Don Pendleton: Doomsday Disciples

"No current members?" Bolan asked.

Hal shook his head.

"Negative. It's all double-checked. Officially, the church has them down as dropouts and defectors. A couple of them were expelled for failure to adopt, unquote. Naturally, church leadership deplores the violence... but it goes on. Drug enforcement and the FBI keep turning up Devotees in connection with narcotics and related rackets. Off the record, that's scarier than all the random slaughter put together."

Brognola punched up another slide, this time a man's face, magnified to twice life-size: an Oriental face, impassive, ageless beyond a talcum dusting of gray around the temples.

A face that Bolan recognized.

"Nguyen Van Minh," Hal was saying. "Founder and leader of the Universal Devotees. He's appalled by rumors that his people are involved with drugs or crime in any form."

"Vietnamese?" April asked.

"That's affirmative. On the record, he's an anti-Communist, family executed in reprisal after Saigon fell in 1975."

Bolan frowned.

" All family? "he asked.

Hal nodded.

"Seems so. Minh got off with prison time, if you can figure that. They cut him loose after three years, and we granted him political asylum. Six months later, he's got himself a church. Claims Christ came to him in prison with a revelation of the one true faith."

"Membership?" Bolan asked.

"Pushing half a million, mostly under thirty. Every convert pledges to divest himself of worldly burdens — like money, cars. You get the picture. They adopt a Spartan life of service to the church."

"I've heard that," April chimed in. "Weren't there some fraud accusations made against the church?"

"That isn't half of it." Brognola shook his head wearily. "Parents have charged Minh with kidnapping, brainwashing, harboring runaways — you name it. So far, nothing sticks."

"There's more," Bolan said. It was not a question.

Hal took his time lighting his stogie, watching Bolan through the smoke. When the fed spoke again, his voice was unusually grim.

"Justice has him marked as the organizer of a cult-related crime wave. And we're checking indicators that he may be a North Vietnamese, possibly involved in sabotage and spying."

"What indicators?" Bolan asked.

"For one thing, he's a man without a past," Hal answered. "Records out of Nam don't mention him, in Saigon or anywhere else. Military personnel and refugees have never heard of him. For all anybody knows, Minh popped out of thin air sometime in 1978."

Bolan was unsatisfied with that. It was easy for a man to lose himself, his past — especially in Vietnam. A recent extension of his own New War had taken Bolan back to the embattled nation where it all began; there he discovered proof of Americans forgotten and abandoned in the final days of war. And if the records could officially "misplace" two thousand Occidentals...

Hal read the silent question in the warrior's eyes.

"One more thing," he said, and another face succeeded Minh's on the viewing screen.

This time the subject was Caucasian, a man in his late thirties, sandy hair receding in the front. The eyes were alert behind steel-rimmed spectacles.

"Meet Mitchell Carter." Hal said. "Corporate attorney on retainer with the Universal Devotees. He was born Mihail Karpeiyan, the son of Soviet defectors after World War II. Had his name changed legally the year he entered college in New York."

"A mole?" April asked.

"Justice has a strong suspicion. Nothing we can hang indictments on so far."

Bolan saw the pieces falling into place.

"Minh's control," he said softly.

Hal shrugged.

"Fifty-fifty there," he said. "Could be the other way around. We don't have time to check it out through channels."

A final slide flashed on the screen, this one a family snapshot of some kind. The subject was a young woman, red hair cut in a short, boyish style. She was dressed for the beach in a revealing swimsuit, and there was nothing masculine about her figure.

"Amy Culp," Hal introduced her in absentia. "One of Minh's recruits, last reported in residence at his estate north of San Francisco."

"What makes her special?" April asked.

Bolan made the connection before Brognola had a chance to answer.

"Related to a certain senator?" he asked.

"Only child," Hal confirmed. "And the senator's convinced she's being held against her will. Incidentally, his friend in the Oval Office shares a similar belief."

Bolan understood the sudden urgency.

"Damage estimate?"

Hal shook his head.

"Unknown. Possible extortion, some kind of incident designed to embarrass the administration. For now, call the girl a handle."

Bolan focused on the smiling, freckled face. A handle, yeah, and the only one they had. One that turned both ways.

If Hal's suspicions were correct, they could expect an escalating reign of terror from the Universal Devotees.

Haifa million potential terrorists, and counting.

Hell, if only ten percent could be manipulated, channeled into random acts of violence...

Bolan shut off the train of thought, fully conscious of the implications.

Every day, Minh recruited more disciples for his cult. Every day he twisted and seduced more young, impressionable minds. Each day his army grew.

There was nothing the authorities could do to stop him. Not within the narrow letter of the law.

But there was something an Executioner could do.

Bolan's eyes locked with Hal's across the briefing room.

"When do I leave?"

The "handle" was avoiding Bolan, checking out the small apartment and its meager furnishings. He let her have the moment, waiting and watching while she got her bearings.

The drop was a walk-up flat in a four-story brown-stone, identical to others lining both sides of the street. Three blocks east of Golden Gate Park, it stood in the heart of Haight-Ashbury, aging and anonymous. The flat was secured by a phone call from Stony Man Farm to Able Team's base of operations. It was "safe" — and expendable, if worse came to worst.

In the sixties, the neighborhood gave birth to a new, restless generation, young people searching for love and peace with no strings attached. Without tools or blueprints, they tried to erect Utopia in the heart of San Francisco. In their youthful inexperience they lost direction and soon bogged down in an underworld of drugs and empty revolutionary rhetoric.

Sheep attract predators, and the Flower Generation had its share of cannibals. Bikers and bomb-builders, closet Satanists and self-styled urban guerillas — the movers and shakers of a new wave that never quite arrived. The Haight became a mecca for the mindless, burned-out drones seeking someone, anyone who could lead them to the light.

Even now there are some still seeking easy answers in a complicated universe, turning on to drugs and cults — everything from Zen and Krishna to the Universal Devotees.

It started there, in The Haight, while a younger Bolan sought answers of his own in another kind of jungle, half a world away. They had come together now, at last, and it was from The Haight that Bolan planned to launch his new offensive on the savages.

The neighborhood had changed with time, but it was still a haven for the rootless and disaffected. A person could get lost there — deliberately or otherwise — and it could shelter Amy Culp while Bolan dealt with Minh and his Universal Devotees.

He ditched the battered Cadillac, retrieving his rental car with weapons and equipment in the trunk. The nondescript sedan would merge better with the neighborhood, and by abandoning the Caddy he gave Minh something else to puzzle over. Another dead end for his bloodhounds to pursue.

The warrior had observed a change in Amy as they drove. She had lost the hunted look, but there was caution in her manner, and he caught her looking suspiciously at him. At their destination, she reluctantly followed him inside and up the dingy stairs, wary of betrayal.