Don Pendleton - Enemies Within

Bolan hated to pull the plug, but he didn’t intend to spark a further bloodbath in the streets of Centreville. On top of that, he heard a siren’s distant wail, either the local cops—with twelve men on the force full-time, as he recalled—or a Queen Anne’s County deputy out on routine highway patrol. He didn’t want the law drawn into this with no idea of what they’d wind up facing, so he made the only call that suited him.

“I’m calling it,” he told Grimaldi. “Let’s get out of here before SWAT hears a rumble and starts gearing up.”

“At least we didn’t pick up any shrapnel,” the pilot said.

“Small favors,” Bolan replied as Grimaldi swung down an alley and began reversing their direction back toward 313.

“I’m thinking Hal won’t like it.”

“Not one little bit,” Bolan agreed.

“You think he’ll pull us off?”

“Doubt it,” Bolan replied after considering. “Right now, we’re all he’s got.”

“I wish that didn’t carry so much weight.”

“Comes with the big bucks.”

“Yeah. I’m still waiting for those,” Grimaldi said with a grin.

“You and me both.”

When they’d cleared Centreville and started back toward Goldsboro, where the chopper waited for them on the ground, Bolan began rehearsing what he’d say to Brognola. He’d never polished up bad news before, and wouldn’t start today, but at least he still had other leads, besides the father who had not seen Walton Tanner Junior in so long most people would consider them estranged.

Another of the AWOL Rangers, Tyrone Moseley, had a brother in Newark, New Jersey, chasing a bachelor’s degree in engineering. Moseley’s file had sketched sufficient background on the kid to mark him as a “normal” student, but he was an African American whose hackles might rise at confrontation with two white government agents looking for his brother, handing back their cards without revealing much of anything.

Life in a city of a quarter million people, some still brooding over riots forty years ago and nursing grudges that might never heal. Some would be militants, the bulk of them just ordinary people conscious of the fact that they’d been wronged repeatedly for years on end, while no one in authority extended an apology, much less making them whole for loved ones killed or maimed along the way.

That wasn’t Bolan’s problem, and he couldn’t solve it if it was. His more immediate concern was to find out if one young man bent on making a new life for himself had been in contact with his elder brother. And what—if anything—had passed between them when they’d spoken, and whether Tyron had been crass enough to drag the kid into his mess.

Bolan hoped not, but as he’d learned to his private sorrow, families were complicated, nursing secrets rarely spoken to outsiders, if at all. He would reach out, learn what Jesse Moseley had to say, if anything, and hope for any clue that put him on the AWOL Rangers’ trail.

Failing that, he’d have to play the rest of it by ear.

Nothing unique in that approach for Bolan, since he’d struck out on his own against the Mafia so long ago, and carried on from there into a world gone mad with terror, tyrants and the endless clash of hostile creeds. He soldiered on, because that’s what a soldier did, until the Universe allowed no choice but to lay down his or her weapons and surrender in the end.

He and Grimaldi had a job to do, and there could be no turning back.

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