Dragon's Den. Don Pendleton

Bolan kept to the outermost exit lane. His eyes flicked to the rearview in time to see the sedan slide into the lane next to his and keep back a couple of car-lengths. The maneuver left no doubt in Bolan’s mind the followers weren’t new to the game.

      Bolan spotted the large hotel ahead of him and signaled early enough to make sure his tail saw where he planned to go. He swung into the parking lot and parked in one of the side-lot spaces. The L-shaped hotel was actually split into two sections separated by a breezeway at a right angle to the main office.

      Bolan walked into the breezeway and broke into a jog after moving from view of the observers. He reached the other end, then turned right at the end. He followed this causeway to the rear of the hotel and crossed around the windowless back side of the office. Bolan waited about half a minute, then vaulted the eight-foot wall. He dropped to the pavement and skirted the wall to the edge of the lot.

      Bolan peered around the wall and quickly spotted the sedan. The driver had pulled into the parking lot of a taco joint directly across from the hotel. It afforded them a virtually unobstructed view of the hotel. It seemed they meant no violent threat to the Executioner—at least not an immediate one—and Bolan planned to make sure it never got that far. He’d learned that sometimes discretion wasn’t the better part of valor, and this was one of those times.

      Bolan turned and strolled to the stoplight half a block away. He crossed with the light and then doubled back so he could approach from the rear. When he reached the building next to the taco stand, he circled it and came up on the sedan from the rear. He took the last twenty yards in a crouch and approached on the passenger side. Two men in crew cuts and short-sleeve shirts occupied the front seats. Bolan kept low and quietly tested the rear door handle. Locked.

      Bolan went in hard.

      He reached into the open window and grabbed the passenger by the collar. With his left hand, he shoved the man to the left and produced the Beretta 93-R in his right fist, pointing it toward the head of the driver.

      “You packing?” he asked them.

      The passenger yelped something as Bolan’s rock-hard knuckles pressed against his neck, and the driver’s eyes went wide. The men were young and inexperienced. They hadn’t expected their quarry to become the aggressor, and Bolan had taken them by total surprise.

      “I asked a question,” Bolan said. “You guys packing?”

      “Yeah, yeah,” the driver replied.

      “Right or southpaw?” Bolan asked him.

      “Say what?”

      “Are you right-or left-handed?”

      “Right,” he said. “Why?”

      “You first, then. Use your left hand and dump the piece out the window.”

      “You’re making a big mistake, asshole,” the passenger finally squealed in outrage.

      “So is he,” Bolan said, gesturing in his partner’s direction with the muzzle of the Beretta. He returned his attention to the driver. “Last chance. Lose the sidearm or it all ends here.”

      “Fine, fine,” he said.

      When Bolan heard the pistol hit the pavement outside, he ordered the passenger to carefully hand over his weapon. The guy complied. Bolan immediately recognized the Glock 21. He tucked the pistol at the small of his back, then commanded the pair to put their hands on the dash. He opened the rear door once they had done it and slid to the center of the backseat.

      “Okay, let’s have it,” Bolan asked.

      “You just stepped in a whole pile o’ shit, pal,” the passenger said. “You’ll be at the top of Homeland Security’s most-wanted list by close of business today.”

      “Somehow I don’t think so,” the Executioner replied.

       2

      “I don’t get it,” Hal Brognola said when Bolan related his encounter with the federal agents. “Why would this interest Homeland Security? In fact, how would they even know about it?”

      “No clue. But they admitted their orders were to pressure local authorities to keep this thing under wraps,” Bolan replied. “I kept my cover but it won’t last. I’m sure they’ll make calls. I need them to back off this thing. I don’t want to have to worry about friendlies getting caught in the cross fire if it goes hard.”

      Brognola sighed. “You got it. I’ll make sure the order to stand down comes straight from the top. I’m sorry about this, Striker.”

      “Not your fault, Hal. This wasn’t on my radar screen, either.”

      “So Captain Amherst told you they’ve seized three thousand kilos of high-grade opium, huh?” Brognola recited. “That’s seriously heavy weight.”

      “Yeah, and it’s obviously drawing more attention by the moment. That’s why I need to move on this right now before the entire area gets flooded with real DEA.”

      “If the press gets wind of this, DEA will be the least of your problems. All the major papers are carrying the yacht-raid story, and you know sooner or later someone’s going to leak the rest of it. Reporters will swarm that town like nobody’s business.”

      “Exactly,” the Executioner replied. “And I’m not real big on having my face splashed all over the six-o’clock news.”

      “You have a plan?”

      “It’s sketchy, but it’s all I have to go on. Amherst told me about the other surrounding towns within her jurisdiction where they also seized large quantities of the same purity. One of them is Ladera Heights. According to my LAPD contacts, the Bloods control all major drug action in this area. I need to know who’s in charge.”

      “I’ll put Bear to work. You’ll have it within the hour.”

      Bolan believed him. Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman wore his nickname well. Not only because of his wrestlerlike body, but also because of the heart to match. The leader of Stony Man’s crack cybernetics team seemed serious, but he hadn’t permitted the internal man to mirror that gruff exterior. That sensitivity set him apart from most men who’d experienced the kind of trauma he had—confined to a wheelchair by a bullet in the spine—and Bolan considered Kurtzman to be one of the most intelligent people in the world.

      “You can send it through the plane’s uplink,” Bolan said. “I’ll be waiting there with Jack. Out here.”

      Bolan broke the connection, then took the exit ramp leading to LAX and the private hangar leased under one of Stony Man’s paper companies. While the ultracovert group operated at the pleasure of the President, its actions weren’t consistent with constitutional law. Some of Stony Man’s past operations inside the territorial borders of the U.S. would have been considered by most as highly illegal, even with the leeway granted to federal agencies investigating terrorism. That’s why Brognola insisted on the provision of cover names and federal-agency credentials, as much to reduce Stony Man’s culpability as to protect the identities of its operatives.

      The Executioner didn’t really need the forged documents, since he could get what he wanted by other means. He disliked working with allies—the other team members of Stony Man notwithstanding—and what he couldn’t glean from his many intelligence contacts or free access to Stony Man’s databases, he could get through enemy interrogation. Bolan rarely had to implement the latter solution and he didn’t believe in torture, chemical or otherwise, although he occasionally understood the need for such methods.

      Bolan reached the airport in fifteen minutes. He pulled his rental car around the rear of the hangar—the section not visible from the tarmac—and then strolled inside. In the center of the hangar sat a converted Gulfstream C-20 jet. At just over eighty feet in length, it sported a pair of Rolls-Royce Spey engines and had a range of more than thirty-six hundred nautical miles. Any casual observers wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary