Conflict Zone. Don Pendleton

stored most of his hardware in the trunk. A baggy shirt, unbuttoned and untucked, hid the Beretta 93-R in a fast-draw shoulder rig, with spare mags pouched under his right arm. And just to be on the safe side, he held back a couple of Russian-made RGO-78 frag grenades—the “defensive” model, with ball bearings packed around eighty-five grams of TNT, with an effective killing radius of twenty yards.

      Bolan was hoping that he wouldn’t need the pistol or grenades for his preliminary meeting with Obinna Umaru, but he knew that banking on a free ride was the quickest way to wind up lying in a gutter or a shallow grave. He would hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.

      He had a map of Warri and an hour to kill before their scheduled meeting at a marketplace on the city’s north side. Bolan decided to spend the time touring his new battleground, and checking for tails in the process.

      But first, he wanted to check out the car.

      No matter where you went, on every continent, auto theft was a problem. Millions of company cars came with LoJack technology or its equivalent, GPS systems that let the home office keep track of all wheels on the road, for whatever reason. Bolan had no reason to believe that Jared Ross would shadow him, but it was best for all concerned—and Bolan, in particular—if his movements in Warri went unobserved.

      Once he was safely off the K-Tech lot, Bolan found a place to park and went to work. He used a simple scanner, the size of a cigarette pack, tuned to the standard LoJack frequency of 173.075 megahertz and found the transceiver hidden underneath the padded liner in the trunk. He took it out, pitched it into a nearby vacant lot strewed with rubbish, and then performed a second scan of the Toyota, running through assorted other frequencies that might betray a second homing device.

      His ride was clean.

      Now all he had to do was to pass the time until his rendezvous, ensuring that he wasn’t followed from the K-Tech property by either friend or foe.

      For in the present situation, either one could get him killed.