Crucial Intercept. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ over his shoulder.

      “Good luck with…whatever it is you’re doing.”

      “Thank you, Officer.”

      It took Bolan only a few minutes to gather up his gear, check the Crown Victoria for damage and get on the road toward Newport News. Once in motion, he pressed the gas pedal as close to the floor as he dared, weaving through traffic with skill and determination. He was already far behind the curve, but there was no point in delaying further. Until he knew otherwise, his quarry was more likely than anywhere else to be in Newport News, Hampton, Norfolk, or beyond it. That meant he needed to be there, too, and soon.

      He set the cruise control and, though he knew it was dangerous, spared a glance at his phone. He scrolled through the data the Farm was transmitting to him, calling up each image as it downloaded. There were brief personal biographies of the men for whom identities had been dredged up, and complete dossiers on two men not pictured. Bolan read in fits and starts as he switched his attention from the small screen to the road and back again. These were the Farm’s best guess at the likely leaders of such an Iranian strike group. It was a guess based on past Iranian intelligence ops and what Stony Man’s almost prescient computer team could tell him of known Iranian terror operatives—those operating with the nominal sanction of their frequently rogue state’s government.

      The two dossiers were for men named Hassan Ayman, likely the senior member of an Iranian field team assigned to stir up trouble in the United States, and a Marzieh Shirazi, whose name Bolan remembered from several different terror bulletins in Europe. Each man had a file as long as Bolan’s arm. Shirazi was linked to several bombings of targets in Israel, where he had a close working relationship with the PLO and, more recently, with the Palestinian government that incorporated many high-ranking PLO figures, each man among them a murderous terrorist in his own right. Shirazi was small and squat, with a prominent brow, and dark, beady eyes pressed into a face that looked like it had stopped a brick at some point in Shirazi’s teenage years.

      Ayman concerned Bolan more. He had no definitive terror incidents or murders assigned to him but, according to the file, he had long been rumored to be an extremely high-ranking official in Iranian intelligence. He was implicated in scores of deaths of civilians and nominally military targets alike, both in Israel and during the Iran-Iraq war. This last started in 1987. Apparently Ayman was believed, by the Farm’s team and as independently theorized by CIA analysts, to have been instrumental in several high-profile atrocities during the tailend of Iran’s “imposed war” with Iraq. If either Ayman or Shirazi was on scene, or if both of them were active in the here and present, on the streets of the urban United States, things would only get more bloody.

      The big question remained: what did Iranian black-ops assassins want with a single former CIA cryptographer, a young man who had never, according to his file, worked as a field agent or on anything resembling a project related to Iran? This much was included in the data the Farm had sent on Baldero. It was a puzzle, and Bolan did not like puzzles. They pointed to incomplete information, and incomplete information, though a common problem in the field, was the most frequent cause of lost engagements. To gain and keep the initiative in combat required that he surprise his enemies. He did not intend to be on the other end of the exchange.

      He was burning up the road, having passed Hampton and Newport News without incident, debating whether to cycle back and forth between them and Norfolk when his phone began to vibrate. The Farm would know he had reached the next city, of course; they were tracking him through the SAASM-compatible GPS tracking module in his phone. The Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module technology was the U.S. Military’s answer to GPS positioning. It ensured that, while his phone could be tracked by the team at Stony Man Farm, giving Price and her people up-to-date location data as Bolan traveled the country, no enemy could do the same, nor could false position data be transmitted to the Farm to misinform Kurtzman’s cyber team.

      “Striker,” he answered.

      “Striker, we have a mission-critical update,” Price said without preamble. “We are transmitting new coordinates to you as we speak. The advance field team has been combing likely spots for Baldero to go to ground, including local motels and gas stations. They have a pickup truck parked behind a Dumpster at a motel on the North Military Highway. They say it’s full of bullet holes.”

      “Registration?”

      “The truck was reported stolen in Charlottesville yesterday,” Price said, “and now it’s wearing a set of stolen license plates swapped from a similar Chevy S-10, also in Charlottesville.”

      “Coincidence?”

      “There’s that word again,” Price echoed.

      “I’m on it,” Bolan said. “Out.”

      It took him another fifteen minutes to reach the address, guided by the GPS directions in his phone. When he was close to the location, he stowed the phone and slowed, doing his best to stay inconspicuous. He found the motel and reconnoitered as quietly as he could, cruising around and hoping his interceptor and its missing side mirror wouldn’t scream “law enforcement presence” to Baldero if the man were watching and had reason to fear legal interference. Bolan was not a police officer, of course—he was a soldier. Baldero would not know that, though. To the fugitive Baldero, Bolan would represent the law, and any man running from so many shooters would either welcome rescue or fear capture. The situation would be very tense until the Executioner knew which way Baldero would break.

      There was no sign of the advance field team. They would have pulled out to some discreet distance once word got out that a Stony Man operative was on the way. The team’s job was not combat and its mission was to remain undetected, to go unnoticed as long as possible. Getting drawn into a firefight was not its purpose; the unnamed, faceless analysts who had sent so much after-action intelligence Bolan’s way thus far could only continue to do so if they stayed out of the way. That was fine with the Executioner. He preferred to work alone, whenever possible, and if there was a firefight to be had, he was content to bring it to the enemy.

      He found the truck right where he had been told to expect it, hidden in the lee of a pair of industrial-sized trash containers behind the motel. He parked behind it, blocking it in, nose-out in case he needed to put the Crown Victoria into action quickly.

      The truck’s engine was still ticking. It had not been parked for long and was still shedding excess heat from what had to have been a breakneck drive. Bolan could smell burning brakes and hot rubber, the unmistakable odors of a vehicle that had been pushed to its limits.

      He had his canvas war bag slung over his shoulder. Before he moved on the motel, he paused to open the bag’s large cover flap. Inside was the mini-Uzi he had first noted when making a cursory inspection of the care package from Kissinger. He withdrew the weapon, loaded one of the 30-round box magazines from the bag and placed the weapon on the hood of his vehicle.

      He recounted the other explosives and lethal surprises in the bag, as well as taking stock of the loaded magazines for the Uzi. Kissinger had thoughtfully provided several 20-round box magazines for the Beretta 93-R, its 9 mm ammo compatible with the Uzi. There were a handful of loaded mags for the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, too, and a few boxes of ammunition for both weapons.

      Finally, he withdrew a small item he had at first overlooked. It was a rosewood-handled boot dagger in a leather sheath with a metal spring clip. He withdrew it, examined the four-inch, double-edged blade and resheathed the knife with a mental nod. Then he clipped the sheath inside his waistband in the appendix position, where he could draw it with either hand readily enough. His windbreaker covered it, barely, as it concealed his other hardware in their holsters.

      As he went to pick up СКАЧАТЬ