Don Pendleton - Face Of Terror

Just the same, Drake was glad he’d downed a Lortab and a Xanax—painkillers—with a mouthful of whiskey right before the yellow Hummer appeared. His nerves had been on edge lately, and the mixture of drugs was sometimes all that kept him from screaming out loud.

As the Jeep took a rise, then suddenly plunged downward toward a dry creek bed, Drake twisted his neck and looked at the Ford F250. It was negotiating the rugged ground as well as the Jeep. He turned his head back and saw the Dodge Ram just outside his open-topped vehicle to his right. It was doing fine, too.

Whitlow was right. They had stolen the four-wheel-drive pickups, along with the Jeep, earlier that morning from a farm twenty miles away, and they’d been perfect vehicles in which to deliver the cocaine. And the farmer who had owned all three vehicles wouldn’t need them anymore, either.

He and his wife lay dead on a pile of hay in the barn.

Drake took another quick glance at the Dodge Ram and saw Felix Bundy riding shotgun. Though he couldn’t see past Bundy in the higher vehicle, he knew Donald O’Hara was in the driver’s seat. Both men had been Navy SEALS and served in the Middle East just like Drake and Whitlow. Drake glanced one more time at the Ford F250 as all three vehicles came up out of the creek bed and raced on toward a county section road just past a barbed-wire fence another two hundred yards away. Elmer Scott was behind the wheel of the Ram, with Charlie Ducket riding shotgun for him. The two of them had been U.S. Marine recons and had shot their share of Arabs just like the rest of the team.

Harry Drake instinctively ducked lower behind the Jeep’s windshield as the front bumper burst through the barbed wire. The pickups had fallen in directly behind him, and now he raced up the bar ditch to the dirt road.

Drake frowned, thinking at lightning speed. The county road was a temptation. It would be easier going, with less chance of one or more of his convoy breaking down. But the Hummer would likely catch up to them more quickly if they took the easy route. Besides, once they reached the highway they’d be sitting ducks for Oklahoma highway patrolmen and any small-town cops who got word of what was going on over the radio.

By the time he had decided to go on through the next pasture he was already halfway down the bar ditch anyway. The Jeep popped the barbed wire surrounding the next quarter section as easily as it had the first one, and sent a small herd of Black Angus cattle scurrying away in terror.

As they raced across the pasture, Drake saw the white paint of the helicopter peeking between the branches of a small grove of trees. Behind the controls, he knew Joe Knox would be waiting to take them skyward. He slowed the Jeep and prepared to jump out, abandon it and help the men with the money load the briefcases before they abandoned the pickups.

As soon as he’d ground to a halt, Drake held his hand up to his eyes. Looking out over the pastureland, he could see the yellow Hummer just now crossing the county road and coming up through the hole in the fence that they had made.

“Okay, guys!” Drake yelled above the sound of the whopping chopper blades. “Get that money on board and let’s get out of here!” He slung his AK-47 over his shoulder on the green web sling and hurried to the F250, where he seized four briefcases. “And from now until we’re safely airborne, we change languages just in case!” A grin curled the corners of his mouth, making the ends of his handlebar mustache rise to tickle the sides of his nose.

He had chosen his crew carefully, including in his criteria for recruitment their exceptional combat skills, intelligence, willingness to break the laws of the nation that had trained them and they had defended, but even more for one other skill they all possessed.

Each and every one of Harry Drake’s men spoke fluent Farsi, the national tongue of Iran.

“Aye-aye,” one of the Marines yelled. Drake couldn’t tell which one.

But it didn’t matter. What did matter was that they get the half-million dollars in cash on board the chopper and fly out of here before that big yellow monstrosity of a vehicle arrived and its passengers shot them all.

Drake had a bad feeling about that canary-colored Hummer. Not so much the vehicle itself but the men inside it.

Something told him that at least one of the men—the driver, who had shown such competency in taking out their Mafia associates—was a superior warrior to each and every last one of them.

THE MAN DEA SPECIAL AGENT Rick Jessup had been told to call Matt Cooper continued to guide the yellow Hummer as it bounced in and out of the ruts and mounds that made up the cow pasture. Far in the distance, the specks that Jessup knew were a Jeep and two more pickups were gradually growing larger. As they banked down into another creek bed, then up the other side, he was suddenly able to differentiate between the vehicles. The Jeep was a standard CJ-5 model. One of the pickups was a Dodge Ram, the other a Ford F250.

Jessup couldn’t remember the license numbers he had seen for a brief second as the three vehicles had fled the scene a few minutes earlier. But if memory served him right, they had all had local farm tags.

Which meant the men driving and riding in them had stolen them from somewhere close to this area. And they had to have stolen them recently. No reports of missing vehicles had gone out over the police-band radio mounted in the Hummer. That could only mean one of two things: either the rightful owners hadn’t discovered their property missing yet or they were dead.

Considering the fact that his snitch had told him it was radical Islamic terrorists who had sold the coke to the Mafia, Jessup’s money was on the latter possibility.

The DEA man watched the vehicles ahead of them slow, then stop as they reached a lone grove of trees in the middle of the pasture. Just above the treetops, he could barely make out the whirling blades of a helicopter.

“So that’s their plan,” Bolan said from behind the wheel. The words came out sounding hard and stark after the silence that had reigned over the Hummer for the past several minutes.

“They’ll just abandon the pickups and Jeep. My guess is they were stolen anyway,” Jessup said.

Bolan nodded, then turned briefly toward Jessup. “Take the wheel,” he said.

Jessup reached over and grasped the steering wheel.

The Hummer slowed momentarily as Bolan took his foot off the accelerator and thrust himself backward over the seat into the rear passenger area of the Hummer. But it was done so quickly and smoothly—obviously a much-practiced move—that Jessup was able to slide behind the wheel and take control immediately.

A second later, Bolan had climbed back into the front, now in the passenger’s seat where Jessup had been a second before. Reaching down to the floorboard, the big man lifted his Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun.

Jessup got the Hummer back up to speed as Bolan strapped his leg down with the seat belt. A moment later, he was more out of the window than in, and firing 3-round bursts from the H&K subgun.

Through the windshield, Jessup could see tiny figures loading what looked like briefcases from the pickups onto the helicopter. He also saw the small grass and dust storms erupt as his partner’s 9 mm slugs fell a few feet in front of the men.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jessup watched Bolan raise his point of aim slightly. As more subgun explosions sounded from the other side of the Hummer, he looked out of the windshield again and saw two holes appear in the side of the chopper.

But they were still too far away for the submachine gun to be relied on for accuracy. It was a short-range weapon, and trying to force it to become a sniper’s rifle was like using a screwdriver for a hammer.