise.

BOB ARMSTRONG DIDN’T CARE much for the spit-and-polish military types. He tolerated them whenever necessary, wore a smiling mask to hide his general contempt for amateurs who meddled in intelligence, and he never under any circumstances gave away the information his superiors had classified as need-to-know.

Sometimes, like now, he’d flatter certain officers with lies or slick evasions when they had to work in tandem toward specific goals, but he would no more tell a grunt in uniform what he was really thinking than he’d drop his pants and wag the weasel at a formal diplomatic function.

Some things were simply not done by professionals. Full stop. Case closed.

But sometimes you had to prime the pump, and so he said, “The truth, Lieutenant Lewis—may I call you Joseph, by the way?”

“It’s Jordan.”

“Ah, my apologies. Then, may I—?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Big smile. “The truth, Lieutenant Lewis, is that Langley’s under fire right now with accusations that we overlook the little things. Nobody seems to care much if a war goes on for years with no result, but we catch hell if we don’t know the dictator of the day’s zip code. You follow me?”

“Not yet,” the Marine said.

“My point is that we want to dot our i’s and cross our t’s, make sure we don’t miss any little thing, regardless of how insignificant it seems.”

“And that affects me…how?” the lieutenant asked.

“I’ve been asked to start from scratch with some of the neglected prisoners. Not my word, mind you. From the top, you know? Wish I could duck it. Big pain in the neck, I realize, but there it is.”

“No problem,” the lieutenant answered somewhat stiffly. “Do you have a list, or are we starting over alphabetically?”

“I have a list,” Armstrong admitted, “but it’s more like alphabet soup. They’ve been prioritized somehow, by someone. You can ask me how, why, who, but I don’t know. God’s truth.”

He was about to put a hand over his heart, but thought that might be overdoing it.

“I don’t require an explanation, Mr. Armstrong,” Lewis said. “When did you want to start?”

“This morning, if that’s feasible.”

“I’ll need your list.”

“Of course.” Armstrong retrieved two sheets of folded paper from an inside pocket of his jacket, passing them across the desk. Lewis unfolded them, blinked once, then tried to mask his surprise as he surveyed the twin columns of small, single-spaced type.

“This looks like nearly half the men in camp,” the lieutenant said.

“Is it?” Armstrong cocked an eyebrow, as if mildly curious. “I couldn’t say.”

“And these have been prioritized, you say? Does that mean that the first, say, dozen on the list are now prime terrorism suspects?”

Armstrong shrugged, his face contorting into something that approximated puzzlement. “Beats me,” he said. “For all I know, they could have ranked them in reverse order, with small-fry at the top. I really couldn’t say.”

“Mm-hmm.” Lewis looked skeptical, to say the least. “And you want to begin with number one, meaning top left on the first page?”

“Correct.”

“And work your way down column one, then back up to the top of column two? Or zigzag down the page?”

Armstrong pretended not to know that the jarhead was making fun of him. “Straight down, I think. If that’s all right with you.”

“Whatever,” Lewis said. “These clowns aren’t going anywhere. You want to start right now?”

“Ideally, yes,” Armstrong replied.

“Suits me. I’ll see if we have an interpreter available.”

Armstrong relaxed and watched the officer go through his pantomime. In fact, as he well knew, Camp X-ray always had interpreters available. It couldn’t function otherwise, with prisoners who spoke at least three languages aside from Arabic.

After another moment on the telephone, Lewis cradled the receiver, donned a tight-lipped smile and said, “I have a man you can use to get started this morning. Later on today, we’re jammed up pretty tight.”

“Where there’s a will….”

“I’ll see what I can do. No promises.”

“Of course.” He didn’t feel like flexing any hidden muscles at the moment. If the jarhead still felt prickly around lunchtime, Armstrong would reach out and pull whatever strings it took to scorch his lazy ass.

“In that case,” Lewis said, “we’re just waiting for the interpreter. He’s coming over from the barracks as we speak.”

“That should be—”

Sudden rapping on the office door distracted him. The sergeant from the outer waiting room entered, flicked a distracted glance at Armstrong, then told Lewis, “Sir, we’ve had another…incident.”

