Vigilante Run. Don Pendleton

a micro-Uzi or an Ingram. Bolan doubted a single round had come near him. The threat came from the aimed fire to his left, from the man who’d called out to Benny. The speaker’s partner was the spray-and-pray type.

      As the deepening night filled more space between Bolan and the burning drug lab, he circled, flanking his pursuers. The two men were stumbling blindly after him. It would be easy to take them both, but he needed answers. That meant trying to get one of them alive.

      “Carver! I don’t see him!” It was a different voice, the voice of the man with the machine pistol.

      “Shut the fuck up, Stick,” Carver barked. “Watch for movement and then—”

      It was good advice and Bolan took it, emptying his Beretta into Carver. The man went down without a sound. Another wild burst of Parabellum rounds went wide of him as Stick reacted. Shoving the empty Beretta into his web belt, Bolan dropped to his left knee, drawing his .44 Magnum Desert Eagle from the tactical thigh holster on his right leg. The gas-fed hand cannon thundered as Bolan triggered two boattail rounds low and left. The first one missed, but the second took Stick in the abdomen. The thug’s knees buckled and he dropped to the ground.

      Fishing in a pouch of his web belt, Bolan produced a small LED backup light. He held the little aluminum cylinder between the fingers of his left hand as he advanced on Stick, Desert Eagle at the ready. Stick was moaning and rocking slightly, clutching at his guts with both arms wrapped tightly around his stomach as he knelt doubled over and sobbing. Not far away, steaming in the snow, was Stick’s fallen MAC-10, the bolt closed.

      “You son of a bitch,” he blubbered.

      Stick was a lanky man of thirty to forty years with greasy shoulder-length hair and a face like a rodent’s. His chin was covered in a scraggly growth that made him look even more like a rat. In the blue-tinted glare of his pocket light, Bolan could see the logo on Stick’s sleeveless denim shirt—CNY Purists.

      “Talk,” Bolan said simply.

      Stick looked up accusingly. “What the fuck do you want?” he wheezed.

      “I want to know what happened here.”

      “You should goddamned know well enough what you done here, you bastard,” Stick sputtered. “You killed Chopper Mike! You killed his old lady! You killed their freaking kid, man. Why would you do that? Who are you?”

      “Start from the beginning,” Bolan commanded. The triangular nose of the Desert Eagle never wavered. Hugging himself, Stick squinted at the man in black and appeared to look him up and down.

      “I ain’t telling you nothing,” he whimpered. His voice hardened. “I ain’t telling nothing to no tall, dark-haired badass dressed like a commando who just hit our place on Route 173.”

      Bolan’s eyes grew wide again. He pistoned a vicious straight kick into the biker, sending him sprawling. There was a lot of blood, but Stick wasn’t wounded as badly as he’d let on. The wireless phone he’d been hiding—and into which he’d been speaking for someone’s benefit—landed in the snow a few feet away.

      Growling like an animal, Stick surged to his feet. The serrated blade of a folding knife flashed in the beam of Bolan’s light. As the biker lunged, Bolan fired twice. Stick was dead before what was left of him settled wetly into the snow.

      The Executioner retrieved the phone, a cheap and untraceable prepaid unit. The connection was still open. As his thumb went for the “status” button, the call was terminated from the other end. The local number Stick had dialed was the only one in the phone’s call log. Looking at the dead man and then glancing back in Carver’s direction, Bolan shook his head. For meth-running bikers, they were far from stupid. Still, he at least had a few clues to feed to the Farm.

      As the meth lab continued to burn, Bolan heard the first of the sirens approaching.

       Stony Man Farm, Virginia

      A S B ARBARA P RICE ENTERED Stony Man Farm’s computer room, nose wrinkling at the smell from the pot of industrial-strength coffee warming on a nearby countertop, she had to dodge Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman as he rolled by.

      “Hal’s waiting on the scrambler and I’ve got work to do,” Kurtzman said, wheeling past and circling her in his chair as he transferred a memory stick from one computer to another, juggling a handful of processed satellite images and doing it all while holding a beer-stein-size coffee mug. The barrel-chested computer expert gestured with one massive forearm toward the communications gear at the far end of the room.

      Smiling, Stony Man’s honey-blond, model-beautiful mission controller stepped past him. Kurtzman always got grumpy when he was short staffed. The rest of his team was on leave or at conferences in various parts of the States, leaving him to field most of their duties during a mercifully light week free of nation-endangering crises. There was more than a little humor to that, Price reflected; Kurtzman had suffered without complaint the injury that had left him a paraplegic for life—but he got testy when asked to answer the phone too often.

      The man from Justice was waiting for her on the satellite feed. Though Hal Brognola didn’t appear too worried at the moment, Price knew it was only a matter of time before the big Fed would be forced to fight yet another looming disaster. The fact that he hadn’t come to the Farm in person was a promising sign. He’d have shown up in person if there were serious problems, Price thought.

      “Barb,” Brognola said.

      “Hal,” Price acknowledged, sitting down and holding the headset to her ear without putting it on. “What can we do for you?”

      “It’s not me, at least not directly,” Brognola said. When Price did not comment, he continued. “I asked Striker to look into something that’s had Justice very concerned for the past two months.”

      “Something we’re tracking?” Price asked, though she knew that was not likely.

      “Too vague for that. We’ve been getting reports through Homeland Security of what was supposed to be terrorism, or isolated events that at least looked like terrorism. I did some checking and what I found was a series of murders across central New York.”

      “Nothing new about that,” Price said evenly.

      “No, nothing new about that,” Brognola admitted. “These were disturbing, though. A family and several others killed in a home in Skaneateles. Three cops shot in Syracuse. A string of arsons in a suburb of the city that claimed the lives of four children and at least three adults. On the surface they’re the usual crimes, though the rate is a lot higher for an upstate city that sees maybe twenty homicides in a normal year. We almost missed it.”

      “Missed what?” Price asked.

      “The pattern,” the big Fed said with a frown. “Larry Kearney is a contact of mine, used to be a reporter here in D.C. He runs a think tank in central New York now and has his hands in a local alternative paper. He spends his time doing what got him run out of Wonderland in the first place—pissing off politicians and raking muck.”

      Price laughed. “He sounds like your kind of person.”

      “More or less.” Brognola managed a faint grin. “It was Larry who put me on the trail. The murder victims—those who weren’t collateral damage—were all connected to the local methamphetamine trade. At least, that’s what Larry believes. He didn’t have much more to go on.”

      “Why involve Justice?” Price asked. “Wouldn’t this be a matter for the local police?”

      “It might be,” Brognola said grimly, “if not for Larry’s nose for corruption. He suspects collusion with local law enforcement. This isn’t simply drug dealers taking shots at the competition, either. He tells me, and I believe him, that there’s something more methodical at work.”

      “A vigilante?” Price raised an eyebrow.

      “That’s Larry’s theory. Given the brutality of the crimes and the alphabet soup of government