Don Pendleton - Dual Action

There had been other changes, too. The former Seed of Yahweh was under new management these days, renamed the Aryan Resistance Movement. Its leaders were more militant, more outraged by the slow drift of society toward equal rights for all.

And if the information out of Washington was accurate, they had a deadly secret.

Finding it, defusing it, was Bolan’s job.

He lay in shadow, clutching the Beretta, while yet another sentry passed by, heedless of his presence in the weeds. When it was clear, the soldier rose and bolted toward the compound’s armory.

He reached it, tried the door and found it locked. Bolan was kneeling, pick in hand, ready to remedy that problem when a scuffling footstep sounded close behind him and a gruff male voice demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

SIMON GRUNDY LOVED his life. It was a strange thing for him to imagine, knowing where he’d come from—foster homes and juvey hall, a half-assed motorcycle gang, state prison—but it was God’s honest truth.

Praise Yahweh.

Who’d have guessed that a habitual offender, malcontent and full-time badass would mature into an officer and gentleman, committed to salvation of his race and nation from encroachment by an enemy who made the Russians and the Red Chinese seem penny-ante by comparison?

Grundy supposed it would’ve made his mother proud, if she had crawled out of a bottle long enough to focus on her only son for ten or fifteen seconds in her worthless life. As for his father, well, Grundy would need a name to find that shiftless bastard, and it wasn’t worth the trouble after thirty-seven years.

The Aryan Resistance Movement was his family now, and that made Grundy proud.

He stood before the mirror in his quarters, counting brushstrokes as he groomed his flowing beard. Most of his troops preferred the skinhead look, but Grundy favored a more biblical style. It could’ve looked bizarre, but he believed his hulking build and forceful personality made him imposing, rather than ridiculous.

Grundy was midway through stroke ninety-five, just after midnight, when somebody gave a shout outside. He didn’t recognize the voice, heard no coherent words, but any breach of Camp Yahweh’s decorum was his ultimate responsibility. Grundy set down his brush, considered putting on a shirt, then stepped outside bare-chested.

Let the ladies look, if they were so inclined.

At first glance, from the doorway of his quarters, nothing seemed to be amiss. He checked the towers, then the fence, and found his sentries standing ready, trying to pinpoint the sound. They were having no luck, so far.

The voice had been a man’s, but Grundy couldn’t say if it had sounded angry, startled or afraid. He ruled out joy, since none of Camp Yahweh’s inhabitants would draw attention to themselves with shouts of glee at midnight.

He should count the guards, Grundy decided, make sure none of them had suffered any kind of mishap or—

The fireball nearly blinded him. Its shock wave struck a second later, driving spikes of pain into his eardrums. Grundy rocked back on his heels, with the concussion of the blast, then felt its heat wash over him.

The armory.

He didn’t have to guess. Even if Grundy hadn’t known Camp Yahweh’s layout perfectly, he would’ve recognized the sound of ammo cooking off, the rapid fire of boxed rounds burning. He instinctively recoiled, crouching, and scuttled back inside his quarters.

What in hell was happening?

He plucked an AR-15 from a wall rack mounted near the door and peered outside again. Guards kept their distance from the flaming ruin of the armory, ducking and dodging slugs that whined through darkness from the pyre. Grundy was on the verge of self-congratulation for their discipline—no panic firing yet—when suddenly an automatic weapon stuttered in the night, some thirty yards east of the burning building.

Full-auto? Something was very wrong.

Machine guns were forbidden in Camp Yahweh. Grundy knew each weapon in the armory—whatever might be left of it—and he examined every private piece brought into camp, from knives to long guns. Nothing was allowed that might provoke another raid, be it a switchblade or a silencer. Up front, at least, he played it strictly by the book.

Which meant that any shooter with full-auto capability was an intruder, wreaking havoc with his men.

Grundy was looking for the prowler’s muzzle-flash, tracking his noise, when someone called out in the night, “That isn’t one of us!”

The sentries started to converge, drifting off-station from the fence, but Grundy didn’t want them moving yet. If there was one intruder in the compound, why not more?

He shouted to the guards, identified himself and ordered them to stand their ground. They were conditioned to obey and did as they were told, although reluctantly. Grundy supposed he’d lose them soon, unless—

“Give me the lights!” he bellowed at the tower guards. “Light up the east side, now!”

As if in answer to his order, yet another thunderous explosion rocked the camp. It was the storage shed this time, roof lifting on a jet of fire that made him think of a volcano spewing lava toward the sky. Two of its walls fell outward, burning, while the others stood in stark relief against the darkness that surrounded them.

Storage.

They kept no arms or ammunition in that shed, but there was fuel for vehicles and generators, propane tanks for cooking. All together, burning fiercely now to light the darkest corners of the camp.

The floodlights blazed, sweeping the compound, bright beams crossing, passing on, returning to the site of the explosion. As they swept across the landscape, Grundy saw a black-clad figure ducking for the shadows, painted face averted from the light.

“Intruder!” he called out to anyone within earshot. Pointing, he ran after the stranger, shouting orders all the way. “Fall in, goddammit! Head him off! I want that prick alive!”

THE EXECUTIONER squeezed off a short burst from his autocarbine as the troops converged. One of his targets stumbled, fell and didn’t rise again.

The lights were trouble, tracking him across the compound when he might’ve otherwise eluded hunters in the dark. Ducking behind a hut that sprouted radio antennas from its angled roof, he craned around the corner, found his mark and milked a 5 or 6 round burst from his stuttergun. The nearest of the floodlights imploded and went dark as soldiers scattered from it, ducking out of sight below the tower’s waist-high walls.

Someone—perhaps the mountain man—was shouting orders at the other troops, coordinating the advance. They hadn’t cornered Bolan yet, but it could happen, if he didn’t stay ahead of them. Step one was blacking out the other light before it marked his place and someone on the sidelines made a lucky shot.

He saw the glaring beam wash over his position, even though it couldn’t find him in the shadow of the small communications hut. It wouldn’t take the sentries long to close around him, pin him down, and numbers could defeat him then. He wasn’t Superman, wasn’t invincible. A storm of fire would drop him where he stood, like anybody else, unless he found a way out of the trap.

Lights first.

Taking a chance, he stepped into the open, raised his weapon, sighting down the beam of that all-seeing eye. Before the startled hunters could react, Bolan triggered another burst and blacked out the floodlight, toppling one of its minders from his lofty perch into a screaming swan dive to the earth below.

The sudden darkness covered him, but not for long. On orders from their chief, the camp’s guards were advancing, still maintaining discipline of fire, but it would only take one glimpse of Bolan in the shadows, one stray shot, to spark chaos.