“Explain,” Lewis commanded. When the sergeant looked again at Armstrong, the lieutenant added, “Sergeant, please speak freely.”

“Yes, sir. It’s another suicide attempt. One of the inmates tried to hang himself.”

“Which one?”

The sergeant looked down at his cupped left hand, where Armstrong saw a sticky note not quite concealed. “His name’s Hasam Khaled, sir. Just a nobody, as far as we can tell. One of the men on walk-through found him hanging in his cell and cut him down.”

“You said he tried to hang himself. How badly is he hurt?” Lewis inquired, sounding as if he didn’t really care much either way.

“Should be all right, sir. That’s the word for now, at least. The medics have him in sick bay.”

“All right. Dismissed.”

The sergeant wheeled around and left the office, closed the door behind him.

“Lieutenant,” Armstrong said, “I’d like to climb out on a limb here, and suggest a change of plans.”

“Not sure I follow you,” said the Marine.

“I’d like to reprioritize that list a bit.”

“Meaning?”

“I want to put a new name at the top.”

“Okay. Which one?”

“I’ll have my first chat with Hasam Khaled.”

“The loser who just tried to off himself?” Lewis seemed surprised.

“That’s right.”

“You mind if I ask why, exactly?”

As it happened, this time Armstrong didn’t mind at all. “He’s anxious to get out of here by any means available,” he said. “That tells me that he’s either cracked and lost his mind—or maybe, just maybe, has something to hide.”

AT FIRST, HASAM KHALED believed that he had found his way to Paradise, but then he felt the harsh pain in his neck and grimaced as his vision cleared. If this was Paradise, then the imam had lied and there was no reward worthy of sacrifice.

Before that sacrilegious thought could take root in his head, Khaled woke to the fact that he was still alive, apparently sequestered in the camp’s infirmary. He had accomplished nothing, other than inflicting needless pain upon himself.

Hoping the noose might have destroyed his vocal cords, he cleared his throat, then tried to speak. The words were hoarse and painful, but he heard them clearly, even though he whispered.

“Doctor,” someone said beyond his line of sight, “this one’s awake.”

“Good thing,” another voice replied. “I’ve got them breathing down my neck.”

Khaled was functional in English, but he still had trouble with its slang and idioms. Why, for example, would one person breathe into another’s neck, except for purposes of artificial respiration? And the second speaker clearly didn’t require such treatment, since he had ability to breathe and speak unaided.

Faces loomed beside his narrow bed, one man with a white coat over his uniform, the other garbed in the fatigues worn by all guards throughout the camp. Khaled had studied rank insignia for the Great Satan’s military forces, and he recognized the white coat as a first lieutenant, while the other was a corporal of the United States Marines.

His mortal enemies.

“Mr. Khaled?” The white coat peered into his face and raised a fist, the index finger pointed up. “How many fingers do you see?”

He had a normal hand. “Five,” Khaled said.

The white coat raised another finger, to create a V. “How many now?” he asked.

“Still five.”

“He’s yanking you, Lieutenant,” the corporal said.

“You think?”

Scowling, the officer informed Khaled, “You have some visitors. Their sense of humor sucks.”

Khaled did not attempt to turn his head. He’d let his enemies do all the work, while he focused upon resisting them.

A moment later, two new faces flanked his bed. One was a sergeant in his early twenties, while the other was a slightly older man, blond haired, wearing some kind of business suit.

The suit spoke first. “Hasam Khaled?”

Khaled didn’t respond. He was determined to say nothing, come what may. If later he was forced to scream, perhaps it wouldn’t count against him in the eyes of God.

“That was quite an accident you had,” the blonde remarked. The sergeant translated his words to Arabic.

What accident? He’d tried to hang himself. The only accident had been his failure to achieve that end.

“Escape attempts are frowned upon, you realize.”

Escape? Khaled concluded that the blond man was a fool, perhaps insane.

“It adds time to your sentence, get it? And you haven’t even had your trial yet. Honestly, Hasam, what were you thinking?”

