Don Pendleton - Dual Action

They hadn’t cornered Bolan yet

But it could happen if he didn’t stay ahead of them. Step one was blacking out the 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. Numbers could defeat him then.

He wasn’t Superman, wasn’t invincible. A storm of fire would drop him where he stood.

Unless he found a way out of the trap.

MACK BOLAN®

The Executioner

#255 War Bird

#256 Point of Impact

#257 Precision Play

#258 Target Lock

#259 Nightfire

#260 Dayhunt

#261 Dawnkill

#262 Trigger Point

#263 Skysniper

#264 Iron Fist

#265 Freedom Force

#266 Ultimate Price

#267 Invisible Invader

#268 Shattered Trust

#269 Shifting Shadows

#270 Judgment Day

#271 Cyberhunt

#272 Stealth Striker

#273 UForce

#274 Rogue Target

#275 Crossed Borders

#276 Leviathan

#277 Dirty Mission

#278 Triple Reverse

#279 Fire Wind

#280 Fear Rally

#281 Blood Stone

#282 Jungle Conflict

#283 Ring of Retaliation

#284 Devil’s Army

#285 Final Strike

#286 Armageddon Exit

#287 Rogue Warrior

#288 Arctic Blast

#289 Vendetta Force

#290 Pursued

#291 Blood Trade

#292 Savage Game

#293 Death Merchants

#294 Scorpion Rising

#295 Hostile Alliance

#296 Nuclear Game

#297 Deadly Pursuit

#298 Final Play

#299 Dangerous Encounter

#300 Warrior’s Requiem

#301 Blast Radius

#302 Shadow Search

#303 Sea of Terror

#304 Soviet Specter

#305 Point Position

#306 Mercy Mission

#307 Hard Pursuit

#308 Into the Fire

#309 Flames of Fury

#310 Killing Heat

#311 Night of the Knives

#312 Death Gamble

#313 Lockdown

#314 Lethal Payload

#315 Agent of Peril

#316 Poison Justice

#317 Hour of Judgment

#318 Code of Resistance

#319 Entry Point

#320 Exit Code

#321 Suicide Highway

#322 Time Bomb

#323 Soft Target

#324 Terminal Zone

#325 Edge of Hell

#326 Blood Tide

#327 Serpent’s Lair

#328 Triangle of Terror

#329 Hostile Crossing

#330 Dual Action

Dual Action

Don Pendleton

The fires of hate, compressed within the heart, Burn fiercer and will break at last in flame.

—Pierre Corneille 1606-1684

Le Cid

I’m fighting fire with fire this time. The risk is that the end result may be scorched earth.

—Mack Bolan

To Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Epilogue

“Jeez, you get a load of that one?” Eddie Sawyer asked.

“There’s nothin’ wrong with my eyes,” Joe DeLuca answered from the shotgun seat beside him. “Twenty-ten, last time I read the chart.”

“So, what’s the score, Hawk-eye?”

“I’d give her six.”

“I bet you would,” Sawyer quipped, “if you had the six to spare.”

He tried to get another quick glimpse of the blond hitchhiker in his right-hand mirror, but the armored truck was rolling at a steady 60 mph, and her form had dwindled to the size of a toy soldier in the glass.

“I’m sayin’ I’ve seen better,” DeLuca said.

“Not today, you haven’t.”

“Well—”

“Let’s ask the mole.” Sawyer reached back and keyed the intercom that linked the driver’s section of the truck with the cargo vault behind. “Hey, Tommy boy!” he called. “You see that sweet young thing?”

Tom Nelson’s scratchy voice came back at Sawyer through the speaker. “Screw the botha youse.”

It was a running joke among the men of Truck 13, Ohio Armored Transport. Nelson’s line of vision from the vault was strictly limited, and it was well-known that he spent his travel time immersed in Popular Mechanics, trying to “improve” himself. He never saw the sweet young things at roadside, standing with their thumbs out, and a good deal more besides. They always asked him, though, and his reply was perfectly predictable within a narrow range.

Screw you.

Piss off.

Blow me.

The Nelson repertoire.

It never failed—and always got a laugh out of DeLuca.

“Never mind there, Tommy. Sorry I disturbed you,” Sawyer offered in meek apology before switching off the intercom.

During the spring and summer months, girl watching was a principal diversion for the men of Truck 13. Of course, they lost the female scenery in autumn, and they saw no one at all on foot during their long runs in the winter. It got boring in a hurry, then, with nothing to watch out for but the black ice on the highway, waiting for a chance to put them in a ditch.

Their long run, once a week, was back and forth from Dayton to Columbus, with a stop in Springfield on the eastbound leg. It wasn’t all that far, really—no more than fifty miles—but it seemed longer with the load they had to escort over open country.

Wednesday mornings, as regular as clockwork, they were out on Highway 70 with ten to fifteen million dollars riding in the back.

On Wednesdays, Sawyer had an extra cup of coffee in the barn before they hit the road. It kept him sharp, ready for anything—although, in truth, nothing had ever happened on a Wednesday run, or any other time.

He had been lucky driving Truck 13. DeLuca was a decent partner, if somewhat opinionated. Sawyer had seniority with four years longer on the job, and both of them had Nelson ranked. He was the baby of the family, all six feet seven inches of him, with a pair of hands that made the M-16 they kept in back look like a toy.

Not that they’d ever had to use the rifle, or the shotgun mounted on the dashboard, or the pistols on their hips. Sawyer had never fired a shot himself, except in practice, and he hoped he never would.

Still, you could never tell.

“You hear about that orange alert on the news this morning?” he asked DeLuca.

“Sports arenas, what they said on Channel 7. Maybe sports arenas, maybe on the coast. Of course, they couldn’t say which coast. ‘No further details. Sorry. As you were.’”

“I hear you.”

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, Ohio Armored’s management had tried to keep up with the terrorist alerts from Washington, but who could follow all of that? It had been years of running through the color code with “credible” alerts from “trusted” sources, and they never came to anything. Lately, Sawyer suspected the alarms were issued automatically, either to justify the Homeland Security payroll or to make the Feds seem like they were achieving something with their sound and fury.

Mostly, Sawyer thought it was a waste of time and energy, but if he dropped his guard and something happened for a change, it would be his ass in a sling. He was the senior man on Truck 13, and thus responsible for anything that went awry.