Don Pendleton - Radical Edge

Then he was falling. As he floated through the air, suspended in space, he turned his head and saw the finger of thick black smoke roiling from the flash-burned Chevy and climbing high into the sky.

The pavement rushed up to meet him.

The soldier didn’t feel the impact. He was suddenly prone, staring at the blue sky, watching the smoke climb to heaven. He was losing all sense of time. He heard voices; he saw faces. Were civilians gawking at him? Trying to help him? He had no idea how long he lay there. It might have been seconds; it might have been hours.

As gray snow crawled in from the edges of his vision, finally carrying him to oblivion, he thought he heard the sound of helicopter rotors.

The darkness claimed him.

CHAPTER FIVE

He woke to find himself staring into Jack Grimaldi’s face.

“Somehow,” Bolan said, “I always knew it would end like this.”

“You aren’t dead, Sarge,” Grimaldi said, grinning widely. “And I’m sure no angel.”

“I was thinking just the opposite.”

“You must be feeling better if you can make bad jokes. Here. Take a sip of this.” Grimaldi handed him a bottle of water and helped the soldier to sit up. Bolan realized they were in the back of the Pave Hawk. He had been lying on an olive-drab Army blanket between the bolted seats.

Bolan took a long sip of water and then looked down at his hands. Grimaldi had sprayed them with translucent, liquid skin. His palms were numb.

“Switch that to your left hand,” Grimaldi said, “and give me your right.” Bolan extended his right hand, which his friend turned palm-up and began dressing with light gauze.

“How long was I out?” the soldier asked.

“Not long enough,” Grimaldi said. “I gave you some painkillers that will be wearing off soon. There’s more in the medical kit.” He gestured for him to switch hands, then began the process of wrapping his left palm. Bolan sipped more water. It wasn’t cold, but was delicious anyway. His throat felt raw.

He looked out past the unmanned door gun of the Pave Hawk. The chopper sat in the center of a broad expanse of scrub and sun-baked dirt on what he took to be the outskirts of Alamogordo.

“You’re in rough shape, Sarge,” Grimaldi said. “Nothing that won’t get better provided you take a couple weeks’ vacation.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Bolan told him.

“Right.” Grimaldi shook his head. “I shot you up with some of the pain amps in your kit. As much as I dared. It’s going to wear off and you’re going to hurt again. You’ll need to stay on top of that.”

“I can manage.”

“We’ve got a blacksuit squad on-site cleaning up the damage,” Grimaldi said, “and running interference with the Alamogordo PD, who’re hopping mad. All but the two cops whose lives you saved. They’ve been debriefed.”

“Somebody beat us to the safe house. Killed everyone inside.”

“Yeah.” Grimaldi nodded. “The officers kept asking me if you did that. Although I don’t think they really believed it.”

“The house?”

“A complete loss,” Grimaldi said. “The bomb started a fire that burned the place to the ground. You’re lucky. It could easily have killed you and your two new friends.”

“The Chevy,” Bolan said. “Getaway car. Two men. One automatic weapon. They were with whoever hit the safe house.”

“Uh…yeah.” Grimaldi hesitated. “About that. Both men and the car were burned to a crisp. Any clues we might have found inside…well. You get the idea. We’ve had the bodies routed to a facility we control, for autopsy, but running their dental records will take time.”

“Yeah.” Bolan shook his head.

“Here,” Grimaldi said. “I made you something.” He handed over a pair of leather gloves. Bolan held them up curiously. He realized that the fingers had been removed.

Grimaldi held up a pair of medical shears. “These are yours, too.” He put them back in the kit. “Those gloves are sized for my mitts, which are a little smaller than yours. Without fingers, though, it won’t matter.”

Bolan pulled the leather shells on over his hands. They fit snugly but weren’t too tight. The cut-up gloves covered his dressings and protected his scorched palms.

“Thanks, Jack,” Bolan said. “You know you’ve got a pretty decent bedside manner?”

“No, I don’t,” Grimaldi replied. “I’m about to spoil your mood. You want the bad news or the bad news?”

Bolan said nothing. He raised an eyebrow.

“We’ve got a big problem,” Grimaldi explained. He produced a replacement earbud and his own secure satellite phone. “I can use the transmitter here in the chopper to relay to the Farm,” he said. “Use my phone. The earbud is from the spares here.”

“The problem?” Bolan prompted.

“Idle hands,” Grimaldi said. “You didn’t find Shane Hyde at the second target house,” he said. “I know, because I’ve been talking to the Farm while you were out. Shane Hyde and his Twelfth Reich boys have been very busy. If he was here, he was long gone before you got yourself blown up.”

“Doing what?”

“I’ll let Barb tell you that,” Grimaldi said. He pointed to the earbud. “You’re hooked in through the chopper.”

Bolan put the device in his ear. “Striker here.”

“Striker?” Barbara Price sounded worried. “Jack says you’ve sustained some injuries. If you need to come in—”

“Negative,” Bolan said. “I’m all right, Barb.”

She paused. “All right. Striker, what I have for you is significant. Bear and his computer team have identified, through a series of account transfers and our internet chatter algorithms, a hijacking perpetrated by Twelfth Reich.”

“Perpetrated as in already conducted?” Bolan asked.

“As in happening right now,” Price said. “We’ve checked it at the source and we’re confident it’s ongoing. So is the domestic intelligence network. Right now Hal is sitting on DHS and the Bureau, who are gearing up to take action. Hal held out for confirmation from you. He’s pushing hard to get you in on this.”

“What is it?”

“Do you remember O’Connor Petroleum Prospecting?”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “The oil outfit that had some trouble in Honduras when the dictator there nationalized their equipment and took some of their employees hostage.”

“O’Connor has finagled a deal with the relatively new government of Honduras, the powers that are in Guatemala, and the new, moderate regime in Mexico. They’re running a pipeline from newly discovered oil fields in Honduras to a refinery in Mexico, from which they’ll ship oil across the Texas border and around the country. This energy initiative is very important to the Man and, as you know only too well, is the result of some recently resolved political turbulence in all three nations.”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “That sounds vaguely familiar.”

“We have identified a series of account transfers, among other things, that helped us identify some suspicious industrial purchases of fertilizer. There were multiple indicators that Bear, on his own time, cross-checked. The pattern emerged slowly—too slowly for us to stop it before it could begin.”

“Stop what, Barb?” Bolan asked.

“Twelfth Reich’s people have hijacked an OPP tanker train,” Price said. “We believe they’ve packed it with ammonium nitrate fuel oil bombs—ANFOs—in cargo cars attached to the tankers. They’re heading for an enormous O’Connor tank field outside of Dallas, one of the largest of its type in North America. The facility is adjacent to a kind of tent city, an encampment that has risen to serve Mexican immigrants working for O’Connor. That’s the target. Twelfth Reich wants to kill those people.”