That’s for me to know, Khaled thought, tuning out the voice of the interpreter.

“I’d like to help you, if I can,” the American said.

Then kill yourself, Khaled answered silently. It took an effort not to smile, but even thinking seemed to hurt his injured throat.

“Of course, I can’t do anything on your behalf, unless you’re willing to cooperate.”

Never.

“A few quick questions,” the blonde said. “Nothing earth-shattering, you understand. The basic sort of thing. Name, rank and what have you.”

The blonde was lying. Khaled smelled it on him.

“But if you won’t help,” the litany went on, “well…”

Here it comes. First threats, then pain. Khaled tried to prepare himself, but it was difficult, not knowing how his captors would torment him.

“I suspect,” the suit remarked off-handedly, “that you could use some medicine. Sergeant?”

“I’ll fetch the medic, sir.”

Briefly alone, the blonde bent lower, almost whispering. “If you can follow this at all, I really think that you should talk to me, without the needles. Once they start…well, hey, I never knew a doctor who could say, ‘Enough’s enough.’ Have you? Hasam? Okay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The sergeant returned with a different white coat, this one balding and grim in the face. The new arrival carried a hypodermic syringe half filled with milky fluid.

Hasam Khaled recoiled—or would have, if his arms and legs hadn’t been pinned by heavy leather straps. All he could do was wriggle, strain against the leather, as the medic with the needle swabbed his arm with alcohol, then spiked him.

Khaled was expecting pain, but in its place euphoria suffused his body. For a moment, he imagined they were killing him—some executions in America were carried out with poisoned hypodermics—but that made no sense. They couldn’t question him if he was dead.

No. They were lulling him with drugs, polluting him with chemicals to make him speak. Khaled determined to resist Satan’s technology at any cost, even if he was forced to bite his tongue and drown in his own blood.

That sounded like a good idea, but when he tried it, Khaled found his jaws unwilling to obey. In fact, the very notion seemed so silly that he nearly burst out laughing.

“Hasam? Earth to Hasam?”

The blonde was speaking once again, his translator echoing everything he said, like an annoying television sound track.

“Feeling better, Has, my man? That’s good. Now, let’s get down to business, shall we?”

Business? I was never very good at business. You can ask my father. He will—

“What I need to know, first thing,” the rude blonde interrupted him, “is why you tried to kill yourself. Just tell me that, for starters, and we’re on our way.”

“Secret,” Khaled whispered, not realizing for an instant that he’d spoken.

Stop! Resist! Say nothing, in the name of God!

“Secret? Now we’re getting somewhere, Hassy. May I call you Hassy? Good. About this secret, now. What is it?”

Although Khaled had spoken English, the interpreter continued with his task.

“Too great. I must…not…tell.”

“We’re all friends here,” the blonde assured him, smiling like a sneaky thief. “You can tell me anything. Don’t be embarrassed. Hassy, I can promise you, I’ve heard it all.”

“Not this.”

“Surprise me, then. I’m always up for something new.”

Khaled could feel the smile form on his face. “You will know soon enough,” he said.

“Will I?” the blonde replied. “All right, then, but I’d like a little preview, if you don’t mind. What we call a trailer, in the States. A glimpse, to you. How’d that be, Hassy?”

Still Khaled resisted, but he couldn’t fight the drugs forever. Finally, weeping for shame and the inevitable loss of Paradise, he spoke a name.

CHAPTER ONE

Cocoa Beach, Florida

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, walked along a quiet, nearly vacant beach at sunrise. It was nearly vacant, since a beach bum and his lady had apparently camped out the night before, somehow avoiding the nocturnal beach patrol to plant their sleeping bags above the high-tide water-line. They were engrossed in each other as he passed, ignoring him, waking to yet another day of—what?

Good luck, he hoped, and wished them well.

A small crab scuttled out of Bolan’s path, chasing the white Atlantic surf as it retreated. In his short-sleeved shirt, Bolan was conscious of a chill wind off the ocean, but he trusted that the sun would warm him soon enough.

