Don Pendleton - Altered State

“Sounds like a blast,” Bolan replied.

A S PROMISED , the CD contained all of the information Bolan needed, and then some. There was a capsule history of opium and heroin production in Afghanistan, spanning the period from British domination in the nineteenth century, through Russian occupation, modern civil wars, up to the present day. Bolan skimmed over it and focused chiefly on the maps and satellite photos depicting known heroin trade routes.

The background on Vanguard International demanded his closer attention. The company had been founded in 1995 by present owner-CEO Clay Carlisle and a partner, improbably named Thomas Jefferson, who had dropped out of sight after selling his shares to Carlisle in August 2001. Carlisle was the undisputed king of Vanguard, fielding a private army larger than those deployed by some Third World nations.

As for Carlisle himself, he was the son of a self-ordained evangelical minister, born in 1964, who had graduated “with honors” from an unaccredited parochial high school, then volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps and served with distinction in Grenada. After eight years in the Corps, he’d pulled the pin and entered corporate security as a hired bodyguard. In 1994 he’d shot it out with kidnappers who tried to snatch his client—a Texas oil billionaire—and had suffered a near-fatal wound in the firefight. The grateful client, who emerged unscathed, was pleased to bankroll Carlisle in creation of his own security firm, Vanguard, which claimed the oilman’s vast empire as its first client.

And the rest, as someone said, was history.

An odd footnote to Carlisle’s dossier described his fat donations to various far-right religious groups and his membership on the board of Hallelujah Ministries, which sponsored revival meetings and kept a small staff of attorneys on retainer to defend ministers “falsely accused” of various crimes, including embezzlement and child molestation. At a private Hallelujah gathering in 2002, Carlisle had described the 9/11 raids as “proof that the Second Coming will occur in our lifetime.”

How all of that squared with drug smuggling was anyone’s guess.

Carlisle’s second in command was Dale Ingram, a twenty-five-year FBI veteran who had ended his run as chief of the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Division. September 11 had caught Ingram and his G-men by surprise, despite warnings from several FBI field offices that Arab nationals with suspected ties to al Qaeda were training at U.S. flight schools. Whistleblowers produced memos bearing Ingram’s signature, dismissing the warnings as “red herrings,” whereupon he was invited to retire two years ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, he had become acquainted with Carlisle through contacts still unknown, and Ingram found retirement from the Bureau very lucrative indeed.

If smuggling heroin into the States bothered the former G-man, he had learned to conceal any qualms. In fact, judging from the photos Brognola and Stony Man had supplied, Ingram seemed to be laughing all the way to the bank.

Bolan scanned the reports of Vanguard mercenaries seen on Afghan opium plantations and convoying heroin shipments. The CD included numerous photos and several video clips—one of Carlisle and Ingram together at a Kabul hotel, meeting a native identified as Basir Ahmad-Shah.

Ahmad-Shah’s CD-ROM dossier identified him as one of Afghanistan’s four largest heroin kingpins. Within his territory, he enjoyed a vertical monopoly, from poppy fields through processing and export from the country. He had agents scattered all over the world, but Ahmad-Shah himself had never left Afghanistan, as far as anyone could say. Imprisoned briefly by the Taliban in 2001, he’d been released and lauded as a “prisoner of conscience” after coalition troops drove his persecutors from Kabul and environs. His number two was a cut-throat named Jamal Woraz, identified by the DEA as Ahmad-Shah’s strong right hand and primary enforcer.

That left the file on Bolan’s DEA contact, one Deirdre Falk. Bolan had worked with female Feds before and found them more than capable, but he was still a bit surprised to find a woman stationed in Afghanistan, where brutal violence was a daily fact of life and male officials of the Islamic Republic were predisposed to treat females with a measure of disdain.

The good news was that she’d been handling it for nearly three years now, and showed no signs of cracking up. She’d built some solid cases, although only one of them had gone to trial so far, sending a second-string drug smuggler off to prison for three years. The big boys were protected, and Falk had to know it.

Which perhaps explained why she was willing to collaborate with Stony Man—or the organization “Matt Cooper” said he represented.

There was no reason to suppose she’d ever heard of Stony Man Farm or the covert work it performed. If she had , then the Farm’s security needed a major tune-up. The flip side of that coin might be shock, when she realized that Bolan hadn’t come from Washington to help her put the Vanguard gang on trial.

Officially, the U.S. government did not engage in down-and-dirty vigilante tactics. Since the 1960s, when the CIA’s clumsy attempts to kill Fidel Castro had backfired with disastrous, embarrassing results, no federal agency was authorized to carry out “executive actions”—otherwise known as assassinations.

Scratch that.

No agency was publicly authorized to do so.

Stony Man had been created expressly to do that which was forbidden. A former President, beset by enemies on every side, domestic and foreign, had realized that every nation had to defend itself, by fair means or foul. When the system broke down, when the law failed, clear and present dangers had to be neutralized by other means.

Deniability was critical.

If Bolan or some other Stony Man agent—the troops of Able Team and Phoenix Force—were killed on a mission at home or abroad, they did not officially exist.

If worse came to worst, if one of them was caught alive and cracked under torture or chemical interrogation, providing verifiable details of Stony Man’s operations, the buck stopped with Hal Brognola at Justice. He’d been prepared from the start to fall on his sword, confess to launching and running the program on his own initiative, financing it covertly, without the knowledge or approval of superiors.

It was a fairy tale that might be hard to swallow, but the Washington publicity machine would sell it anyway. The corporate media—so far from “leftist liberal” that Bolan had to laugh each time he heard the talking heads on Fox News rant and rave—would ultimately join ranks with the state to cover any tracks that led beyond Brognola’s office to respected politicians higher up the food chain.

The trick, on Bolan’s part, was not to get captured or killed. So far, he’d managed fairly well.

And this time?

As he started to erase Brognola’s CD-ROM, he knew that he would have to wait and see.

Kabul, Afghanistan

They ditched Falk’s bullet-punctured Ford near the Park-e-Timor Shahi, on the River Rudkhane-ye-Kabul, and found another waiting two blocks over, thanks to one of Falk’s associates who asked no questions when she’d called him on the telephone.

“The other one will be reported stolen,” she told Bolan as they drove across the city to a safe house in the Shash Darak district.

“You’ve done this kind of thing before?” he asked.

“We’re living on the edge, here, Mr. Cooper. No one really wants us in Afghanistan. We get that message from the beat cops, right on up the ladder to the president.”

“Which one?” Bolan inquired.

She smiled at that and told him, “Take your pick. Ours has to talk about the ‘evil scourge of heroin’ to get elected, but I swear, sometimes it feels like it’s all talk.” She frowned, then added, “Hey, forget I said that, will you? I still need this job, and I don’t even know who sent you.”