Frontier Fury. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ grenades were Russian RGD-5s, with 110 grams of TNT and liners scored to fling 350 lethal fragments over a killing radius of sixty feet.

      With that gear, and his companion’s AKMS rifle, Bolan was up against a light machine gun with a range around 860 yards, and ten or twelve Kalashnikov assault weapons, likely firing 5.56 mm NATO rounds, with an effective range of 650 yards. Put all that hardware together, and his pursuers could lay down a blistering screen of some eleven thousand rounds per minute.

      In theory.

      In fact, however, none of the APC’s soldiers could fire while their vehicle was rolling in hot pursuit. That left the APC’s machine gunner and the Jeep’s shotgun rider, for a maximum of two weapons engaged, and the APC’s weapon had a 210-yard advantage over anything the Jeep’s rider was carrying.

      Say five hundred rounds per minute for the 7.62 mm MG, and allowing for spoilage of aim, as the eight-wheeled, 11.5-ton BTR-70 pitched and rumbled on its way at top speed, and they might be all right.

      Might be.

      The safer plan was to remain outside the machine gunner’s 860-yard effective range, thus rendering his task that much more difficult, but that was down to Bolan’s driver—whom he’d never seen in action previously, and whose vintage SUV was subject to the same foibles as any other man-made vehicle.

      Call it a race for life, then.

      He was barely on the ground in Pakistan, and Bolan’s mission already hung in the balance.

      They should be able to outrun the APC, with its factory-standard top speed of fifty miles per hour, but bullets were faster, and that still left the Jeep on their tail.

      No matter how well his driver managed to perform, Bolan would have to derail the soldiers in the Jeep—and hope they hadn’t radioed ahead for reinforcements to establish roadblocks on the highway leading northward.

      One thing at a time, Bolan thought, as he focused on the military vehicles behind him. The Jeep had just crossed the river bridge and was accelerating after them, its shotgun rider hanging on for dear life as his driver put the pedal to the floor. Another moment and the APC was after them, its turret gunner rocking helplessly behind his MG, still too far away to sight and fire.

      How long could Bolan’s driver hold that slim advantage? Were his tires in decent shape? Had he maintained his engine? Was the gas tank full?

      Too many questions.

      Bolan crawled over the SUV’s backseat, onto the rear deck in the hatchback section. He would play tail gunner when the enemy closed in behind them.

      And with any luck, he just might live to fight another day.

      2

      Shenandoah National Park, Virginia: Two days earlier

      Skyline Drive was aptly named. It ran along the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains for 105 miles, from Front Royal at the northern terminus to Rockfish Gap at the southern end. Because its full length was within a national park, visitors paid an entry fee of fifteen dollars per car or ten dollars per motorcycle, thus obtaining a seven-day pass.

      Mack Bolan could have saved his money by displaying an ID card he’d received from Hal Brognola through a drop box, which identified the bearer—“Michael Belasko,” with a nonexistent address and a photo that could pass for Bolan’s likeness—as an employee of the National Park Service, but he’d figured why bother?

      He didn’t need to see the ranger in the ticket booth look worried, wondering if he’d done something wrong, or if something critical was happening inside the park and he had missed the memo.

      Anyway, the fifteen bucks made Bolan feel that he was giving something back.

      Built between 1931 and 1939, at the nadir of the Great Depression, Skyline Drive was convoluted and tortuous. Scenes of epic beauty dazzled drivers all the way, but caution was required on the winding turns where bicycles and black bears shared the relatively narrow highway. Park police enforced a strict 35 mph speed limit, and Bolan didn’t want to risk a speeding rap.

      Rolling through Mary Rock Tunnel, 670 feet of pitch darkness, with his headlights on high beams, Bolan wondered where Brognola planned to send him this time. There had been no warning on the telephone—there never was—and Bolan had been left, as usual, to speculate in vain.

      One thing he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt—it wouldn’t be a social call.

      Somewhere, somehow, someone had stepped across a line, and Bolan would be sent to reel them back or punch their ticket for one long, last ride.

      He could refuse the job, of course. That flexibility was built in from the start. But in reality, he’d only turned thumbs-down on a few assignments in the time he’d worked with Brognola and the assembled team at Stony Man Farm.

      The Farm was named for Stony Man Mountain, the fourth highest in the park at 4,010 feet, but it wasn’t actually on the mountain. It did not appear on any map available for public scrutiny, and while it was a working farm—in more ways than one—its crops were not marketed under the Stony Man name.

      Trespassing was rigorously—sometimes fatally—discouraged.

      Roughly half the time, when Bolan visited the Farm, he flew in and out. Stony Man had its own airstrip and helipads, complete with stinger missiles and hidden batteries of antiaircraft guns to deal with any drop-ins who ignored the radio commands to steer clear of restricted airspace.

      It had only happened once, to Bolan’s knowledge, with a careless pilot running short of fuel halfway between Pittsburgh and Winston-Salem. In that case, the guns and rockets hadn’t fired, but several days of house arrest and chemically induced amnesia left the interloper scrambling to explain how he had missed his scheduled wedding.

      The groom did not live happily ever after with his bride…but at least he lived.

      Some others who had trespassed at the Farm with sinister intent were not so fortunate.

      Bolan cleared the tunnel and killed his headlights, braking just beyond the next curve for a line of deer crossing the road. A nine-point buck was last across, pausing to stare at Bolan for a moment through the tinted windshield of his rental car.

      Bolan wondered if the deer spent their whole lives inside the park’s 306 square miles, or if they sometimes strayed outside. With hunting season on the way, he wished them luck.

      So many predators, so little time.

      BOLAN DIDN’T try to spot the guards staked out along his route of travel from the gate to the farmhouse that served as Stony Man’s HQ. He was expected, so went unchallenged by the Farm’s team of “blacksuits.”

      At any given time, Stony Man’s security staff included active-duty members of the U.S. military who dressed as farmhands but were armed.

      Brognola was waiting on the farmhouse porch with Barbara Price—the Farm’s mission controller—when Bolan got there, slowing into his approach. A stocky farmhand with a military buzz cut waited two steps down, to spirit Bolan’s rental car away and out of sight once he had cleared the driver’s seat.

      “Good trip?” Brognola asked, as Bolan climbed the porch steps and shook СКАЧАТЬ