Right now, the chill felt good, a respite from the heat he knew was coming, guaranteed.

It was a rare day when he could escape the heat.

He’d spent the past two nights at the Wakulla Inn, taking a unit with a kitchen and more bedrooms than he needed, just to have the space. Two days of beachfront R and R had tanned him, while meandering along the main drag, two blocks from his pad, briefly immersed him in the tourist scene. He’d poked around Ron Jon’s and other surf shops, happily admiring the bikinis, scowling at the baby sharks and alligators slaughtered into knickknacks for the Yankee set.

And life went on.

But not for long.

That morning, he was meeting Hal Brognola, their connection arranged on Sunday evening via sat phone linkup from Stony Man Farm. Bolan hadn’t asked why Hal wanted to meet in Florida, instead of someplace close to Washington. It simply wasn’t done.

As luck would have it, he’d been passing through Atlanta with some time and narcotraffickers to kill, when Hal had buzzed him to request a face-to-face. They met in person six or seven times a year, on average, but usually in proximity to Wonderland, D.C., where the big Fed held down a desk at the Justice Department, six blocks from the White House.

Bolan had never seen Hal’s office. It would be a no-win situation, all around, since he had been America’s most-wanted fugitive—until his death, some years ago, in New York City. Now, with a new face and several identities to spare, he did the same things that he’d done before, but with the covert blessing of his Uncle Sam.

He felt relaxed, ready to roll on whatever assignment Brognola might have for him. He didn’t try to second-guess the man from Justice, having learned from long experience that it would be a futile exercise. Brognola would present the facts and arguments for intervention. Bolan had the option of refusing any job that went against his grain, in which case it would pass to other hands, but he had never exercised that right.

One reason: he and Hal were well attuned to life, society and the preventive maintenance required to keep America the beautiful from turning into something else entirely. Bolan respected the Constitution and the laws that guaranteed all citizens their civil rights, but there were times when something happened to the system and it didn’t work as planned.

Sometimes corruption was to blame, or loopholes in the law that might take years to plug, while predators took full advantage of the gaps to victimize the innocent and weak. At other times, the system’s built-in safeguards made the wheels of justice turn too slowly, costing lives and human misery before a verdict could be rendered, then appealed, then reaffirmed by higher courts.

Brognola found some of the targets for him. Bolan found some others on his own. Financing from the nerve center of operations came from covert budgetary pigeonholes, while Bolan’s pocket money often emanated from the predators themselves. He had no qualms about relieving drug dealers or loan sharks of their blood money, and if the scumbags suffered catastrophic injuries while he was taking out a loan, what of it?

There were always more scumbags in waiting, never any shortage in the world that Bolan had observed.

Downrange, he saw a solitary figure striding toward him, hands in pockets, a fedora planted squarely on its head. He couldn’t swear it was Brognola, but odds against a stranger showing up at the appointed time, in that getup, were next to nil.

Brognola called to him from fifty feet away. “Would you believe I’m on vacation?”

“Not a chance,” Bolan replied.

“Okay, you’re right. Let’s take a walk.”

They walked and talked. The basic pleasantries were brief, whatever passed for personal emotion understood between these battle-hardened warriors and beyond the reach of words. Despite a friendship so deep-seated that both took it rightfully for granted, they had business to discuss.

“Vacation,” Brognola mused. “Sure, I’ve heard of that.”

“You ought to try it,” Bolan said.

“Maybe next year. And look who’s talking.”

“I’ve just had two days.”

“That’s two in how damned long?”

“Who’s counting?” Bolan asked him.

“Right. Okay. So, what I’ve got is something sticky. It’s a problem that I can’t turn loose.”

“I’m listening.”

“What do you know about Guantanamo?”

“It’s ninety miles that way,” Bolan said, with a thumb jerk toward his shoulder. “Cuba. Big Marine base, captured from the Spanish back when Teddy Roosevelt was still a rough-rider. Maintained as U.S. territory since the Castro revolution, more or less to spite Fidel.”

“What else?” Brognola urged.

“Detention blocks for terrorists and terror suspects taken in Afghanistan, Iraq and who-knows-where.”

