Force Lines. Don Pendleton

capable of handling. Even with the most tenacious of moral resolve, a number of cops didn’t make it, couldn’t cut it. Used up, burned-out, staring over the edge of the grave and down into the waiting worms and maggots.

      Kramer had fairly told him as much about himself, with a look and tone the soldier read as saying that a simple thank-you way back when would have sufficed to keep him chugging along with an eye toward a half decent tomorrow. But, Bolan, ever the realist, knew there were some professions where, if a man was looking for a pat on the back, promotion or glory, then he was in the wrong line of work. What was more—and even worse—he could never fully do the job.

      Soldiers dropped into that particular category.

      For the warrior on the front lines it was all guts and no less than steely commitment to duty, with no expectations, or they caved when it hit the fan, or ended up seething wrecks of whining recrimination, bitter regret and the kind of relentless self-pitying anger that rotted out the very soul itself.

      The world was a tough place, but the soldier was more than acquainted with the bitter facts of good and evil, life and death.

      Another look at Kramer, and Bolan wasn’t sure what to make of the man. He was no angel, but he was damn sure fallen. At the moment, the ex-cop was on his haunches, perched up against the base of pine tree. The laminated card was in his cuffed hands. Figure he was praying to the Holy Lady of Desperate Cases, and, for some reason, that alone was pushing the soldier toward a decision that might well prove one of his worst to date.

      Or would it?

      Bolan left Kramer to what sure appeared penitent reflections and silent imploring of divine intervention and walked forward several feet. Crouched behind a thicket of bramble and ferns—M-16 with M-203 grenade launcher having replaced the HK subgun now that it was all leaning toward open-ground warfare—the soldier gave the lay of the land a second thorough scan, while scraping together the few shreds of a strategy, given the few facts and rumor the ex-cop had laid out. Between the PDA and the mobile GPS unit he had mounted to the dashboard of his Explorer SUV, he found the remote wilderness where the big event was supposed to go down.

      To the north, the misty shroud above the snowcapped sawtooth peaks of the Swan Range was being cleared away by the early morning sun. A few miles west, at the opposite edge of the Flathead National Forest, the Swan River ran in a north-south parallel course to Highway 83. Somewhere to his back, the soldier made out the cries of geese, mallards and other winged creatures taking to flight or searching out a meal. East, across rolling grassland he imagined once teemed with legions of bison, the soldier made out the road as it humped up and spined its two-mile-or-so course to what Kramer informed him was a forest ranger station.

      The wide, undivided but paved road was nowhere to be found on any map.

      Using its own intelligence sources and renowned cyberhacking, the Farm—after the soldier had faxed Kramer’s CD with what were believed encrypted marching orders—believed the ranger station was a front for a classified government facility, but for the life of them they didn’t know what went on there. With cyclone fencing around a squat steel-walled compound, the cyberwizards learning the road was slashed out of the forest and grasslands a few years back by the Army Corps of Engineers, and after Bolan had seen from a distance through his field glasses…

      Well, the posted warning at the far south end of the road had sealed it. No trespassing, property of United States Government, and authorized to use deadly force cued the soldier that, despite his prisoner’s ignorance of the finer details, this was the right place where the wrong thing—and what that was remained to be seen—would go down.

      According to Kramer it would all begin any time now. What the cargo the Sons of Revelation planned to hijack, well, Bolan could venture a sordid educated guess.

      WMD, of some type, and the soldier hadn’t brought along his HAZMAT suit for the lethal party.

      And with Kramer mentioning something about two men in black he read as spooks gathering for two recent private meets with the so-called Highest Sons that he knew of…

      Problems, all around, but Bolan was never short on the determination, skill and experience to work them out.

      Then there were enemy numbers to consider, and which could range from anywhere to a known forty or fifty to another ten to twenty. If there were snakes wrapped in the Stars and Stripes and hidden among the spook convoy that was due to roll its way from the north, if an inside job was about to land a cache of biological, chemical or radiological matériel into the hands of the Sons of Revelation for reasons that included money, twisted ideology…

      Bolan turned and dropped a long look on Kramer. The question hung in his mind, as the Stony Man warrior knew a moment of truth had painted him into a corner. “Who was she? Saint Rita.”

      A tired smile crossed Kramer’s lips, his eyes telling Bolan he was reaching back into memory. He slipped the prayer card into a coat pocket, said, “I was in a motel room, real crumby part of Hollywood, which really isn’t saying much. I was loaded, as usual, with some hooker. I wasn’t two steps inside the room when her pimp, or boyfriend or whoever, drove a knife square into my gut. Another inch or so higher, if he’d twisted up some even, or ripped down…sixty-two dollars and forty-four cents is what they took off of me. Funny, you know, how a guy can remember something so damn trivial, exactly how much his life might have cost him…or the amount of money he was prepared to throw away on his soul.

      “I remember the girl. One of these corn-fed Mid-western blondes who comes to Hollywood, thinking she’s the next Marilyn Monroe, but ends up tricking and doing porn and looking like an eighty-year-old hag by the time she’s thirty. She was cussing like a fleet of drunken sailors the whole time he’s rifling my pockets, pissed because that was all I had on me. Here I am, bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig, holding in my guts, and all she’s worried about is how much dope she’s going to get from setting me up and seeing me eviscerated, all in a snit because it’s not nearly enough she’d hoped for. Funny thing, I saw her kind more than I count, worked some of the worst murders when I was a cop, but when cold-blooded murder is actually happening to you like that, when you’re helpless and your number is up…Anyway, she kicks me a couple real beauts like only a junkie whacked out of her gourd and dying for the next hit can, all that geeking rage and hate. She wants the knife to finish me off but her boyfriend wouldn’t give it to her—why, I couldn’t tell you. Funny. Miserable as I was, how often I thought about dying—you know, Dear Mother of God, won’t you come and take me away from this vale of tears—when it’s actually happening I was terrified and wanted nothing more than to live, more out of my conscience screaming at me that what was waiting on the other side was a whole bunch of accounting.

      “Long story short, I crawled to the phone, reached up like my arm was shot out of a cannon. Knocked the phone down and along with it comes a Bible. Brand-spanking new. I remember that because the edge of the spine felt like a steel rod when it bounced off the side of my face. The thought hit me—why in the world do they keep Bibles out for the kind of people go there to do what they’re doing anyway? God is the very last thing on their minds. Well, turned out, somebody was reading it. Out comes the bookmarker.”

      “Saint Rita.”

      “Yeah, Saint Rita. How it ended up in my pocket, how it was still there when I was released from the hospital.” Kramer paused. “I don’t know how long it was, but I entertained a wicked desire to use some cop buddies I still had in Hollywood. Track those two down. Payback, the likes of which I couldn’t even imagine the Devil himself conjuring up. Then, for some reason I can’t explain, I’m in a library, a nagging suspicion that as bad as my life was it could get a whole lot worse, when I stumble across an encyclopedia on the lives of the saints. Who was she, you ask? Saint Rita wanted nothing more than to go into a convent when she was a young girl, but it seemed her family had promised her out in marriage. She marries, they have two sons, but her husband was murdered. Her two sons then set out to avenge his death. She prayed that they would die before they could carry out their plan of cold-blooded murder, thus condemning themselves to eternal ruin. Seems her prayer was answered. They died, but no one knows the circumstances. After that, she entered a convent,