Don Pendleton - Sabotage

Bolan stood, leaning against the nearest of the police cruisers, as local law enforcement prowled the area. Already the crime scene was being meticulously photographed, tagged and logged, while uniformed officers and a couple of plainclothes personnel circulated among the Patriotism Riders. The mourners had been questioned first, their statements taken quickly. Most of them had left. Bolan sympathized with them. Most wouldn’t be able to imagine the emotions that the family and friends of the dead serviceman had to be experiencing, with a tragedy in the family burned so raw by fresh, seemingly random terror and gunfire. The Executioner, on the other hand, had seen more than his fair share of death, tragedy and inhumanity. He understood. He also felt a grim satisfaction at being able to stop these killers before they could take more innocent lives, before they could pervert this graveside service into the type of obscene political statement their kind craved.

The local law enforcement had, as usual, been extremely suspicious. Bolan had given them his “Matthew Cooper” identification and the Justice Department credentials Brognola’s people had issued to that alias. It had still taken a few phone calls, one of them eventually fielded by the big Fed himself, before the police were satisfied. They had grudgingly accepted Bolan’s presence after that, and even done a pretty good job of pointedly ignoring him. The soldier could understand some of the territoriality that came with the job, and he knew only too well that his violent intervention wasn’t something that good cops just dismissed easily.

To those police and any other observer, Mack Bolan was simply waiting around. There was no good reason, in the minds of the police, for this mysterious federal agent not to leave the scene. Bolan imagined they thought he, too, was being territorial, perhaps not trusting the local boys to do a thorough job with the crime scene. The truth was something far different, of course. Bolan was playing a hunch, one spurred by long experience and countless battlefield scenarios.

Something wasn’t quite right, and he could feel it.

There was a loose end somewhere; Bolan was sure of it. As he stood, seemingly observing the police as they took the Riders’ statements, he was surreptitiously scanning the perimeter of the cemetery. The spotter, if indeed there had been one working with the shooters in the van, was bound to be somewhere along that perimeter somewhere, offering him a view similar to the one Bolan had enjoyed from his sniper’s vantage. Unless the man—or woman—had the sense to flee immediately when the action went down, he or she was still up there. Bolan had been watching. That feeling that he, in turn, was being watched was something he couldn’t shake. He had been under fire enough times to know to trust his gut. His finely honed combat instincts were screaming at him. He was listening.

A knot of the Riders no longer speaking with the police had drifted toward Bolan. They were a fairly typical bunch, at first glance—mostly large men in leather jackets, boots and jeans, with a sprinkling of other accessories and licensed motorcycle brand accoutrements. There were a few tattoos in evidence. They looked like bikers, but without the hard edge that Bolan had seen in so many outlaw clubs. These were simply citizens who rode motorcycles, first and foremost, and in this case for a good cause.

The nearest man, who sported a blond crew cut and wore a pair of sunglasses on a cord around his neck, shuffled closer to Bolan and cleared his throat. This was the man Bolan had seen talking to the funeral director.

“Excuse me, sir?” the man asked.

“Yes?”

“Mitch Schrader, sir,” the biker said, extending his hand. Bolan shook it; Schrader’s grip was firm, but not aggressive. “With the Patriotism Riders.”

“So I gathered.” Bolan nodded. “Matthew Cooper.”

“So you said.” Schrader grinned. “You really with the Justice Department? You’re not FBI, or something?” Schrader asked.

“I really am,” Bolan said. In a certain sense, it was true. The soldier worked for nothing more than unbridled justice, justice in its purest and most righteous form.

“I wanted to thank you,” Schrader said. “The boys and I, we, well, we wondered if maybe something like this might happen.”

“What do you mean?” Bolan asked.

“Well—” Schrader shrugged “—the protests, they’re bad enough. We’ve been fighting that for a while. But we figured it was only a matter of time before they stopped being ‘peaceful,’ you know? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I’m not aware of any violence at the funerals of military personnel,” Bolan said warily.

“’Course not.” Schrader grinned. “You’d have to say that, wouldn’t you? But come on, Cooper, you and I both know that’s probably not true. You hear things. Most of the guys are vets themselves. We stay in touch. We network. That’s how we know what the buzz is, where to ride, what services to protect. Makes me sick.” Schrader turned and jerked his chin toward the bodies of the attackers. “They aren’t all like them, I suppose. Not all terrorists or murderers or whatever. But the ones who march and chant, they’re just as bad, aren’t they? Pissing on the graves of war dead. Upsetting the families. Turning the deaths of brave men into a political statement.”

“And women,” one of the other Riders put in.

“And women,” Schrader stated, grinning. “That’s Ben. He’s our resident equal rights activist.”

“Up yours,” Ben snarled.

“Anyway,” Schrader said, his smile fading, “I mean it, man. You didn’t just save them—” he motioned toward the few mourners still present, who were speaking with the funeral director beyond the circle of bustling police “—you saved all of us. We’d have been the first to catch one. I thought maybe, well, it’s hard to explain. But I knew coming here might be bad for us. We couldn’t stay away, though, not thinking there was a protest going down.”

“How did you find out about that?” Bolan asked.

“I got a phone call, man.” Schrader shrugged. “Last minute. Don’t know the guy. He said just that he was a fellow American, and that he knew the service today was going on, and that there was supposed to be a big peace protest here. Said he figured that would be of interest to me, and yeah, it was. It’s what we do. We stand up for people who can’t do it themselves, you know? People who’ve already given everything there is to give. You can dig that, right?”

“I can.” Bolan nodded. Indeed, he could.

“We network,” Schrader said, indicating his fellow Riders. “There are other chapters of Riders in this part of the country, and a few other groups that go by different names, folks who do the same thing we do. We stay in touch and we tip each other off when a ride comes up, especially if we think one of those protest groups, especially the crazier ones you see on the news, is aware of the service and looking to march on it. We were, all of us, on CNN just last month. But I’m telling you, Cooper, this is the first time I’ve ever gotten an anonymous phone call like that. I’m thinking now it was some kind of setup.”

“You could be right,” Bolan acknowledged. He took a small notebook from inside one of the pockets of his blacksuit. Using the metal pen clipped to it, he wrote down a phone number. The number would route a call through several satellite cutouts and eventually to Bolan’s secure satellite phone, while flagging the call as an unsecured transmission from a potentially unknown third party. No amount of tech-tracing would produce any intelligence on Bolan’s phone or the soldier’s whereabouts, but to the caller it would still appear to be a direct line. Bolan tore out the slip of paper and handed it to Schrader.