Fire Zone. Don Pendleton

he might be afraid someone would spirit her away.

      “No one.” The man went cold inside. Were there others here to slow him and further delay the execution of his mission?

      “Good. We were hoping we’d find a spot to, you know, sit and talk.”

      “Oh, Jerry,” the girl said, punching him playfully. “That’s not what you said you wanted to do.” She stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear. The boy grinned crookedly. The man had a good idea what she had said. She was a typical looking American teenager. Too much meat on her bones, though after the skinny women in his country, he did not mind that so much. But she tittered and appeared pushy. He did not like that in American women. Even the ones he did not spend the night with.

      “What’s all that in your pack? Looks like rolls of toothpaste.” The boy came closer, frowning as he studied the contents of the pack. “Thought you were getting ready to cook some lunch. But I’ve never seen anything like—”

      He got no farther in his examination of the explosives. The man in camo moved swiftly. Two steps took him behind the boy. A brawny arm circled the neck and lifted up a stubbled chin to expose a vulnerable throat. The quick slash sent blood spewing outward in a bright arterial spray.

      The move was so practiced and easy that the girl didn’t realize her boyfriend was dead before she, too, was killed. The knife slid under her rib cage and angled upward as the man grabbed her Radiohead T-shirt and pulled her forward to prevent her escaping his blade. A tiny gasp escaped her lips, followed by a touch of pink froth and then death. He stepped away as she dropped to her knees and finally fell facedown onto the ground.

      He drove his knife blade into the drought-hardened ground to clean it off before he returned it to the sheath at the small of his back. Cursing in three languages but sticking with French for the worst of his rant, he unwound the det cord and strung it along the edge of the trees. When he drew out the full ten yards, he placed a detonator cap on the end and carefully attached wires to it. He retreated to where he had begun and placed the thin wire leads on the ground. He repeated the procedure, going along the edge of the forest in the other direction and placed a second detonator. He ran hard to get back to the juncture of the two lines of explosives and fastened the wires to a small receiver.

      He had barely finished screwing down the leads to the radio receiver when his earbud crackled with three short, staccato bursts to alert him.

      “Red Leader to Red Two, report.”

      He swallowed and wiped sweat from his face.

      “Red Two here, good to go,” he said.

      “Fifteen minutes.” That was all Red Leader said. That was all the time he had to clear out before the explosives detonated along a twenty-yard stretch of forest. The meadow would allow plenty of oxygen to flow in to feed the fire as it moved deeper into the Boise National Forest, feeding off dead undergrowth and dried trees. Within minutes a hundred hectares would be ablaze.

      He slung his now-lightened pack onto his back and loped across the meadow in the direction from which the two young lovers had come. He never broke stride as he stepped over their bodies along the way.

      RED LEADER PUSHED the night-vision goggles higher on his forehead. It was late afternoon on a summer day. If he used the NVG in the daylight, he would have been blinded by the full sun, but in a few minutes they would be quite useful to him. He moved around the fire tower at the western edge of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, taking care to step over the body of the dead forest ranger. A single shot to the forehead had dispatched an unwanted witness.

      Red Leader gave no thought to the dead man, because it was his fault he had died. He was supposed to be out on a road doing a fire danger appraisal. For whatever reason, possibly the typical American laziness, he had returned to the fire tower and found a trespasser had broken in.

      Red Leader looked at the PDA and chafed at the delay. The mission was running late by almost five minutes. “Red One, come in.”

      “Red One, aye,” came the whisper over the radio. The voice was almost lost in a sea of static. The dry conditions caused interference.

      “Are you done?”

      “Red Leader, almost finished. Got the det cord strung a bit deeper into the forest than I intended.”

      Red Leader looked at the small dot moving on his PDA map display. Red One had gone deeper into the Salmon-Challis National Forest to the east than necessary. That threw off the timetable.

      His thumb worked the tiny keyboard until a regional weather report slowly scrolled on the screen. The isobars showed the air pressure. The lines squeezed together, indicating mounting wind to the east.

      “Are you done, Red One?”

      “All done, Red Leader,” came the smug reply.

      Red Leader pressed another button on the PDA. The Salmon-Challis National Forest erupted in a fireball that sent flames blasting a hundred feet into the air. Red One should have been on time. Red Leader pressed another button and started the timer. The emergency response to this fire would be imminent. Minutes.

      Even as his timer hit ninety seconds, the ranger’s radio crackled with warnings and orders to call out firefighters.

      Red Leader let the fire burn for another eight-and-a-half minutes before triggering the explosives laid by Red Two. All the emergency response in the area was en route to the Salmon-Challis blaze. The fire on the edge of the Boise Basin would be ignored for the time being, since it was smaller in scope.

      Smaller but more important. He snapped his head down and brought the infrared goggles over his eyes, squinting as he adjusted the intensity. Even then, blocking out most of the daylight, he saw a wall of intense dancing light. Red Two’s fire burned exactly as they had planned. Heavy smoke from the underbrush would lay a pall over the lower lying countryside as the fire worked its way toward Shepard Peak. Except in extraordinary cases, fires were predictable. They burned upward.

      Up the side of the mountain and away from the scene of the real action.

      “Blue Leader, you have cover,” Red Leader said. His radio crackled. The burgeoning fires caused even more static interference.

      “Moving in now, Red Leader. Rendezvous in three hours. Mark.”

      “Red Leader to Blue Leader, out.”

      He turned off his radio and reset his stopwatch. Three hours to the second. The carefully planned raid proceeded as flawlessly as it had so many times before. He stepped back over the annoying corpse drawing flies in the small lookout tower and spiraled down the stairs, taking them three at a time in his hurry. There was little enough time to skirt the fires his team had set and reach the rendezvous where the real backbreaking work would begin.

      1

      No matter where Mack Bolan looked, fire devoured the land. Trees exploded hundreds of feet below him, sending fiery sap close to the V-22 Osprey’s rotors. Looking out over the Idaho forest convinced him that nothing could survive down there. The fire was too intense and spread like…a wildfire.

      “Where you want to land?” The voice in his headphones might have been either the pilot or the copilot. Bolan couldn’t be sure, and it really didn’t matter. It took both men’s skill at the controls to keep the tilt-rotor aircraft from being buffeted to pieces in the fierce superheated air currents caused by the fire.

      “Not down there,” Bolan said. His keen eyes studied the raging inferno and found nothing. No landing zone was possible when the very earth itself appeared to be on fire. Besides, Salmon-Challis National Forest was not the spot he was most interested in. It might have been the first place to be torched, but he found the other side of the spiny ridge more interesting. More than his gut feeling, the powers that be back at Stony Man Farm agreed. The real evidence of who set the fires was not here but over near Shepard Peak.

      “We’re running low on fuel, sir.”

      This time