Interception. Don Pendleton

prepared to defend its base of operations. With the death penalty so frequently employed, maybe they felt they had nothing left to lose.

      He saw more clusters of fifty-five-gallon drums connected by television cables designed to carry electronic impulses and digital signals. The triad team had cobbled together a devastating mixture of low-and high-tech. What it lacked in complexity Bolan felt sure it would make up for in raw, explosive power.

      00:00:20.

      Squeezing the girl tightly, Bolan lifted the pistol and fired into the big padlock holding the thick links of chain together. The metal padlock jumped at the impact like a fish on the end of a line and split apart. Bolan stepped forward and struck out with the tread of his boot, catching the mechanism and ripping it down.

      Karen Rasmussen joined him as the thick chain dropped to the floor. The girl was almost epileptic in her spasm now as she kept shrieking a word over and over again, the same liquid syllables in screaming repetition, but Bolan didn’t know the word, didn’t think he even recognized the language. He stuffed his pistol into its shoulder holster to better control the twisting girl and reached out to pull the warehouse door open.

      00:00:19.

      Karen Rasmussen threw herself against the handle and heaved her weight against the sliding structure. It came open easily and she stumbled through, Bolan rushed out after, running hard. The little girl bucked in his arms.

      He heard a car door open and saw the flash of a dome light out of his left eye even as he was turning. He saw an Asian man in a leather coat with a long ponytail hopping out of a sleek black Lexus, one of the team’s ubiquitous machine pistols filling his hands.

      Bolan dropped the twisting girl as he brought up his handgun. Rasmussen was screaming, her voice raw now, hands up around her face and standing directly in his way. He struck her with a heel-of-the-palm blow to her shoulder blade as the gunman lifted his machine pistol, and she spun away from him.

      The Executioner leveled his silenced weapon, just catching a sense of the girl darting away from him. His finger found the trigger a split second before the other man’s and a 3-round burst struck the Asian in the chest. The man staggered under the triple impact and came up against the edge of the car. Bolan pulled down and stroked his trigger again. The man’s face was ripped off his skull, and he hit the broken pavement of the parking lot.

      Bolan turned, reaching out for the girl, but he just missed her as she darted back into the building. His fingertips grazed her, coming close enough to feel the feather brush of her hair as he grasped nothing and she slipped past him.

      “Sister!” Rasmussen suddenly shouted. “I just remembered the word, I was too scared to translate before!” the daughter of the American diplomat said. “Her sister’s in there.”

      But Bolan was already running.

      HE HIT THE DOORS of the warehouse three steps behind the frantic girl. His eyes were drawn to the LED display and what he saw flooded his system with fresh jolts of adrenaline.

      00:00:09.

      He sprang forward, growling with the exertion and caught the girl as he dived toward the hiding spot he had first pulled her out from. She turned like a ferret and sank her teeth into his palm.

      00:00:08.

      He swore and let go instinctively as blood pooled up out of the cuts. The girl was under the desk and with incredulity he saw that her “sister” was a little rag doll as filthy as its owner with bright black eyes. He reached out with his unwounded hand and caught the girl by her shirt. Doll firmly in her grip, she came away easy now and he pulled her tightly to him.

      00:00:05.

      He saw the readout and knew he couldn’t make it. His feet hit the ground as he drove with his legs against the concrete like a running back breaking for open field after a hand off. He cut around an overturned barrel and cursed the half second it caused him.

      The girl was babbling now at him in some dialect he was too keyed up to catch, but she was also hugging him tightly. He saw the door standing open and put on the last burst of speed left in his body. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, banging against his ribs with the exertion and his breath was coming fast and hard.

      00:00:02.

      He hit the door at a dead sprint just as he felt the air around him suddenly draw backward in a vacuum rush that stung his eyeballs. He drew the girl closer against him as he felt the flash of sudden heat come rolling up behind him like a fast-running locomotive.

      Cowering on the pavement, Karen Rasmussen watched him dive through the doorway. He seemed to hang for a moment in the air and she could see the ball of fire rushing up behind like a film image on fast forward.

      Bolan was hurtling through the air, twisting as he flew to catch the angle out of the doorway and the orange freight train of a fireball rushed past him. The concussive force sent the doors flying like tumbling dice.

      She couldn’t stop screaming as she watched, and Bolan twisted as he fell to protect the girl, landing hard along one arm and shoulder. He grunted with the impact and recoiled slightly off the pavement before sprawling wide to cover as much of the girl’s flesh with his own body as he could.

      Behind them jets of flame shot out windows and air vents and punched holes through the roof. Black smoke appeared instantly, and debris began to rain down. The teenager felt her throat choke up with sudden, sharp pain and she realized she had been screaming but that the blast had deafened her.

      She stopped, coughing, and then looked up at the savage bonfire lighting up the dockside neighborhood. She felt tears filling her eyes as she realized the bastards were dead.

      Just like that, it was over.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      Bolan eased himself into a chair in the war room at Stony Man Farm. “What’s up, Bear?” he said to Aaron Kurtzman.

      Kurtzman, head of the Stony Man cybernetics team, turned his wheelchair toward Bolan. “What’s up, Mack? Got you some coffee. Barb and Hal will be here in just a second.”

      Bolan took a seat at the long hardwood table. In front of him was a steaming mug of black coffee and a plain manila folder marked with a single red stripe over a bar code and the word “Classified.”

      He had always preferred this place in the old farmhouse to the newer Annex. He had taken a lot of mission briefings here, formed innumerable strategies, argued tactics and made life and death decisions. He shrugged the thought away and reached for his cup of coffee as Barbara Price and Hal Brognola entered the room. Bolan nodded in greeting and took a drink.

      He frowned at the bitter taste. “That’s a nice batch you brewed there, Bear,” he said wryly. The thickset man grinned like a Viking from behind his black beard and hit a button on his console panel. “Good for what ails ya,” he agreed. A section of the wall slid down, revealing a huge screen.

      “Nice work in Split,” Brognola said. He sat in a chair and dropped a thick attaché case on the table in front of him. “The State Department is very grateful.” He paused and smiled. “If they knew who exactly to be grateful to, that is.”

      “The girl?” Bolan asked.

      “She’s fine,” Price said. The honey-blond mission controller took her own seat. “We channeled her into an American relief organization. She’ll be safe until she can be returned to her family in Jakarta.”

      Bolan nodded. His face was impassive, but he felt pleased. “What’s that leave us with now?” he asked.

      Price snorted and Bolan turned to her in surprise. “A ghost hunt,” she answered.

      Brognola turned to Kurtzman and nodded. “Show him,” he said.

      The cyberwizard typed briefly on his keyboard and hit his roller mouse with a thumb. Instantly the big screen recessed into the wall came alive. Bolan turned in his seat and regarded the digital image.

      First