“Camp X-ray,” Brognola confirmed. “It’s part of why we’re here.”

“They need another sentry?” Bolan asked.

“I doubt it. Sentries they have plenty of. Also interrogators.” Bolan caught a faint tone of distaste in the big Fed’s voice, covered reasonably well. Both of them recognized that sometimes information had to be gathered swiftly, forcefully. And neither of them liked it one damned bit.

“Interrogators?” he reminded Brognola when silence stretched between them for the better part of a minute.

“Right. A few days back, one of the inmates tried to hang himself and botched it. They revived him, and decided he was worth a closer look. Why now, I’m guessing was the rationale. Why would this nobody, who claims he’s innocent, decide to off himself one afternoon for no apparent reason?”

“It’s a question,” Bolan said.

“And they got answers,” Brognola confided.

“Which involves us…how?”

“I guess you know the rule of thumb for suspects held since 9/11, right? Arrest a hundred, and you may get four or five who know a guy who knows a guy. Arrest a thousand, maybe you find one or two who are those guys. This guy who tried to lynch himself knows people. My guess, he got tired of sitting in his cell, ignored, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. He figured they’d be getting back to him, sooner or later, and he wanted to eliminate the chance of letting something slip.”

“Too bad for him he couldn’t do it right,” Bolan observed.

“Too bad for him, but maybe good for us.”

“How so?”

“Because he knows things,” Brognola said. “Not a major player, now, don’t get me wrong. His face isn’t on anybody’s deck of cards. They never heard of him at Langley, until three, four days ago. At least, they never really thought about him. Way down at the bottom of some list that gathered dust. No one you’d give the time of day. They might’ve turned him loose, another six months or a year, except for the attempted suicide.”

“But now he’s in the spotlight.”

“Sitting right there on the grill,” Brognola said. “Maybe you smell the smoke from here. And one way or another, they persuade this guy to spill his guts. Turns out, he’s been around and knows his way around. Hamas, al Qaeda, PLO—little Hasam Khaled’s got friends all over.”

“But he’s not a major player?” Bolan asked.

“Not even close,” Brognola replied. “But he’s the man nobody notices. Loyal to a fault, likely involved in bombings or some other shit, but mostly, he’s just there. Maybe he brings the big boys tea and sandwiches, stands guard outside the tent or tags along behind them with his AK when they take a stroll. But all the while, he hears things.”

“Which he’s sharing with the Gitmo gang,” Bolan said.

“Bingo. Some of it’s history, you know, like Joe Valachi telling all about the 1930s Mafia in 1961. Khaled isn’t that old, but neither are the groups he’s been involved with. What I hear, he’s talking personalities and troop deployments, plans that failed, others that hit the bull’s-eye, schisms in the ranks—the whole nine yards.”

“That covers lots of ground,” Bolan observed.

“Too much for us to think about. Except, maybe, one thing.”

Bolan said nothing, waiting for it.

“There was one name that stood out,” Brognola said. “I mean, a lot of names stood out, but this one was American.”

“Unusual.”

“In spades. You’ve heard about the so-called American Taliban caught in Afghanistan, and that guy with the shoe bomb that didn’t go off.”

Bolan nodded, still waiting.

“Well, those are the norm when al Qaeda or some rival group gets a Yank in the ranks. Disaffected young men, for the most part. They look for a cause with excitement attached. If they’re rednecks, they go for the Klan or militias. Same thing. Self-improvement through hate.”

“But the new name is different,” Bolan said, not asking.

“And then some,” Brognola replied. “This one worries the hell out of Langley, the Pentagon, maybe the White House. It worries the hell out of me.”

“It’s a congressman? Senator? What?”

“Don’t I wish. If it was, we could stake out his office, tap into his phone lines, whatever. The Bureau could do it and slap him with charges from here to next Easter. It isn’t that simple.”

“Go on.”

“First, the guy’s not in-country. You’ve heard of free radicals? This one’s the ultimate. Maybe we know where he is, maybe not. It’s a toss-up, and knowing’s not bagging.”

