Crucial Intercept. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ each time it happened, but Bolan knew as well as Price did that they would not get ahead of the shooters by playing a reactive game. They needed to get in front of the gunners, whoever they were.

      He had checked each site, the latest a motel in Williamsburg that had been blown half to hell. Yet again, there was no evidence of the shooters themselves. He had phoned in and reported as much. Price had promised that the follow-up field team, a covert Justice analysis unit protected by blacksuit gunners from Stony Man, would check for evidence he might have missed in his cursory inspection, as they had been doing behind him all night. They would also see if there were any local surveillance sources to be pulled for analysis. That didn’t concern Bolan, at least not immediately. He would be surprised if the tapes showed anything of use except to confirm Baldero’s presence. Intelligence on the shooters would be helpful, but even that wasn’t crucial at the moment. The only thing that mattered was getting out in front of the shooters, and that depended on the pattern analysis Stony Man had been working on.

      “Price here.”

      “Striker,” Bolan said. “Same story here.”

      “You’re still outside Williamsburg?”

      “Yes,” he said. “Your crew can move in on the motel. I saw a lot of shell casings but not much else. No sign of our boy, and nothing of use. Barb, you’ve got to get me in front of this. Has Bear run his pattern analysis?”

      “Got you right here, Striker.” Aaron Kurtzman’s voice came over the line. “I’m here with Barb. Our instincts have been right all along. We’re plotting the shootings and they make a line, more or less. That puts the next possible cluster of targets in a more or less straight line through Hampton, Newport News and Norfolk, if the pattern holds.”

      “Then I’m headed to—” Bolan began. He stopped.

      “Striker?” Price asked in Bolan’s ear. The soldier’s head snapped left, then right. His eyes narrowed.

      “I hear gunshots,” Bolan said. He snapped the phone shut and half-vaulted the hood of the Crown Victoria, throwing himself behind the wheel and slamming the door shut. The big tires squealed and the engine roared as he floored the vehicle, tearing out of the convenience store parking lot. Horns honked as he cut off several vehicles. The car whipped onto the highway and he hit the automatic windows, rolling them all the way down on both sides, fore and aft.

      He heard it again, then—the unmistakable sound of automatic gunfire in the distance, moving away from him. He pushed the interceptor onward, yanking the wheel hard left, cutting across a side street and taking another.

      When he heard the next burst of shots, it was louder. He was getting closer. He scanned the traffic far ahead of him.

      Logistically, this was very bad. It was broad daylight. A running gun battle in an American city, especially an American tourist city, was going to pour gasoline on the already raging media fire over the cluster of shootings throughout the night. The Executioner had been listening to news-talk radio throughout his nighttime chase. Every station was bubbling over with sensational reporting on the “terrorist attacks,” with hysterical talking heads manning their desks and filling the airwaves with commentary from “experts.” The incessant speculation and mindless chatter had eventually become so much background noise to Bolan, who understood only too well the reality that the reporters were playing at analyzing.

      From a pocket of his blacksuit—the formfitting black combat clothing that could pass for casual street clothes to the untrained eye, especially when worn under a light windbreaker as he was doing—Bolan removed a tiny earbud headset and donned it. He flipped open his secure sat phone and replaced the device in his pocket after hitting the first speed dial. Price’s voice came to him almost instantly, filtered through the earpiece.

      “Striker?”

      “I’m in pursuit, target or targets unknown.” He consulted the GPS unit on his dashboard and read off the coordinates and heading. As he did so, he heard more gunfire and thought he could make out muzzle flashes in the distance. It was hard to tell in the daylight. “Tracking gunfire specifically. To guess, I’d say our shooters weren’t quite done with Williamsburg.”

      “You’re across town from the motel they hit,” Price said, though Bolan was perfectly aware of his position. “If you stay on this heading, you’ll end up hitting Norfolk, more or less.”

      “Kudos to Bear, then,” Bolan said. “Barb, I have a theory.”

      “Striker?”

      “Our boy Baldero. He’s rabbiting. Think about it. If you were suddenly a fugitive, if someone or some group of some-ones was trying to shoot you, where would you go? A computer lab, to try and contact help. Baldero’s a tech geek, right? That’s familiar. That’s where he’d head. Motels, convenience stores, Laundromats…places to go to ground, and places to get food or supplies that are open all night long while you’re on the run.”

      “We’ve been considering that in trying to work up a profile on him,” Price said. “There’s not much. Baldero has no criminal record. No known associates in the drug trade or with fringe political groups. No legal records of any kind, apart from a custody battle working its way through the courts. He’s got an estranged wife and a three-year-old daughter, living in Texas.”

      “So,” Bolan said, slamming the big car’s accelerator to the floor and rocketing around a slow-moving panel truck as he gained on the gunfire ahead of him, “we’ve got a former CIA cryptographer who’s got himself into something so bad that it’s worth putting holes in half the state to kill him. The question is, what?”

      “That’s what has the Man worried, Striker,” Price said. “More than the need to put a stop to these attacks, and the unrest they’re generating, we need to know what’s behind it. It could be much worse. It’s almost certainly much worse.”

      “Got it, Barb. I’m closing now. We’ve caught a break, it seems. Have Bear and his team stand by to analyze any intelligence I might—”

      The cargo van that cut across Bolan’s path was traveling nearly eighty miles an hour.

      Bolan could see the van’s grille bearing down on him as it barreled straight for the driver’s door of his sedan.

      The headlights shone very bright.

      2

      Bolan had a fraction of a second in which to react. He did the only thing he could do—he whipped the steering wheel hard to the left.

      The dirty white cargo van blew past him on his passenger side, sheering off the car’s side mirror in a small maelstrom of plastic shards and silvery slivers. The rear end of the big car broke free, losing traction through the violent maneuver. The back of the vehicle came around, and Bolan found himself skidding through a complete 180-degree turn. The smell of burning rubber filled the car as he fought the steering wheel and the brakes, riding out the skid and narrowly missing a passenger car as he crossed the double line and barreled through oncoming traffic. The Crown Victoria finally jerked to a stop on the shoulder of the opposite side of the road, facing back the way Bolan had come.

      He wasted no time. Snatching up the canvas war bag that contained his gear from Kissinger, he threw it over his shoulder and was out of the car in a heartbeat. As he moved, he drew the Beretta 93-R pistol from its custom leather shoulder holster. Flipping the selector switch to 3-round-burst mode, he rounded on the van, which had come to a screeching СКАЧАТЬ