Defense Breach. Don Pendleton

was often dependent on controlling more variables than his opponent, and people scared out of their wits were not easy to control. He turned sideways to reduce his profile and held the penlight away from his body as he shone the beam into the void.

      A woman was huddled in the far corner, her eyes blinking in rapid response to the light.

      “Please,” she said in a vacant voice.

      “I won’t hurt you,” Bolan replied, holstering his Beretta upon seeing she was alone and unarmed.

      “I thought you were one of them. They’re coming back,” she stated.

      The dugout was about four feet deep and tiny, cramped by a single electronics cabinet that hummed evenly next to a small table supporting a computer monitor. A pair of industrial-gauge wires ran from the cabinet to the monitor, on which Bolan could see six incandescent green blips moving in a tight group.

      “Does that tell you how far away they are?” he asked.

      Her eyes wandered to the screen where they rested for a moment before she shook her head and repeated vacuously, “They’re coming back.”

      “Come on,” the Executioner said.

      The woman pushed herself away from the wall and grabbed Bolan’s outstretched hand to boost herself out of the dugout and onto the bedroom floor. As Bolan pulled her to her feet, he gave her an appraising look while slipping the penlight back into its pouch.

      She was disheveled and dirty, dressed in jeans and an unzipped maroon ski parka over a gray sweatshirt with San Diego Chargers emblazoned in cursive pink across the front. Bolan guessed she was in her late twenties. The earrings she wore, along with the stylish cut of her jet-black hair, told him she was neither a camper nor a survivalist.

      “Don’t look,” Bolan said as he led her out of the bedroom toward the cabin’s door.

      “I heard.” Her voice caught in her throat and her knees buckled, causing her to lean in to Bolan. He put his arm around her, supporting her weight until they came to the door. “They kept shooting Davey,” she said. “They kept shooting him, but Wes couldn’t give them what they wanted. I was afraid he was going to tell them where I was hiding. They kept asking if there were three of us.”

      “What did they want from Wes?” Bolan asked.

      She sniffed once before her eyes began spilling tears as if an inner dam had suddenly given way. “The rest of the code!” she said in a hitching voice that shook her entire body. “Wes only had half. After they left I kept trying to call 911 on my cell phone. I couldn’t get through to…” Her voice tapered off.

      “Do you work for Nautech?” Bolan asked.

      “We all do.”

      “What’s your name?”

      She swallowed hard and wiped her tear-streaked cheeks with her palms before replying, “Sherry Krautzer.”

      “Okay, Sherry. We’re getting out of here.”

      Winter darkness fell quickly in Manitoba. When Bolan pushed the cabin door open, he discovered it was as black as midnight outside. He grabbed Sherry’s hand and started pulling her toward the spot in the woods where his equipment was stashed, realizing before they took half a dozen steps that the snowmobiles he had heard earlier were much closer now.

      “Hurry,” he said. “You have to hide in the woods until I take care of them. Understand?”

      Her teeth were chattering when she replied, “Marlene said no one would get hurt. But they kept shooting Davey to make Wes tell them. Wes doesn’t know who has the other half. None of us do.”

      Bolan jerked her arm roughly, realizing she was going into shock.

      “Listen,” he said, pulling her to within inches of his face when they reached the tree line. “If they see you, they’ll kill you. Do you understand me? You have to stay hidden.”

      She was nodding when he pushed her to the ground under the canopy of a sprawling pine where she wouldn’t be spotted.

      “Don’t move until I come to get you. Understand?”

      She nodded again, but the way she kept touching her face with fluttering hands and looking about with vacant eyes did little to reassure Bolan, who understood from experience the unpredictability extreme terror caused.

      “Sherry. Do not move until I come get you. They’re coming back to kill you,” he said.

      “Okay.” She paused, then repeated, “Okay.”

      Bolan left her concealed behind the pine boughs and ran to find a position offering sufficient cover from automatic weapons. Before killing Wes, they had apparently made him watch while they mutilated his friend’s corpse. The fact that they had taken a psychological rather than physical approach to torture was telling. They were either thugs receiving specific instructions from a handler who kept them under tight control, or they were well-trained, intelligent operatives with authority to ad lib. Fanatical terrorists blindly following orders were one thing—skilled professional soldiers dedicated to a greater cause were an entirely different matter. When survival was at stake, Bolan preferred going up against the former.

      The snowmobiles appeared in his binoculars as six specks of light when they were still miles from the section where trees grew in shallow stands dotting the open prairie. Sherry said that Davey and Wes were able to give their killers only one-half of the code. Bolan thought amateurs might naively believe they were protected when dealing with terrorist elements by not turning over the complete package until they received full payment. But what an inexperienced person might not understand was a terrorist’s willingness to torture and steal rather than part with money that could be better spent on recruitment, weapons and training. They’d kill everyone involved simply to cover their tracks and eliminate all traces of their transactions. Bolan had witnessed the scenario too many times to count. In a transaction pitting rookies against professionals, the pros always won.

      As he watched the approaching snowmobile headlights, he pondered the group’s return. Sherry had tried to make a call on her cell phone, not realizing that out here in the wilderness, the probability of being in range of a communications tower was slim. What she had actually done was send out an electronic ping that announced her presence while it searched for a connection. The killers had to have picked up the transmission on a scanner and realized that the third person they suspected could have been with Davey and Wes was, in fact, in the cabin. They were coming back to finish the job.

      They were about to get more than they bargained for, the Executioner thought.

      From his position at the base of a thick maple, Bolan reached into the pouch on his web belt containing his night-vision goggles. He focused the goggles, bringing the six pinpoints of light into sharp relief. Magnified hundreds of times as they passed through the internal photocathode tube, the photons from the approaching headlights shone with the intensity of search beacons. Each snowmobile carried a single rider, and it appeared that one vehicle was pulling a sled holding something that resembled a miniature howitzer. From its profile, Bolan was sure the item was a weapon of some type. Its pertinent characteristics, he knew, would soon become known. He drew his Beretta 93-R from its shoulder holster, reached into the pouch holding the handgun’s suppressor and screwed the extension onto the end of the pistol’s barrel. He knew there was going to be gunfire, and figured he should delay announcing his location until absolutely necessary.

      The snowmobiles maintained a steady speed, splitting up when they came close. The vehicle pulling the sled with the unknown weapon halted approximately twenty yards from the cabin, while two veered off toward Bolan and the other three set out to circle the structure and cruise along the adjacent tree line from the opposite direction. The precision of their maneuver reinforced Bolan’s earlier consideration that they might be skilled combatants. He remained silent as the pair coming his way passed in front of his position, taking note of their weapons as they passed.

      The men were armed with Uzi submachine guns slung across their chests on canvas