“Okay.”

“But he’s not just elusive. He’s skilled, see? He knows the guerrilla game inside and out, and it’s not just in theory. He’s been there, in combat, for our side and theirs. In between he was anyone’s soldier if they could afford him. Turns out, some of our enemies have oil and cash to burn.”

“Sounds tough,” Bolan agreed.

“He’s tough, all right.” Brognola stopped dead in the sand, sun rising at his back. “In fact, he’s you.”

“Say what?”

“I don’t mean you, you. But he’s like you. Special Forces. The same training, same background, plenty of real combat experience before he took a discharge and went into business for himself.”

“Who is this guy?” Bolan asked.

Brognola fished inside his jacket and produced a CD in a plastic case. “His file’s on here, in PDF,” the man from Justice said. “Long story somewhat short, his name is Eugene Talmadge. Born in 1967, joined the Army out of high school. Graduated to the Green Berets at twenty, with a sergeant’s stripes. Like you.”

Bolan was less than thrilled with the comparison, but kept his mouth shut, listening.

“Combat-wise, he served in Panama, the Noriega thing down there—”

Bolan supplied the operation’s name. “Just Cause.”

“That’s it. Then, he was back for Desert Storm in 1991, followed by action in Somalia and Bosnia. Peacekeeping, I believe they called it at the time. In 1995 there was an incident with one of his superiors. It’s in the file, sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“The way it reads, Talmadge had words with a lieutenant and teed off on him. The looey wound up close to brain-dead. Talmadge got a compromise verdict at his court-martial. Guilty of assaulting a superior, acquitted of attempted murder and some other stuff. The Army yanked his pension and he walked with a dishonorable discharge.”

“You don’t buy the verdict,” Bolan said, not making it a question.

“Oh, I’m sure about the verdict,” Brognola replied, “but not about the case. Transcripts are classified, but I got Aaron and his techies at the Farm to do some hacking for me, on the q.t. It turns out that Talmadge’s defense was basically eradicated from the public record.”

“Being?”

“Namely,” Brognola said, “that he caught this officer and gentleman trying to rape a female corporal. Apparently, when Talmadge pulled him off, the looey lost it, started swinging on him, and the rest his history.”

“They hung him out to dry for that?”

“Apparently,” Brognola said. “Today, they’d probably be prosecuting the lieutenant, but the atmosphere in 1995 was different. They had adultery scandals going on, reports of sexual assaults at West Point and Annapolis. I’m guessing that one more black eye was one too many.”

“And Talmadge came out pissed.”

“I’m guessing yes. He shopped around for jobs, but with the DD and his lack of college training, it was pretty much a hopeless case. Before starvation hit, he started doing what he’s good at, but for higher pay than Uncle Sam had ever given him.”

“A merc,” Bolan said. It was more or less predictable, the same course followed throughout history by soldiers of all nations who were left without a service or a war to fight.

“A merc and contract hitter,” Brognola amended. “Once again, it’s in the dossier. To summarize, we’re sure of work he did in Africa, Myanmar and Brazil. That’s soldiering. Talmadge is also the prime suspect in at least eleven contract murders spanning Europe and North Africa, with one in Canada. He does good work, cleans up after himself. No charges pending anywhere.”

“Which brings us back to Gitmo,” Bolan said.

“It does. Our songbird dropped his name last week. No, it didn’t ring a bell at first, but Langley started digging, and the Pentagon pitched in. It set alarm bells ringing when they found his file.”

“What’s he involved in?” Bolan asked.

“Washington supposed it must be some kind of guerrilla training. Make that hoped. Sources confirmed that Talmadge has been seen in Syria, Iran and Pakistan. Also in Jordan, once or twice, hanging around the Bekaa Valley. That’s dope money and Islamic terrorists. He could’ve been on tap for either, or for both. So, training, right?”

“Sounds like it,” Bolan said.

“Until we started looking at his travel record and comparing it to contract hits. A Mossad district chief in Stockholm. An Iranian defector in Versailles. Two Saudi dissidents in Rome. One of Osama’s breakaway lieutenants in Vienna. It goes on like that.”

