Radical Edge. Don Pendleton

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      The dead hadn’t merely been neutralized; they had been mutilated, shot again and again in what could only have been postmortem overkill. Bolan filed that fact for analysis even as his mind worked overtime to make sense of what he was seeing.

      Had the skinhead safe house been hit by a rival gang? A conflicting security firm? Counterterrorists, perhaps operating without authority on American soil? The first was possible; the second was unlikely, given the Farm’s contacts and Brognola’s knowledge of domestic security operations. The third was possible but didn’t seem to fit. Bolan had only too recently found himself caught between rival security and black-ops personnel from multiple countries, in playing bodyguard and escort to a Very Important Person whom he had to transport to Wonderland. Even at their most vicious, foreign kill teams wouldn’t have wasted the time and firepower necessary to do this kind of job on poorly trained skinhead combatants. An ops team from a nominally allied nation, like Israel, certainly wouldn’t kill so unprofessionally.

      The term caught in Bolan’s mind. That was what bothered him. The position of the bodies indicated that the skinheads had barely had time to process the assault on the safe house. They weren’t arrayed behind cover or braced in fatal funnels such as the hallway from the living room to the kitchen. They were, instead, dead where they’d probably been sitting when the attack came. Bolan paused just long enough to snap pictures of the dead, wondering if he would fine Shane Hyde among them. But the Twelfth Reich leader wasn’t there.

      He moved down the corridor to the kitchen, holding the FN P90 before him. Two more dead men waited here, one stripped to the waist, his tattoos proclaiming the supremacy of his race and stretching in blues and blacks across his back. He had been shot as he sat at the kitchen table. He lay in a puddle of his own brains amid the mess of an overturned cereal bowl and an opened can of beer.

      The fire licking up from the stove and consuming the ventilator hood was almost out of control. Bolan grabbed the dusty fire extinguisher from its strap on the kitchen wall, pulled the pin and sprayed its contents across the stovetop. The extinguisher was long expired, according to its pull-tag, but it did the job. Whatever had been burning was now a black, frosted mess in the center of a charred frying pan.

      Food, still cooking on the stove…and the man lying dead at the table had been shot down in the middle of his skinhead’s breakfast of champions. Something about this was very wrong. Bolan took out his phone and photographed the dead men, noting the flashing icon that indicated transmission to the Farm.

      “Sarge,” Grimaldi said in his earbud. “The first of the emergency responders is inbound to you in less than three minutes. A pair of uniforms. You’re about to have company.”

      “Understood,” Bolan said.

      There was a groan from nearby.

      At the back of the kitchen, a door that appeared to have been punched several times—perhaps during some skinhead’s drinking binge, producing several fist-size holes in the cheap pressboard—led to the basement. The sounds of pain and distress became louder. They were coming from behind the door, which stood slightly ajar.

      Bolan didn’t wait. He simply ripped the door open the rest of the way, angling the short barrel of the P90 against his body so he could target the space without turning his weapon into a lever to be used against him. The gaunt, shaved-headed man lying on the stairs within had full tattoo “sleeves” up his arms. The mesh muscle shirt he wore was ragged and bloody. He was hugging himself, holding his guts in, trying to staunch the massive wound where he had been shot.

      “Don’t move,” Bolan ordered. The man held no weapon that the soldier could see, but that didn’t mean he was unarmed. In his time fighting terror and crime, Bolan had seen every sham I’m-wounded ploy in the book. He wasn’t easily fooled. “Who did this?” he said. “Who hit you?”

      “I think I’m dying,” the skinhead said. “Hell…I think I’m dying… .”

      “Tell me,” Bolan snapped. “Before it’s too late. Before you’re out of time. You can get even. You can hit back at whoever did this. Tell me who it was.”

      “You gotta…” the man said. He tried to draw breath and apparently couldn’t. “You gotta…”

      Just what it was Bolan had to do, he would never know. The man stopped gasping. The light left his eyes.

      That was that. There would be no intelligence to be had here.

      “Sarge,” Grimaldi said in Bolan’s ear, “I’m transmitting to the locals. I’m warning them that there is a Justice Department agent on the premises. They don’t like it. I’m not getting confirmation that they’ll hang back.”

      “Understood,” Bolan said again. “Out.”

      He placed two fingers against the dead man’s neck, knowing he would feel no pulse. A quick check of the skinhead’s pockets revealed nothing. Up once more, Bolan made his way carefully back through the kitchen, just in time to confront a pair of uniformed Alamogordo Police Department officers with their guns drawn.

      “Freeze!” they shouted, almost in unison.

      “Matt Cooper,” Bolan said, citing the cover identity that appeared on the credentials issued him by Stony Man Farm. “Justice Department.”

      “Drop the weapon!” one of the cops called.

      “You were contacted,” Bolan said. “You’re interfering in a federal operation.”

      “Drop your weapon!” the police officer repeated. His partner looked at him dubiously, though he didn’t lower his own gun.

      “Continue pointing that weapon at me,” Bolan said, “and we’re going to have a problem.”

      “Are you threatening to fire on duly appointed law-enforcement officers?” the first cop demanded.

      “No,” Bolan said. “I don’t shoot the ‘good guys.’ However, if you don’t stop pointing those guns at me—” he paused, and his voice became steel “—I will take them away from you and beat you unconscious with them.”

      “Put it down, Jimmy,” the man’s partner whispered urgently.

      Reluctantly, the first officer lowered his weapon. The second breathed a noticeable sigh of relief as he did the same.

      “How many are you?” Bolan asked. It was only a matter of time before the safe house was swamped with law enforcement and emergency response personnel. He would need to move quickly if he was to find anything useful amid the debris before the place was overrun with competing administrative concerns. The crush of jurisdictional red tape would make Bolan’s job more difficult no matter how well-meaning the cops themselves were.

      The officers exchanged glances, probably trying to decide if it was safe to tell Bolan anything sensitive. Stepping toward them and lowering his own weapon, the Executioner removed the Justice Department identification from his web gear and waved it under their eyes. That seemed to mollify them, though the cynical part of Bolan’s mind told him that it shouldn’t have. Were the soldier some sort of assassin or other well-equipped hostile operative, forged credentials would pass such a quick inspection.

      “Backup is on the way,” Jimmy said. “We’re it for now. What happened here, Mr.…”

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