Fire Zone. Don Pendleton

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      “TWO BODIES,” Bolan told Kurtzman. “Both murdered.” He lightly prodded the man’s head with his feet and saw how the spinal cord had been almost severed with a savage slash. The charred corpse revealed little else. The female with him was harder to evaluate, but Bolan wasted no time figuring it out. She was dead and probably by the same hand. He thought she had been knifed in the belly and then the point driven upward into her heart. Bowels, lungs and heart were cinders, but her head remained firmly affixed to her spine. A murder-suicide was out of the question, since there wasn’t a knife anywhere to be seen.

      Kill the man, then the woman. That was how the solitary killer had moved. Professional. Very professional.

      “What do you see at the edge of the forest?”

      Bolan’s stride lengthened as he went to the worst of the burned area along the meadow. The fire had ravaged the terrain and had moved a mile farther east, where it still roared uphill with voracious intensity. It took only a couple minutes for him to find what remained of one detonator cap and the radio unit that had set off the explosive. He rubbed his fingers over the ground but came up with only soot. Any of the grainy PETN likely used would be completely oxidized.

      “He knew what he was doing,” Bolan said.

      “Latest intel says there is an African PMC on the prowl. We’re pinging the CIA and FBI for info on them now to get a better identification.”

      “That’s a mighty big continent.”

      Kurtzman did not respond, and Bolan hadn’t expected him to. He ended the call and pulled out his map and oriented himself, then set off running downhill in the direction of the Lucky Nugget Mine, reaching the tall cyclone fence around the property in under a half hour. He took slow, deep breaths and calmed his pounding heart. Having been at altitude in the Rockies for the prior week helped, but the thin Idaho air still took its toll on him.

      As he rested, hands on knees, he looked around the mine site. From the dozen signs painted with huge red letters, this property was owned by Lassiter Industries, a multinational conglomerate owning not only gold mines but copper, silver, manganese and every other metal known to man. Rested, he tossed a broken branch against the fence to see if he might get a shock or trigger an alarm. Seeing no response, and hearing only the miles-distant crackle of a forest being destroyed by fire, he scaled the fence, deftly avoiding the barbed wire strands on top, then dropped lightly to the ground inside.

      He reached a well-traveled road and saw a couple abandoned trucks. Of the large crew required to work a mine this size, he saw nothing.

      Some equipment had been properly shut down, but most had been hastily abandoned. He knew what had happened. Sirens warned of the forest fire. The miners had to evacuate the mine or risk being trapped a half mile underground if the fire swept this way. Those aboveground would work frantically to get the miners to the surface, then they would all jump into trucks and evacuate. The sheriff’s department would be sending constant warnings the entire while. The scream of sirens as the firefighters came in would goad the miners into leaving.

      Some might even be volunteer firefighters and join the effort. However it happened, they were all absent from the mine.

      But the security staff would remain. Not of their own choosing, but orders would keep them here until the flames came close enough to singe their eyebrows. Bolan jogged to the main gate, which gaped wide. He peered into the glass-windowed guard booth and saw a man slumped on the floor. There was no reason to check his vital signs. The huge hole in the back of the man’s head showed where a single shot had taken him out.

      Bolan turned from the guard booth and went immediately to the main office building. The double doors were closed. He tugged at one and it came open easily. The panic bar had not properly locked when the last employee had evacuated.

      Halfway down the corridor was the sprawled body of a uniformed woman. She had been shot in the back of the head just like the other guard. Bolan moved from room to room. He found three more murdered security guards. Only one had tried to get his weapon free before six shots had punctured his chest. Examining the entry angles of the wounds convinced Bolan that at least three shooters had sighted in on the poor son of a bitch. From what he could tell, the same caliber weapons had ended the man’s life. The killers probably used identical model pistols. That would go with the military precision shown in this attack.

      Bolan searched the building from top to bottom. Whoever had killed the guards had not looted the offices. Computers remained on desks. No drawers had been pulled out and searched. Obviously valuable display ingots remained in glass cases in the hallways. Since he found no one alive in the rest of the building to give him eyewitness information, he exited to search other parts of the sprawling mine complex.

      Like a compass needle finding magnetic north, he was drawn to a large shed nearby. Heavy steel doors that had once been held closed by intricate locks stood open. Reaching down, he drew his Desert Eagle and let the muzzle precede him into the well-lit interior. Vaults along the walls were open and empty. The guards positioned at all four upper corners of the building on catwalks had been shot. From the look of it, they had put up a fierce fight but had been overwhelmed by superior firepower.

      Walking into the empty expanse in the middle of the building, Bolan saw where a truck had stood next to a loading dock. It took no effort for him to imagine a half-dozen men swarming into the vaults, removing the gold and loading it into the truck before driving away with СКАЧАТЬ