Don Pendleton - Patriot Strike

“It’s one of ’em,” said Haskin. “Has to be. Who else would be here when the place is closed?”

“Damn tourists,” Bodine suggested. “Wanna snap a picture standin’ in the lights.”

“Parkin’ as far as they can get from anything?” Haskin snorted dismissively. “We got one. Now just keep your eyes peeled for the other.”

“You figure they’ll be packin’?” Jackson asked him.

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“Hell, I am.”

That was a fact. Between them, they were carrying two pump-action shotguns, one Heckler & Koch HK416 carbine chambered in 5.56 NATO, one AK-101 feeding the same NATO rounds and at least four handguns. Bodine sometimes wore a second pistol in an ankle holster for backup, normally a Colt .380 Mustang Pocketlite, but Haskin hadn’t looked to see if he was packing it tonight.

They had firepower, anyhow, and horsepower under the hood of their GMC Yukon, with its 5.7-liter turbocharged Chevrolet small-block V8 engine. Haskin wished they’d had a bit more brainpower, but these were good boys, dedicated, all straight shooters. He would work with what he had.

And how hard could it be?

Pick up two people from the ever-loving Shrine of Texas Liberty and take them back to headquarters for questioning. It wasn’t like they had to fight John Wayne and Richard Widmark, or even Billy Bob Thornton. Sure, one of them was a Texas Ranger, but she was a woman, for God’s sake.

One woman then and she’d be packing, but he didn’t know about the other one. Haskin had no idea who else they were looking for—a man or woman; white, black or whatever—but it stood to reason that there’d be at least one other gun against their eight or nine.

Safe odds, if only they had been allowed to kill their quarry, but that wasn’t in the cards. His orders were to bring at least one of them back alive and preferably both. Headquarters couldn’t question corpses, and if Haskin dropped the ball on this one, it would be his own ass on the charcoal grill. And that was not one of them whatchamacallits. Simile or metaphor, maybe an oxymoron.

Screw it.

“Here goes,” said Jackson, as the Dodge Avenger’s driver opened up her door and stepped out. She’d turned the dome light off—smart thinking—but the parking lot was lit for security’s sake, and Haskin recognized her from a photo he’d been shown that afternoon.

“It’s her,” he said. The lady Ranger.

“One down, one to go,” said Bodine, like he had just invented math.

“Suppose the other one don’t show?” asked Folsom.

“Then we bag this one,” Haskin replied. “Call it a night.”

“We have to take her straight back?” Jackson queried. “She’s a looker.”

“Remember what we’re here for, damn it. And remember what you stand to lose, if you screw it up.”

* * *

WATCHING FROM THE SHADOWS, Bolan saw his contact step out of a vehicle he took to be her personal ride. Nothing the Texas Rangers would select for chasing outlaws on the open road, and Bolan wasn’t sure if they did any undercover work. He knew the force was small—about 150 officers to police America’s second-largest state and its twenty-six million inhabitants. Not to mention the countless tourists, drifters and undocumented aliens. Only a handful of Rangers were women, and Bolan was looking at one of them now.

He knew her face from photos he’d received in preparation for the meeting. She, on the other hand, wouldn’t know him from Adam until Bolan introduced himself. Photos of Bolan—with the new face he had worn since “dying” some time back in New York City’s Central Park—were scarce as the proverbial hen’s teeth. He hadn’t bothered changing fingerprints at the same time, since he was dead to the world, and Uncle Sam’s elves had purged every file they could find that contained Bolan’s prints—from the Pentagon and FBI headquarters, to LAPD, NYPD and so on down the food chain.

In that sense, at least, it was good to be dead.

The Ranger he had come to meet, by contrast, was very much alive. And Bolan hoped to help her stay that way.

Adlene Granger was thirty-one years old, five-seven without standard Ranger cowboy boots and Stetson hat, her frame packed with 137 fairly trim, athletic pounds. Green eyes and auburn hair, no known tattoos, although she had a scar inside her left forearm from taking down a crackhead who had pulled a razor in the scuffle. All of that was in her file, together with the fact that she had shot two would-be bank robbers in Brownsville, on a stakeout, killing one of them.

But now she needed help and couldn’t ask her fellow Rangers. Couldn’t put her faith in local law enforcement, Texas-style. She wasn’t all that keen on trusting Feds—from what Bolan understood—but everybody had to lean on someone, sometime.

Nature’s law.

Enter the Executioner.

His contact—Ranger Granger?—had a tale to tell, and Bolan had agreed to listen. He already knew the basics from his briefing, but he needed more details. Needed to know if it was serious enough to rate his kind of handling and yield a positive result.

Bolan had known too many dedicated and courageous women of the law to swallow any crap about their runaway emotions, inability to cope with crises or the rest of it. Short of a power-lifting contest in the heavyweight division, Bolan couldn’t think of any field where women did not rival or surpass their male competitors—and he had seen some Russian ladies who could hoist the big iron, too.

He wasn’t looking for a partner, though. Had no intention of enlisting anybody for his mission, if it turned out that there was a mission here, deep in the heart of Texas. He wanted information he could act on—if it seemed his kind of action was appropriate—while Ranger Granger went back to her normal daily life and put their meeting out of mind as best she could.

Simple—unless it wasn’t.

Bolan knew she had a personal connection to the problem, but he didn’t know how far she planned to chase it. He would have to make it crystal clear that he was not recruiting, not inviting her to join in a crusade. She would be briefing him and nothing more.

He hoped.

Emerging from the shadows, Bolan showed himself, waited and watched her start the long walk from her Dodge Avenger toward the south end of the Alamo’s facade. She took long, determined strides, an easy swing to her arms. She wore hand-tooled boots with sharply pointed toes, blue jeans, a denim shirt under a thigh-length suede jacket. The jacket was unbuttoned, granting easy access to a good-sized pistol on her right hip, worn in a high-rise holster.

Here we go, he thought, standing his ground.

* * *

“YOU SEE ’IM?” Jackson blurted out.

“We ain’t blind,” Haskin told him.

“Let’s get after ’em,” said Bodine.

“Not yet.”

“Why the hell not?” Folsom challenged.

“Look, we know it’s her and likely him, but I ain’t making no mistakes ’cause we got hasty.”

“What, you think he’s just some random guy walkin’ around the Alamo?” asked Jackson.

“Making sure don’t cost us nothin’ but a little time. And they ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Oh, yeah? Suppose his wheels is back there and they just take off?”

“We ain’t afoot,” Haskin reminded him. “And Kent didn’t put you in charge.”

“Hey, I’m just sayin’—”

“Shut your piehole, will ya? Lemme see what’s goin’ on.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

At times like this, Bryar Haskin wished he didn’t have to deal with idiots. They were useful, in their way, but Christ, their whining grated on his nerves.

He watched the woman walk toward the man who had appeared as if from nowhere—meaning that he’d walked up somewhere from the south, maybe approached by way of Crockett Street. Whatever. He was here now, if it was him, and while Haskin had no serious concerns on that score, he was still determined to be sure before he made a move.