Fire Zone. Don Pendleton

at the end of a mission when Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman had contacted him. Bolan had been looking forward to a much-needed break, possibly taking time to climb Mount Elbert for the solitude it offered and, for a while, simply not worry about someone shooting him in the back.

      The V-22 had been dispatched from the 58^th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to pick him up. The altitude near Leadville made helicopters unstable to operate, and the V-22 afforded a quick method of transport. For all the fly-by-wire technology involved in the vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, Bolan was more interested in speed. It duplicated the helicopter’s vertical capability and added an airplane’s range and ability to move him to his target at more than three hundred miles per hour.

      “Head due west,” Bolan said.

      “The other fire?”

      Bolan nodded and the pilot went back to his controls. The Osprey banked sharply, giving Bolan another look at the devastation below. Kurtzman had sent a video taken by a commercial airline pilot who had happened to be above the forest when it erupted in flame. Careful examination of the low-resolution video by the Stony Man analysts had given a chilling view of the first seconds of the fire. Bolan recognized the sudden wall of flame for what it was: detonation of a long string of explosives, probably dat cord. The second fire had erupted almost exactly ten minutes later, showing coordination and intent.

      The charred stench made his nose wrinkle as he leaned out the doorway and peered down. Intense heat like a mile-long blast furnace seared his face, but Bolan saw only the courage of the firefighters below risking their lives to keep the fire from spreading and devouring more untold square miles of the tinder-dry forest.

      “Sir, we’re here,” the pilot said. Bolan tapped his earpiece. The static interference almost deafened him. “But we got a problem. We can’t land down there.”

      Bolan saw the problem immediately. The fire west of Shepard Peak had devoured too much of the forest for him to get into the spot where he believed the second, more important fire had been set.

      “We could get down, but we might never get back into the air. I’m not risking a seventy-million-dollar aircraft, even if the SecDef himself ordered me down.”

      Bolan knew the pilot held some resentment toward him personally for being sent on this mission. The orders had come down fast from on high to deliver a single passenger of unknown affiliation to the middle of a forest fire.

      “What’s your operational ceiling?”

      “Twenty-six thousand.”

      “Take me up to fifteen, then you can go home.”

      The engines changed pitch as the pilot started an upward spiral. Bolan began getting into his gear. He had to hand it to Kurtzman. The man had anticipated everything. The parachute included with the pack on board when he rendezvoused with the V-22 was exactly what he needed.

      “What do you want me to do?”

      The pilot’s words spilled from the earpiece dropped onto the deck. Bolan was already out the door and tumbling through the turbulent air above the Boise National Forest. He got a good look at the terrain and how the fire had burned from the obvious line where the blaze had started. It looked as if someone had taken a fiery razor to the ground.

      More det cord.

      Turning slowly as he fell though the heated air, Bolan arrowed his way toward the seared meadow just to the west of the first ignition point. When he was only five hundred feet from the ground—definitely HALO to avoid the worst of the heated updrafts—he pulled the rip cord. The jerk as the parachute deployed caused his teeth to clack together. Then he hit the ground hard. His knees bent and he rolled in the blackened grass, tangling in the shroud lines as they collapsed rapidly. He finally scraped to a halt and got to his feet. A few minutes later, Bolan had the parachute gathered and weighted down under a rock so it wouldn’t blow around in the hot wind all around him.

      It was time for the Executioner to go to work.

      Stony Man Farm, Virginia

      AARON KURTZMAN LOOKED up from his computer console to see the mission controller, Barbara Price, standing in the doorway. The dark circles under her eyes told him she hadn’t slept much in days. She said nothing and didn’t have to. Kurtzman felt the weight of her unspoken question.

      “Nothing yet,” Kurtzman said. “Striker has just dropped into the Boise Basin and is doing a quick recon.”

      “Have you filled him in?”

      “I’m still gathering intel,” Kurtzman said, glancing at his screen. He looked back up. “What more can you tell me?”

      “Not much more,” she admitted, heaving a deep sigh. “It seems more and more like an outright attack on the U.S. economy. All the gold was earmarked for delivery to the government to bolster the dollar on world markets. There’s no doubt that the last attack was done by a PMC.”

      “Identified?”

      Price shook her head and looked even grimmer.

      “How many private military companies can there be on the loose within U.S. borders?” Kurtzman asked aloud, but he didn’t expect a response. The question was rhetorical because no one could answer, and they both knew it. The homegrown paramilitary militias had died down over the past few years as government activity against terror cells escalated. This was not the atmosphere a paranoid, super-secret paramilitary group could thrive in. When they were ignored, they flourished in backwoods and the mountains where no one had cared if they blew up old cars with RPGs or shot cutouts of their particular bogeyman. With air travelers having to take off their shoes to check for explosives and everyone jumpy over the slightest thing amiss, the paramilitaries had come under such governmental scrutiny that they could almost be written off.

      But not the PMCs. The government used them for security in Iraq and other hot spots around the world. That was fine. What wasn’t fine were the PMCs employed by fat cats as bodyguards and even by dictators as personal armies. Most of the PMCs contained mercenaries honed to a keen edge in a dozen different armies worldwide. The various Special Forces branches of the United States supplied their share, but so did the Russian Spetsnaz, the British SAS and all the other European countries with their super-secret, always denied special ops forces. Kurtzman didn’t even want to think about the disaffected mercenaries operating out of South Africa, Europe and elsewhere. Too many men and women around the world sold themselves to the highest bidder.

      “The last two strikes accounted for well over fifty million dollars in gold,” Price said. “That much gold weighs close to two tons. The M.O.s match what’s going down in Idaho. I hope Striker can get on their asses in a hurry. We’ve got to stop them before they bankrupt the country.”

      Kurtzman felt a shiver travel up and down his spine. Forest fires were set to divert authorities. The PMC strike team had moved into mines with smelters on-site and killed anyone who had not been evacuated. Then the gold had simply vanished. Tons of it. Gone. Like so much golden smoke.

      He touched a screen to get a news ticker scrolling slowly along the bottom and smiled without humor. “Gold just hit nine hundred dollars an ounce today, and it’s still going up. They’re making money even after they steal the bullion. You’ve got to wonder how they transport that much.”

      “The question I can’t get a handle on is why they need so much,” Price said.

      Kurtzman felt a little colder. Greed was one thing, but this transcended mere avarice. Whoever was responsible for the thefts was amassing enough cold, hard currency to fund a revolution. A big one.

      He opened communication with Bolan to get an update.

      “Striker, it’s Bear. Report.”

      “TWO BODIES,” Bolan told Kurtzman. “Both murdered.” He lightly prodded the man’s head with his feet and saw how the spinal cord had been almost severed with a savage slash. The charred corpse revealed little else. The female with him was harder to evaluate,