Conflict Zone. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ What was he fighting for, if not the chance to lead a better and more peaceful life?

      Of course, he fought for others. Sacrificed his future, in effect. There’d be no wife and kiddies, no white picket fence, no PTA meetings or Christmas parties at the nine-to-five office. No pension or gold watch when he’d put in his time.

      Just death.

      And he’d already had a preview of his own, stage-managed in Manhattan by the same folks who had built the installation that lay five or six miles down the scenic route.

      Mack Bolan was no more.

      Long live the Executioner.

      BOLAN CLEARED security without a hitch. He passed a tractor harrowing one of the fields on his left as he drove toward the main house. Stony Man was a working farm, which paid some of the bills and supported its cover, since aerial photos would show cultivated fields and farmhands pursuing their normal duties.

      Those photos wouldn’t reveal that the workers were extremely motivated cops and members of America’s elite military teams—Navy SEALs, Special Forces, Army Rangers, Marine Corps Force Recon—who spent duty rotations at Stony Man under a lifetime oath of secrecy. All armed. All dangerous.

      There were risks involved in spying on Stony Man Farm. Each aircraft passing overhead was monitored on radar and by other means. If one appeared too nosy, there were means for dealing with the problem.

      They included Stinger ground-to-air missiles and a dowdy-looking single-wide mobile home planted in the middle of the Farm’s airstrip. If friendly aircraft were expected, a tractor pulled the mobile home aside to permit landing. If intruders tried to land uninvited, the trailer not only blocked the runway, but could drop its walls on hinges to reveal quad-mounted TM-134 miniguns, each six-barreled weapon capable of firing four thousand 7.62 mm rounds per second.

      Fifty yards out from the farmhouse, Bolan recognized Hal Brognola and Barbara Price waiting for him on the wide front porch. A couple of young shirtless warriors in blue jeans and work boots were painting the upper story of the house, a procedure that Bolan had never observed before. He caught Price glancing his way and couldn’t help smiling.

      The home team waited for him where they stood. Bolan climbed the three porch steps and shook their hands in turn. Price’s greeting was professional, giving no hint of all the times they’d shared a bed in his upstairs quarters at the Farm, when he was passing through.

      “Good trip?” Brognola asked, as always.

      “Uneventful,” Bolan answered.

      “That’s the best kind. Join us in the War Room?”

      Bolan nodded, then followed Brognola and Price inside.

      The War Room occupied roughly one-quarter of the farmhouse’s basement level. It was basically a high-tech conference room, with all the audiovisual bells and whistles, but Brognola had always called it the War Room, since discussions held around its meeting table always ended with an order to destroy some target that duly constituted authorities found themselves unable to touch by legitimate means.

      Sooner or later, it came down to war.

      Bolan supposed that somewhere in the Farm’s computer database there was a tally of the lives that had been terminated based on orders issued in that room. Bolan had never made a point of keeping score, and didn’t plan on starting now, but sometimes he got curious.

      The Farm wasn’t his sole preserve. It issued orders to the fighting men of Able Team and Phoenix Force, as well, while dabbling here and there in God knew what covert attempts by other agencies to hold the savages at bay. Sometimes—most times—it worked, but only in the short-term. In the long war of Good versus Evil, whoever laid down the ground rules, there was no final victory, no irredeemable defeat.

      There was only the struggle.

      And it was about to resume.

      Aaron Kurtzman—“the Bear” to his friends—was waiting when they reached the War Room, seated in the motorized wheelchair that was his chief mode of conveyance since a bullet in the back had left him paralyzed from the waist down. That had occurred during a raid on Stony Man, initiated by a traitor in the upper levels of the CIA, and it accounted for the ultrastrict security that cloaked the Farm today.

      “I won’t ask you about your trip,” Kurtzman said, smiling as he put the crunch on Bolan’s hand.

      Brognola humphed at that, making the others smile, then said, “Consistency’s a virtue.”

      “Absolutely,” Price told him as she took her usual seat. “No one would ever doubt your virtue, Hal.”

      “In my day, civilized discourse required amenities,” Brognola said. “But hey, screw it. Let’s get to work, shall we?”

      “Sounds good,” Bolan replied, smiling.

      “What do you know about Nigeria?” Brognola asked.

      “It’s in West Africa,” Bolan said. “Ruled by France, then Britain, until independence in the early sixties. Trouble with Biafra in the same decade. There’s oil, and everybody wants it. Drugs, coming and going. Tribal conflict verging on a civil war at times, and throw in some religious upheaval. Advance-fee frauds that go around the world through e-mail. Bribes are the order of the day, never mind corruption. That’s it, in a nutshell.”

      “You’ve hit all the basics,” the big Fed acknowledged. “Are you up to speed on MEND?”

      “Guerrillas. Terrorists. The acronym escapes me at the moment,” Bolan said.

      “You’re still well ahead of the norm,” Brognola said. “It’s the Movement for Emancipation of the Niger Delta, waging armed resistance against the federal government and foreign oil companies. You’ve heard of Marion King Hubbert?”

      “No,” Bolan replied. “Can’t say I have.”

      “No sweat. He died in 1989,” the big Fed stated. “A geo-physicist with Shell Oil, out of Houston, best known for his theories on capacity of oil and natural gas reserves. It boils down to what they call Hubbert Peak Theory.”

      “Which is?” Bolan coaxed.

      “Bare bones, the idea that Earth and every part of it have finite petro-gas reserves. Extraction supposedly follows a bell curve, increasing until pumping hits the ‘Hubbert peak,’ and then declining after that.”

      “Sounds right,” Bolan replied. “They aren’t making any more dinosaurs.”

      “So true,” Brognola said. “Anyway, the word from so-called experts at State is that MEND wants to create an ‘artificial Hubbert peak,’ whatever the hell that means. I don’t claim to understand it, but one of MEND’s spokesmen—a character calling himself Major-General Godswill Tammo—says the group plans to seize total control of the oil reserves in Delta State.”

      “How are they doing so far?” Bolan asked.

      “They haven’t captured any fields or pumping stations, but it’s not for lack of trying,” Brognola replied. “Their main deal, at the moment, is attacking pipelines, storage tanks, whatever they can reach. Also, they’re big СКАЧАТЬ