Altered State. Don Pendleton

legally. Between the jurisdiction thing and their connections from Kabul to Washington, arrests aren’t happening.”

      “Connections,” Bolan said. “Whose toes will I be stepping on?”

      “Vanguard has friends in Congress and around the Pentagon,” Brognola replied. “They serve huge corporations, which means lobbyists are at their beck and call. As far as opposition on the ground, watch out for people from the Company.”

      Bolan suppressed a grimace. Elements within the CIA had dealt with organized criminals from the Agency’s inception in 1947. Espionage was a dirty business, but some of the CIA’s allies were filthy beyond redemption: French heroin smugglers in the late 1940s and early ’50s, Asian traffickers during the Vietnam War, and South American cocaine cartels throughout the Contra mess in Nicaragua. Each time they were caught, the spooks cried “national security” and vowed that they would never touch another load of contraband.

      In each and every case, they lied.

      “I see a problem going in,” Bolan remarked.

      “Which is?”

      “I’ll need a guide, interpreter, whatever,” he replied. “We usually use a native who’s been working for the Company. But if they’re on the other side, this time…”

      “You’re covered,” Brognola replied. “The DEA’s been working overtime on this. In fact, most of the information I’ve just given you came straight from them. One of their agents will provide a native contractor to meet your needs.”

      “We’re in the middle of a bureaucratic civil war, then,” Bolan said.

      “No one in Washington will ever call it that,” Brognola stated. “Vanguard’s the target. Do it right, there’ll be some backroom grumbling, but no politician’s going public to defend drug smugglers who’ve already been accused of killing innocent civilians. They can spin the killings seven ways from Sunday, but there’s no way to explain shipments of heroin.”

      “And if the Company steps in?”

      “Wrong place, wrong time,” Brognola said. “Do what you have to do. They bury their mistakes. It’s one thing they know how to do.”

      “I’ll need more background on the targets,” Bolan said.

      Brognola took a CD in a plastic jewel case from an inside pocket of his windbreaker and handed it to Bolan on the down-low.

      “Everything’s on there,” he said. “Including info on your DEA contact. Just wipe it when you’re done, as usual.”

      “I’ll check it out tonight,” Bolan replied, and made the CD disappear into a pocket of his own. “When do I leave?”

      “Sooner the better,” Hal replied. “You’ll have to fly commercial, I’m afraid. A charter where you’re going raises too damn many eyebrows, but the CD has some addresses in Kabul where you can pick up tools of the trade. In fact, from what I hear, guns are the one thing in Afghanistan that’s easier to find than heroin. Come one, come all.”

      “So, it’s Dodge City in the middle of a bureaucratic civil war.”

      Brognola smiled. “Picture Colombia, devoid of any self-restraint.”

      “Sounds like a blast,” Bolan replied.

      A S PROMISED , the CD contained all of the information Bolan needed, and then some. There was a capsule history of opium and heroin production in Afghanistan, spanning the period from British domination in the nineteenth century, through Russian occupation, modern civil wars, up to the present day. Bolan skimmed over it and focused chiefly on the maps and satellite photos depicting known heroin trade routes.

      The background on Vanguard International demanded his closer attention. The company had been founded in 1995 by present owner-CEO Clay Carlisle and a partner, improbably named Thomas Jefferson, who had dropped out of sight after selling his shares to Carlisle in August 2001. Carlisle was the undisputed king of Vanguard, fielding a private army larger than those deployed by some Third World nations.

      As for Carlisle himself, he was the son of a self-ordained evangelical minister, born in 1964, who had graduated “with honors” from an unaccredited parochial high school, then volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps and served with distinction in Grenada. After eight years in the Corps, he’d pulled the pin and entered corporate security as a hired bodyguard. In 1994 he’d shot it out with kidnappers who tried to snatch his client—a Texas oil billionaire—and had suffered a near-fatal wound in the firefight. The grateful client, who emerged unscathed, was pleased to bankroll Carlisle in creation of his own security firm, Vanguard, which claimed the oilman’s vast empire as its first client.

      And the rest, as someone said, was history.

      An odd footnote to Carlisle’s dossier described his fat donations to various far-right religious groups and his membership on the board of Hallelujah Ministries, which sponsored revival meetings and kept a small staff of attorneys on retainer to defend ministers “falsely accused” of various crimes, including embezzlement and child molestation. At a private Hallelujah gathering in 2002, Carlisle had described the 9/11 raids as “proof that the Second Coming will occur in our lifetime.”

      How all of that squared with drug smuggling was anyone’s guess.

      Carlisle’s second in command was Dale Ingram, a twenty-five-year FBI veteran who had ended his run as chief of the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Division. September 11 had caught Ingram and his G-men by surprise, despite warnings from several FBI field offices that Arab nationals with suspected ties to al Qaeda were training at U.S. flight schools. Whistleblowers produced memos bearing Ingram’s signature, dismissing the warnings as “red herrings,” whereupon he was invited to retire two years ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, he had become acquainted with Carlisle through contacts still unknown, and Ingram found retirement from the Bureau very lucrative indeed.

      If smuggling heroin into the States bothered the former G-man, he had learned to conceal any qualms. In fact, judging from the photos Brognola and Stony Man had supplied, Ingram seemed to be laughing all the way to the bank.

      Bolan scanned the reports of Vanguard mercenaries seen on Afghan opium plantations and convoying heroin shipments. The CD included numerous photos and several video clips—one of Carlisle and Ingram together at a Kabul hotel, meeting a native identified as Basir Ahmad-Shah.

      Ahmad-Shah’s CD-ROM dossier identified him as one of Afghanistan’s four largest heroin kingpins. Within his territory, he enjoyed a vertical monopoly, from poppy fields through processing and export from the country. He had agents scattered all over the world, but Ahmad-Shah himself had never left Afghanistan, as far as anyone could say. Imprisoned briefly by the Taliban in 2001, he’d been released and lauded as a “prisoner of conscience” after coalition troops drove his persecutors from Kabul and environs. His number two was a cut-throat named Jamal Woraz, identified by the DEA as Ahmad-Shah’s strong right hand and primary enforcer.

      That left the file on Bolan’s DEA contact, one Deirdre Falk. Bolan had worked with female Feds before and found them more than capable, but he was still a bit surprised to find a woman stationed in Afghanistan, where brutal violence was a daily fact of life and male officials of the Islamic Republic were predisposed to treat females with a measure of disdain.

      The good news was that she’d been handling it for nearly three years now, and showed no signs of cracking up. She’d built some solid cases, although only one of them had gone to trial so far, sending a second-string drug smuggler off to prison for three years. The big boys were protected, and Falk had to know it.

      Which perhaps explained why she was willing to collaborate with Stony Man—or the organization “Matt Cooper” said he represented.

      There was no reason to suppose she’d ever heard of Stony Man Farm or the covert work it performed. If she had , then the Farm’s security needed a major tune-up. The flip side of that coin might be shock, when she realized that Bolan hadn’t come from Washington to help