Homeland Terror. Don Pendleton

he half expected to see a SWAT force materialize out of the shadows. What he got instead was the sudden, blinding glare of a flash grenade that had just detonated on the road in front of the Hummer.

      “What the hell?” Eddie Chang raised a hand before his face, but the grenade had already left him temporarily blinded.

      Yarborough was similarly stricken, and he feared Cummings and Brower had probably been blinded in the Hummer directly ahead of him. He figured Cummings would go for his brakes and did likewise.

      The Jeep’s tires screeched, and Yarborough felt the vehicle go into a skid. Any second he expected to slam into the rear of the larger vehicle.

      “We’re dead,” he muttered.

      BOLAN KNEW the incendiary flash was coming. Before the grenade burst forth with its blinding light, the Executioner turned his back to the explosion and cast his eyes downward, locking them on the 7.62 mm Belgian FN FAL carbine he’d wrested from one of the crates inside the storage shed. He’d already fed a 20-round cartridge into the breech and cleared the weapon for firing. The grenade had tipped the balance in his favor, but only for a moment. Bolan knew he was outnumbered. If he didn’t act fast, any second he would be outgunned, as well.

      Once he heard the crunch of colliding metal, Bolan turned back toward the road and drew a bead on the Hummer, which had slewed sideways and skidded halfway off the road. The vehicle was so large it was difficult to even see the Jeep that had rear-ended it. Not that it mattered. Bolan’s focus was on the men in the front seat of the Hummer. He could tell that Brower and Cummings were still half-blinded, but they both had their subguns in view and would likely start firing once they could see their target.

      Bolan wasn’t about to let it come to that. Finger on the trigger, he cut loose with the assault rifle, raking the Hummer’s front windshield with a concentrated autoburst. The glass shattered and the men inside the vehicle shuddered as the rounds slammed into them, killing them both before either could get off a shot.

      By now the afterglow of the flash grenade had dissipated, leaving the grounds even darker to the eye than before the explosion. Far behind Bolan, past the tree-lined knoll, the Executioner could hear the first cries of the fantasy campers as they rushed from their barracks, drawn by the blast. Bolan suspected guards from the main gate would also be racing to the scene any second, joined perhaps by more men from the main building. No one had yet emerged from the Jeep that had crashed into the rear of the Hummer, but Bolan wasn’t about to waste precious seconds moving forward to engage them. He wasn’t about to stand around waiting on the arrival of Jack Grimaldi, either.

      Bolan had taken a second grenade with him when he’d left the storage shed, this one an avacado-sized M-61 fragger. Once he’d stepped several yards to the edge of the man-made pond, he thumbed free the safety pin, then lobbed the projectile back toward the shed. He’d left the door wide open, and the grenade sailed clearly through the opening. Bolan couldn’t recall exactly how much of a delay the grenade was equipped with, but he took advantage of what little time he had, casting aside the carbine and diving into cold, murky depths of the training pond. By the time the grenade detonated, he’d clawed his way inside the half-submerged sewer pipe.

      THE INITIAL BLAST of the frag grenade was fierce enough. But when shock waves and incendiary bursts ripped through the weapons carts and triggered secondary explosions, the shed was turned into the equivalent of one large bomb. For a second it looked as if the sun had briefly awakened from a nightmare, as the shed gave off a glow far more baleful than that of the flash grenade.

      Off in the distance, the campers who’d rushed from the barracks clutched at the nearby magnolias to keep from being thrown to the ground by the earthquakelike trembling beneath their feet. Downhill, the shock waves were even more intense, rocking the Hummer sideways and sending it tumbling on top of the Jeep, which had already been rendered inoperable after rear-ending the larger vehicle.

      Eddie Chang, dazed and still half-blind in the front seat of the Jeep, opened his mouth to scream when the Hummer loomed above him like some pouncing beast. The scream died in his throat, however, as he was crushed by the three-ton juggernaut. Marcus Yarborough was spared a similar fate, as he’d been thrown sideways out of the Jeep during the initial impact. He’d landed hard on one knee, then passed out when his head struck the asphalt.

      When he came to moments later, roused by the trembling of the road beneath him, Yarborough’s first impression had been that someone was shaking him awake. Disoriented, a din in his ears and his field of vision swarming with blips of light that zoomed about like errant spaceships, Yarborough groaned and slowly sat up. A shiver of pain radiated from his bruised knee. The Hummer had come to a rest on its side only a few feet away, and he could see Mitch Brower’s bloody corpse dangling halfway out the shattered windshield. The nearby Jeep had been left half-flattened, its tires blown out, Eddie Chang crushed nearly beyond recognition.

      By the time Yarborough had fully regained his wits, a handful of fantasy campers were on their way down the slope leading to the workout area. Their eyes were not on the sharpshooter, however, so much as on the fiery crater where the storage shed had once stood. Nothing remained of the structure but a few chunks of foundation and smoldering bits of cinder block lying in the surrounding grass. Recalling the weapons crates he’d helped transfer into the shed earlier in the day, the sharpshooter began to realize what had just happened.

      Before the campers could reach him, Yarborough heard the bleat of a car horn. Turning to his right, he saw the BMW Z3 pull up alongside him. Its lights were off, and he couldn’t see who was behind the wheel until Joan VanderMeer leaned over and swung open the passenger door.

      “Hurry!” she urged. “Get in!”

      Yarborough grabbed hold of the door and stood up, then tumbled into the front seat next to VanderMeer. He barely had time to close the door before the woman had shifted the car back into gear. She drove off the road long enough to circle around the other two vehicles, then returned to the asphalt and accelerated as she headed back toward the camp headquarters and the mountains that loomed behind it. As she switched on the headlights and gave the sports car more gas, VanderMeer told Yarborough, “We’re outta here!”

      THE HALF-SUNKEN SEWER PIPE Bolan had crawled inside withstood the concussive force of the blasts that had neutralized the storage shed, but the pond had been showered with debris. When he emerged from the concrete tube and stood, drenched and shivering in the waist-deep pond, the Executioner was surrounded by floating bits of shrapnel, some of it giving off wisps of smoke. He’d lost his earbud somewhere in the pipe and wasn’t about to go back searching for it. Instead, he slogged his way to the steep embankment and pulled himself up to level ground.

      Bolan quickly surveyed the aftermath of the mayhem he’d unleashed, then glanced skyward, alerted by the sound of an approaching helicopter. Soon he could see the aircraft sweeping past the magnolia treetops. He wasn’t sure if he was still giving off a GPS signal, so he made a point to wave his arms. If Grimaldi was looking his way, Bolan figured the pilot would be able pick up his silhouette backlit by the still-blazing crater.

      One of the campers thought Bolan was signaling to him and waved back, shouting, “I see you, man! What the hell happened?”

      “Is this for real?” another of the campers said, eyes fixed on the bodies ensnarled in the overturned Hummer and the half-crushed Jeep. “Hell, those guys look like they’re fucking dead!”

      Bolan paid no heed to the questions. He’d shifted his gaze back toward the administration building and the hills behind it. He could see taillights up on the mountain road, and once he checked the parking lot next to the building, he knew that someone was fleeing in the BMW. He also knew that by the time Grimaldi picked him up, it would likely be too late for them to give chase. Just on the other side of the mountain was the main highway, as well as the residential sprawl of Sykesville. Too many escape routes, too many places to hide.

      As he waited for Grimaldi to land the chopper, Bolan glanced back at the crater. At least he had the satisfaction of having destroyed the weapons cache before it could be put to use by enemies of the state. Even that realization was tempered somewhat, however, as Bolan couldn’t help wonder what