“He’s helping them clean house.”

“At least,” Brognola said. “One thing I’d say about our boy, he won’t discriminate. From what’s on file, he likes the highest bidder while the money’s flowing, and he moves on when it stops. No job too dirty, in the meantime. In Vienna, where he used C-4, the target had his wife and daughter with him. Talmadge took all three. The girl was four years old.”

“Hard to believe he hasn’t left some kind of trail for the forensics people,” Bolan said.

“It’s like I said. He’s you.”

“Enough with that, okay?”

“Sorry.” Brognola looked contrite, or something close to it. “No offense. I mean to say that he’s professional. Back in the day, you left a trail because you wanted to. Psy-war against the opposition, right? You rattled them by showing where you’d been, and sometimes called ahead to tell them who was next.”

Brognola’s first contact with Bolan had occurred while the big Fed was FBI and Bolan was engaged in a heroic one-man war against the Mafia, avenging damage to his family and rolling on from there to make syndicate mobsters an endangered species.

“It was a different situation,” Bolan said.

“My point exactly,” Brognola replied. “Talmadge has no cause of his own, no faith in anyone or anything except himself. He’ll work for them, kill for them, but he’s not committed. If he left a sign at any of his hits, it would reflect the group that hired him, not Gene Talmadge.”

“But you’ve tracked him anyway.”

Brognola shrugged. “You know how these things work. Combine the testimony of informants and survivors with the various security devices found in airports—biometric scanners are the bomb, apparently—and we can place him near the scene of various assassinations, bombings, this and that. We don’t have photos of his finger on the trigger, but it comes down to the next-best thing. Besides, it isn’t like we’re taking him to trial.”

And there it was. The death sentence.

“The action you’re describing to me has been going on for—what? Eleven years?”

“At least,” Brognola said.

“So why the sudden urgency?” Bolan asked.

“Ah. Because our songbird down at Gitmo didn’t only drop a name.”

“Go on.”

“According to Khaled, al Qaeda has our boy on tap this time, to ‘teach Satan a lesson he will not forget.’ Khaled has no specifics on the nature of that lesson, but we didn’t like the sound of it.”

“That’s understandable,” Bolan allowed.

“So, there you are. We’ve got one kick-ass warrior, seemingly devoid of anything resembling conscience, working for a group that wants to take us off the map. We’d like to stop them—him, specifically—and do it in a way that doesn’t make the Pentagon look like a nuthouse with the inmates in control. You in?”

Bolan frowned, feeling the deadweight of the CD in his pocket. “Yeah,” he said at last. “I’m in.”

A QUARTER OF AN HOUR LATER, back at the Wakulla Inn, Bolan reviewed the CD on his laptop. It began with all the ordinary paperwork for the induction of a U.S. Army private, with the details of its subject’s early life.

Eugene Adam Talmadge had indeed been born in 1967—April 23, to be precise—in Boulder, Colorado. His high-school grades were average, except in sports, where he excelled. A college football scholarship had been on offer, but he’d turned it down to wear a uniform, and then a green beret.

Bolan was somewhat puzzled by that choice, coming in 1985, when there was no threat of a military draft and no war currently in progress to attract daredevil types. Maybe Talmadge decided that he was unsuited to a college campus, even with the free ride offered by its sports department. Maybe he was hoping to accomplish something on his own, not have it handed to him on a silver platter just because he was a jock. Trouble at home? Something so personal it didn’t make the files?

Bolan would never know.

Talmadge had been a standout boot in basic training, and had taken to the Special Forces school at Benning like a duck to water, acing every course except the foreign-language training, where he struggled for a passing score in Spanish. When it came to weapons training and explosives, unarmed combat and survival, though, Talmadge had everything the service could desire, and then some.

Talmadge had killed his first two men in Panama, a couple of Manuel Noriega’s gorillas who weren’t smart enough to lay down their arms in the face of superior force. There was no intimation of a trigger-happy soldier in that case, no hint of any impropriety.

In combat, people died.

