Crucial Intercept. Don Pendleton

or less straight line through Hampton, Newport News and Norfolk, if the pattern holds.”

      “Then I’m headed to—” Bolan began. He stopped.

      “Striker?” Price asked in Bolan’s ear. The soldier’s head snapped left, then right. His eyes narrowed.

      “I hear gunshots,” Bolan said. He snapped the phone shut and half-vaulted the hood of the Crown Victoria, throwing himself behind the wheel and slamming the door shut. The big tires squealed and the engine roared as he floored the vehicle, tearing out of the convenience store parking lot. Horns honked as he cut off several vehicles. The car whipped onto the highway and he hit the automatic windows, rolling them all the way down on both sides, fore and aft.

      He heard it again, then—the unmistakable sound of automatic gunfire in the distance, moving away from him. He pushed the interceptor onward, yanking the wheel hard left, cutting across a side street and taking another.

      When he heard the next burst of shots, it was louder. He was getting closer. He scanned the traffic far ahead of him.

      Logistically, this was very bad. It was broad daylight. A running gun battle in an American city, especially an American tourist city, was going to pour gasoline on the already raging media fire over the cluster of shootings throughout the night. The Executioner had been listening to news-talk radio throughout his nighttime chase. Every station was bubbling over with sensational reporting on the “terrorist attacks,” with hysterical talking heads manning their desks and filling the airwaves with commentary from “experts.” The incessant speculation and mindless chatter had eventually become so much background noise to Bolan, who understood only too well the reality that the reporters were playing at analyzing.

      From a pocket of his blacksuit—the formfitting black combat clothing that could pass for casual street clothes to the untrained eye, especially when worn under a light windbreaker as he was doing—Bolan removed a tiny earbud headset and donned it. He flipped open his secure sat phone and replaced the device in his pocket after hitting the first speed dial. Price’s voice came to him almost instantly, filtered through the earpiece.

      “Striker?”

      “I’m in pursuit, target or targets unknown.” He consulted the GPS unit on his dashboard and read off the coordinates and heading. As he did so, he heard more gunfire and thought he could make out muzzle flashes in the distance. It was hard to tell in the daylight. “Tracking gunfire specifically. To guess, I’d say our shooters weren’t quite done with Williamsburg.”

      “You’re across town from the motel they hit,” Price said, though Bolan was perfectly aware of his position. “If you stay on this heading, you’ll end up hitting Norfolk, more or less.”

      “Kudos to Bear, then,” Bolan said. “Barb, I have a theory.”

      “Striker?”

      “Our boy Baldero. He’s rabbiting. Think about it. If you were suddenly a fugitive, if someone or some group of some-ones was trying to shoot you, where would you go? A computer lab, to try and contact help. Baldero’s a tech geek, right? That’s familiar. That’s where he’d head. Motels, convenience stores, Laundromats…places to go to ground, and places to get food or supplies that are open all night long while you’re on the run.”

      “We’ve been considering that in trying to work up a profile on him,” Price said. “There’s not much. Baldero has no criminal record. No known associates in the drug trade or with fringe political groups. No legal records of any kind, apart from a custody battle working its way through the courts. He’s got an estranged wife and a three-year-old daughter, living in Texas.”

      “So,” Bolan said, slamming the big car’s accelerator to the floor and rocketing around a slow-moving panel truck as he gained on the gunfire ahead of him, “we’ve got a former CIA cryptographer who’s got himself into something so bad that it’s worth putting holes in half the state to kill him. The question is, what?”

      “That’s what has the Man worried, Striker,” Price said. “More than the need to put a stop to these attacks, and the unrest they’re generating, we need to know what’s behind it. It could be much worse. It’s almost certainly much worse.”

      “Got it, Barb. I’m closing now. We’ve caught a break, it seems. Have Bear and his team stand by to analyze any intelligence I might—”

      The cargo van that cut across Bolan’s path was traveling nearly eighty miles an hour.

      Bolan could see the van’s grille bearing down on him as it barreled straight for the driver’s door of his sedan.

      The headlights shone very bright.

      2

      Bolan had a fraction of a second in which to react. He did the only thing he could do—he whipped the steering wheel hard to the left.

      The dirty white cargo van blew past him on his passenger side, sheering off the car’s side mirror in a small maelstrom of plastic shards and silvery slivers. The rear end of the big car broke free, losing traction through the violent maneuver. The back of the vehicle came around, and Bolan found himself skidding through a complete 180-degree turn. The smell of burning rubber filled the car as he fought the steering wheel and the brakes, riding out the skid and narrowly missing a passenger car as he crossed the double line and barreled through oncoming traffic. The Crown Victoria finally jerked to a stop on the shoulder of the opposite side of the road, facing back the way Bolan had come.

      He wasted no time. Snatching up the canvas war bag that contained his gear from Kissinger, he threw it over his shoulder and was out of the car in a heartbeat. As he moved, he drew the Beretta 93-R pistol from its custom leather shoulder holster. Flipping the selector switch to 3-round-burst mode, he rounded on the van, which had come to a screeching halt half on the sidewalk a dozen yards from his own vehicle.

      The side door of the van slammed open. A man shouted furiously at him, his features twisted in rage. In his hands was the futuristic-looking assault rifle. The muzzle of the weapon spit flame.

      Bolan hit the pavement painfully, his right hand at full extension before him. The 3-round burst of 9 mm bullets caught the shooter under his chin and folded him back on himself, where he disappeared in the dimly lighted interior of the cargo van. Bolan had time to roll sideways before several streams of what his ear identified as rifle fire converged on the pavement where he’d just been, spraying him with sharp pieces of asphalt.

      The soldier recognized his attackers’ language readily enough. He had spent more than a little time operating covertly in cities like Tehran. It was Farsi, also known as Persian, the most commonly spoken of several languages in Iran and Afghanistan.

      Very curious, he had time to think, with the incongruous detachment that often occurred in his mind when his body was engaged in the well-remembered and deeply ingrained mechanics of battle. The Executioner was nothing if not a thinking soldier, and his mind was always active, always analyzing the fluid and unpredictable rhythm of lethal combat.

      Rising to a half-crouch, Bolan took a two-hand grip on the 93-R and glided heel-to-toe around the rear corner of the van, using the vehicle as cover. Predictably, shots began punching through the windows of the rear doors, but the angle was awkward and the gunners inside couldn’t get a clear shot.

      He heard footsteps and saw feet wearing desert-sand-colored combat boots hit the pavement on the side of the van, as the men within piled out. They were shouting instructions to one another in Farsi. Bolan’s command of the language wasn’t up to interpreting it, certainly not in the rapid, clipped tones they were using, but it didn’t matter; the intent was clear. They were trying to coordinate their efforts to kill him.

      Whoever these shooters were, there was no way they weren’t related to whatever had been happening across Virginia—though how a witness could have confused men of Persian descent with Asians, he could not say and would not bother to speculate. The Executioner was painfully aware that whatever vehicle or vehicles these men had been chasing and shooting at, as well as however many more vehicles full