Radical Edge. Don Pendleton

Something wasn’t quite right. Scanning the room, he stood, holding the bloody Beretta at the ready. Bracing the machine pistol with his off hand, he took up a position in the doorway. From this vantage he could see the last room of the house, from which the enemies now piled on the floor had come. It was a bunkhouse of sorts. Old wooden twin beds, never intended to be stacked, were sitting one atop another, nailed in place with cross-braces of plywood and metal wire. A makeshift table in the center of the room—just a large wooden utility spool—was piled with cards, trash and empty bottles.

      “Striker to G-Force,” Bolan said quietly. He shifted to his right.

      The shots that came were fired from underneath the farthest of the “bunks,” ripping through the mattress and tearing holes in the wall a good three feet away. Bolan simply flicked his Beretta’s selector to single shot, took his time aiming, and squeezed off a single round. The bullet punched a hole through the concealed skinhead’s mattress where his skull would be. The hole bloomed crimson and movement from underneath the bed stopped.

      Bolan let out a breath.

      “G-Force here,” the voice in his ear said.

      “G-Force” was Jack Grimaldi’s code name. The Stony Man pilot was even now somewhere overhead, far enough off that the whirring of his chopper’s rotor blades wouldn’t tip off any hostiles. Bolan wore a tiny earbud transceiver, designed in part by Stony Man electronics expert, Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, which transmitted the soldier’s words to Grimaldi and relayed critical communications back to him. The earbud could be connected to Bolan’s secure satellite phone if required, but at the moment, he and his pilot were just connected locally. Grimaldi was Bolan’s lifeline in the sky. Should he become enmeshed in a situation he truly could not handle, Grimaldi would descend, guns blazing. More than once, a well-timed air strike with his colleague at the stick had saved Mack Bolan’s life.

      “Stand by, Jack,” Bolan said quietly. He swapped 20-round magazines in the Beretta and ran his hand over its slide. The knife edge had cut a deep gouge into the well-worn bluing on the steel, but hadn’t damaged the machine pistol’s function. He eased the weapon back into its custom leather shoulder holster.

      “You forgot about me, cop,” said a voice behind him. “Put your hands up or I’ll just put one in your back.” The shotgun that racked behind him for emphasis had already been chambered. Bolan heard the heavy thump of the loaded 12-gauge shell hitting the debris on the blood-strewed floorboards.

      “I’m not a cop,” Bolan said, not moving. His hand was still on the Beretta in its holster under his arm. “I was hoping I could take you alive. You may have information I need.”

      “I don’t know jack,” said the skinhead whom Bolan had kicked unconscious. “They don’t trust me with nothin’. I do what I’m told and I like it that way.”

      “Figures,” Bolan said.

      “Ain’t no way I’m going quietly. I ain’t givin’ up nobody. You ain’t takin’ me alive,” the skinhead said.

      “I’ve learned to live with disappointment,” Bolan said. He pulled the trigger.

      The bullet fired through the open rear of the leather shoulder holster, the muzzle-flash burning the back of Bolan’s shoulder. Turning, he left the weapon where it was, not knowing if shooting from within the holster had prevented the action from cycling properly. He ripped the Desert Eagle from its Kydex scabbard and extended the weapon, snapping the safety off. The skinhead had taken a round through the heart and was dead.

      “You okay down there, Sarge?” Grimaldi said through Bolan’s earbud.

      “Affirmative. I had a brief complication.” He looked down at the dead terrorist. “It’s resolved now.”

      “Roger.”

      “Stand by,” Bolan said. “I’m going to need you to signal the Farm for a cleanup crew.”

      “Standing orders on that just came through from Barb,” Grimaldi said, referring to Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller. “She has a blacksuit contingent on hand to liaise with local law enforcement, make sure the dead bodies get written up the right way.”

      “Another drug deal gone wrong?” Bolan asked.

      “Or something like that,” Grimaldi said. “Maybe swamp gas, a weather balloon…”

      “Or a classified training mission,” Bolan supplied. He could hear Grimaldi chuckling in his earbud.

      “Yeah,” said the Stony Man pilot. “You’ve got it exactly.”

      “All right. Give me a minute to finish up here. Then we’ll hit the second safe house.”

      “I assume negative contact?”

      “Correct,” Bolan said, his voice carrying a hard edge of irritation. “He’s not here.”

      It had been a toss-up determining which of the two safe houses to hit first. This one was farther out than the second, which stood in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Alamogordo. Bolan had opted for the more remote location first, hoping that, with Shane Hyde in custody, it wouldn’t be necessary to risk a firefight in a more populated area. Now they would have to take that step, and quickly. Vermin had a way of relaying word to one another, even where no apparent means of communication existed. Mack Bolan suspected that all criminals and predators shared, if not a sixth sense, then a heightened cunning that made them wary of situations and scenarios out of the ordinary. Losing contact with the crew here at the safe house would tip off Hyde’s Twelfth Reich terrorists nearby. Of that Bolan had no doubt. He and Grimaldi were already on the clock.

      Bolan removed his secure satellite smartphone from one of the pouches on his blacksuit web gear. The phone was equipped with a high-resolution camera, which he used as he moved from corpse to corpse, still cautious, expecting no resistance but prepared to be surprised. At each one, he either leaned in and toed the body over or grabbed a hank of hair and pulled the head back, photographing each dead man—and the dead woman—for Stony Man’s files.

      The images would be relayed automatically through the smartphone’s data link to Stony Man Farm, where Kurtzman and his cybernetics team would run them through facial recognition software. These would be cross-referenced with the Farm’s sometimes extralegal databases linked to multiple law-enforcement systems, including those of Interpol. The Farm’s files on the individual terrorists, where appropriate, would be updated to reflect their new status as “deceased.”

      Each bit of information was, Bolan knew, a potential puzzle piece to solve future problems. Even data that closed doors was useful, for it helped draw boundaries in the Stony Man sleuths’ search for what was missing.

      The frame of the safe house began to rattle, causing dust to filter down from cracks and crevices in the ceiling. The throb of the chopper’s rotors was as familiar as a heartbeat to Bolan, who had made his bones on battlefields far removed, but no less deadly, than this one. The machine that Grimaldi brought in for a landing was, at first glance, the familiar Army Black Hawk. The careful observer would know, however, that the helicopter was anything but.

      Bolan’s ride was, in fact, a highly modified HH-60G Pave Hawk, itself a heavily upgraded version of the Black Hawk. The chopper’s fuel capacity had been effectively doubled with the addition of external fuel tanks. Its integrated inertial navigation, global positioning, Doppler navigation and satellite communications systems had the latest Stony Man augmentations, including the encryption technology Grimaldi needed to exchange data and voice with the Farm without fear of being intercepted.

      Grimaldi had explained to Bolan, during their flight to the safe house, that the Pave Hawk had an automatic flight control system, including forward-looking infrared enhancement for low-light and night ops. The chopper’s ancillary equipment included a six-hundred-pound hoist with a two-hundred-foot range, full infrared jamming and electronic countermeasures, including chaff and flares, color weather radar and an automatic anti-icing system.

      More importantly, one