In Desert Storm, Talmadge had earned a reputation for himself. On the advance from Kuwait, through Iraq, he’d personally taken out at least two dozen members of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, earning a Silver Star and a Purple Heart in the process. The citation that accompanied his Silver Star praised Talmadge for his bravery and focus under fire, resulting in the rescue of two wounded comrades and elimination of a hostile rifle squad. Details were classified, suggesting that the mission also had a covert side.

His flesh wounds didn’t keep him out of action long. Talmadge had shipped out for Somalia in winter 1992, as part of Washington’s attempt to regulate that nation’s rival warlords and bring order out of chaos. That attempt had failed, but Talmadge scored nine more verified kills during four months in-country. His part in the rescue of a downed Black Hawk crew earned him a DSC—Distinguished Service Cross—and yet another Purple Heart.

He did all right, Bolan thought, moving onward through the soldier’s life on paper.

The sutures were barely removed from Talmadge’s Somalian wounds when new orders dispatched him to Bosnia-Herzegovina, land of ethnic cleansing and religious hatred spanning centuries. More warlords, more atrocities, more combat pay. Talmadge hadn’t been wounded in that conflict, but he had logged seven kills the record keepers knew about. No decorations that time for a job well done.

The Army’s standard paperwork included his record for the next year and a half, until the bitter end. Bolan discovered that the incident in 1995 had happened at Fort Benning. A lieutenant, name deleted, was the so-called victim, with a list of fractures and internal damage ranging from his skull down to his knees. The witnesses included two civilians and a corporal, name deleted, who was almost certainly the female Brognola had mentioned in his summary.

And as Brognola had explained, the transcripts of the court-martial were missing, classified for reasons unexplained. The logic of that void was inescapable: the facts were secret. Ergo, there could be no explanation why they had been classified, or else the secret would’ve been revealed.

Catch-22.

Bolan took Brognola’s appraisal of the case as valid, recognized the anger and frustration Talmadge had to have felt at being railroaded. Any remarks he may have offered to the court-martial were classified along with all the rest, leaving the slate blank. Only the verdict now remained, its stinging condemnation of a former hero sure to follow him for the remainder of his life.

Under the circumstances, Bolan was a bit surprised that Talmadge hadn’t sought revenge against the Army. Then again, when he considered what Talmadge had done throughout the intervening years—what he was doing now—perhaps he had. Brognola might be wrong about the former Green Beret’s coldhearted profit motive. Talmadge fought for pay, of course—he had to eat, like anybody else—but in his work for Middle Eastern terrorists, he had been striking out against the West.

And striking back at Uncle Sam.

Bolan was no armchair psychologist, but it didn’t require a Ph.D. to recognize that Talmadge had his pick of causes and employers in a world where violence was the norm. He could’ve spent more time in sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia if his only goal was money in the bank.

Instead, by working for Hamas, al Qaeda and the like, Talmadge had actually chosen sides, but with a difference. He wasn’t some deluded college convert to Islamic fundamentalist extremism, or a celebrity who craved publicity at any cost. He was a soldier, and he’d made a choice.

Bolan thought he understood Gene Talmadge now, and he could even sympathize with him. Up to a point. But sympathy ran out when Talmadge cast his lot with terrorists and criminals. There was—at least to Bolan’s mind—a world of difference between a mercenary soldier drifting aimlessly, involved in brushfire wars without regard to ideology, and one who set himself on a collision course with the United States and civilized society.

Whatever wrongs Talmadge had suffered at the hands of his superiors, he’d given up the moral high ground when he hired on with al Qaeda and its allies to perpetuate a bloodbath fueled by hatred and fanaticism. Bolan knew that something had to be done, and he seemed the best qualified to do the job.

Brognola’s latest information placed the target in Jakarta, where al Qaeda was supposed to have a thriving outpost. Bolan’s contact on the ground would be an agent from Homeland Security, who had been keeping track of Talmadge and his playmates since the news from Gitmo started making waves.

Whether the Special Forces renegade would still be there when Bolan reached the scene was anybody’s guess, but every journey had a starting point.