Patriot Strike. Don Pendleton

street last week, sat down and told his story to the first G-man or G-woman available. That wouldn’t fly, however. Not with the explosive secret he was carrying, the stakes that he was playing for. He’d asked the only person that he really trusted for some advice and had received a single name.

      Case closed.

      Now all he had to do was make it through the next—what? Thirteen hours and change?—to have that talk, give up his evidence and breathe a huge sigh of relief over a job well done.

      A job he’d never wanted, obviously, but it made no difference. Sometimes a circumstance reached out and grabbed a guy by the throat, and wouldn’t let him go.

      So here he sat, on his bed in Room 19, watching a crazy show about a woman with six personalities, while he ate his KFC meal with a Ruger Super Redhawk .44 Magnum revolver beside him. It was the “small” model, with a 7.5-inch barrel versus the maximum 9.5-inch, still bigger and badder than Dirty Harry’s Smith & Wesson Model 29. It would kill anything that walked on two or four legs.

      And Granger hoped it would keep him alive.

      By this time tomorrow he would be in protective custody—assuming he lived that long and that any such thing still existed. Granger wasn’t even sure the FBI could protect him.

      Still it was the best chance he had left. His only chance.

      The wacky chick on TV was dressed like a man now, drinking a longneck Corona and scratching herself like a truck driver in a strip club. Hell, she was in a strip club, paying ten bucks for a lap dance. Granger scowled and switched it off with the remote, not minding nudity but put off by what he regarded as the program’s sheer absurdity. He reached out for his soda can, ready to wash down some of the colonel’s original recipe—and found it empty.

      “Crap!”

      The pop machine was four doors down from Granger’s room, tucked into an alcove with an ice machine at the motel’s northeast corner. He didn’t like going outside in the dark, not tonight, but the chicken was stuck in his throat now. There went another dollar fifty for a can of fizzing syrup that he used to get for half a buck.

      He took the Ruger, tucked it inside the waistband of his slacks as best he could and donned a jacket to conceal it. Desert nights were cold, so no one would think twice about the jacket, and he didn’t plan on meeting anybody, anyway. He was the only tenant on the backside of the Golden Sage, nothing but open land and scrub brush stretching away into the night.

      Granger made sure to take his key, the beige door locking automatically behind him. No surprises waiting for him when he came back with his overpriced drink in its plastic ice bucket. A short walk, out and back. No problem.

      Until the black Cadillac Escalade rolled into view, its high beams nearly blinding him.

      Granger didn’t react at first, telling himself it might just be another guest arriving, then his brain kicked into gear, asking him why in hell the owner of a brand-new Escalade would spend five minutes at the Golden Sage Motel.

      No reason in the world, unless he happened to be hunting.

      As the Caddy’s doors swung open, Granger dropped his empty bucket and started hauling on the Ruger. Snagged its front sight on his Jockey shorts but ripped it free, aiming the big wheel gun with trembling hands. He noted four men flat-footed by the Escalade, its driver still behind the wheel, and fired once at the nearest of them, praying for a hit. It felt miraculous, seeing the big man topple over backward, going down.

      Granger was running then, with gunfire snapping, crackling and popping in the night behind him. He ran past his room and kept on going past his Camry, since the keys were in the motel and there was no time to get in the car anyway. Running like his life depended on it.

      Which, of course, it did.

      The first rounds struck him when he’d covered all of twenty yards. They lifted Jerod Granger and propelled him forward, airborne, arms and legs windmilling as he found that he could fly. It was a freaking miracle.

      But landing was a bitch.

      The sidewalk rushed to meet him, struck the left side of his face with force enough to crack the cheekbone. Granger scarcely felt it, going numb already. He could barely find the strength to feel for his Ruger, but the gun had slipped beyond his reach.

      Like life itself.

      Footsteps approached him, voices muttering as if from miles away and underwater. By the time his killers started firing down into Jerod’s back and skull, he was already gone.

      Chapter 1

      San Antonio, Texas

      Midnight at the Alamo. Not dark—spotlights shone off the old mission’s facade—but, hanging back a hundred yards, Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, still found shadows to conceal him as he walked a circuit of the battle site.

      Once upon a troubled time, the Alamo had stood on San Antonio’s eastern outskirts. Today it commands a plaza downtown, surrounded by streets named for marytrs: Bonham, Bowie, Crockett, Travis. Men who had stood their ground and had died for an idea called Texas.

      Bolan’s first impression of the place was mild disappointment. He had expected more, somehow, from a national shrine. Something larger, perhaps, than the squat adobe-brick structure before him. Sixty-three feet wide and twenty-three feet tall, besides the parapet, extending back one-hundred-odd feet from the plaza in front.

      Not much to it, until factoring in 189 defenders, mostly civilians, fighting to the death against some eighteen hundred trained regulars, both infantry and cavalry.

      Remember the Alamo? San Antonians don’t have much choice.

      Bolan wasn’t here to study history or pay his personal respect to heroes, though he did that automatically, at any battleground or military graveyard. He was at the Alamo to keep a date, obtain some information, maybe save some lives.

      How many? That was still an open question, which he hoped to answer as soon as he spoke to his contact.

      A Texas Ranger, no less. How perfect was that?

      Bolan had flown into San Antonio International Airport from Dulles, in Virginia, and then rented a silver Toyota RAV4. His ID—a more-or-less genuine Texas driver’s license in the name of Matthew Cooper—had served him well at his previous stop, a store with broad, barred windows whose tall neon sign promised Guns! Guns! Guns!

      Thanks to Texas’s lax firearms legislation, Bolan’s purchases included an AR-15 rifle, the civilian semi-auto version of an M16A1; a Benelli M4 Super 90 semi-auto twelve-gauge shotgun with extended magazine and collapsible buttstock; a matched pair of Glock 22 pistols, chambered in .40 S&W; and a Buckmaster 184 survival knife. He added a fast-draw shoulder rig, a clip-on holster for his belt, two dozen extra magazines and all the ammo he could carry. Bolan paid cash—lifted from an L.A. crack dealer some months before—and made the salesman’s day.

      “Y’all come back now, hear?”

      A little tinkering would turn the AR-15 into a full-auto weapon if Bolan had the time. Meanwhile it was a good killing machine straight off the rack. He would have liked at least one sound suppressor for the Glocks, but that meant filling out a lot of Class III paperwork and waiting while it cycled through the ATF labyrinth in Washington. In a pinch, the Buckmaster was quieter than any firearm and never had to be reloaded. He’d simply have to be up close and personal when he went in for the kill.

      This was supposed to be a peaceful meeting, though. No fuss, no muss, no bodies on the ground.

      Supposed to be.

      So here at the Alamo, he wore the Glocks and knife concealed, leaving the rifle and the shotgun in his rented SUV. He had parked it down on Crockett Street and had walked back to the Alamo, dodging the streetlights where he could. If all went well, it was a relatively short walk back to catch his ride. If not, two blocks could be a lethal gauntlet.

      Fifteen rounds in each Glock’s magazine, plus