LITMIR.BIZ

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that he was giving something back.

      Built between 1931 and 1939, at the nadir of the Great Depression, Skyline Drive was convoluted and tortuous. Scenes of epic beauty dazzled drivers all the way, but caution was required on the winding turns where bicycles and black bears shared the relatively narrow highway. Park police enforced a strict 35 mph speed limit, and Bolan didn’t want to risk a speeding rap.

      Rolling through Mary Rock Tunnel, 670 feet of pitch darkness, with his headlights on high beams, Bolan wondered where Brognola planned to send him this time. There had been no warning on the telephone—there never was—and Bolan had been left, as usual, to speculate in vain.

      One thing he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt—it wouldn’t be a social call.

      Somewhere, somehow, someone had stepped across a line, and Bolan would be sent to reel them back or punch their ticket for one long, last ride.

      He could refuse the job, of course. That flexibility was built in from the start. But in reality, he’d only turned thumbs-down on a few assignments in the time he’d worked with Brognola and the assembled team at Stony Man Farm.

      The Farm was named for Stony Man Mountain, the fourth highest in the park at 4,010 feet, but it wasn’t actually on the mountain. It did not appear on any map available for public scrutiny, and while it was a working farm—in more ways than one—its crops were not marketed under the Stony Man name.

      Trespassing was rigorously—sometimes fatally—discouraged.

      Roughly half the time, when Bolan visited the Farm, he flew in and out. Stony Man had its own airstrip and helipads, complete with stinger missiles and hidden batteries of antiaircraft guns to deal with any drop-ins who ignored the radio commands to steer clear of restricted airspace.

      It had only happened once, to Bolan’s knowledge, with a careless pilot running short of fuel halfway between Pittsburgh and Winston-Salem. In that case, the guns and rockets hadn’t fired, but several days of house arrest and chemically induced amnesia left the interloper scrambling to explain how he had missed his scheduled wedding.

      The groom did not live happily ever after with his bride…but at least he lived.

      Some others who had trespassed at the Farm with sinister intent were not so fortunate.

      Bolan cleared the tunnel and killed his headlights, braking just beyond the next curve for a line of deer crossing the road. A nine-point buck was last across, pausing to stare at Bolan for a moment through the tinted windshield of his rental car.

      Bolan wondered if the deer spent their whole lives inside the park’s 306 square miles, or if they sometimes strayed outside. With hunting season on the way, he wished them luck.

      So many predators, so little time.

      BOLAN DIDN’T try to spot the guards staked out along his route of travel from the gate to the farmhouse that served as Stony Man’s HQ. He was expected, so went unchallenged by the Farm’s team of “blacksuits.”

      At any given time, Stony Man’s security staff included active-duty members of the U.S. military who dressed as farmhands but were armed.

      Brognola was waiting on the farmhouse porch with Barbara Price—the Farm’s mission controller—when Bolan got there, slowing into his approach. A stocky farmhand with a military buzz cut waited two steps down, to spirit Bolan’s rental car away and out of sight once he had cleared the driver’s seat.

      “Good trip?” Brognola asked, as Bolan climbed the porch steps and shook his hand.

      “Normal,” Bolan replied.

      It was the standard small-talk introduction to his latest job. He hadn’t flown across country from San Jose to Washington, then driven south from there to Stony Man, to talk about the Shenandoah scenery.

      “Okay,” Brognola said. “We may as well get to it, then.”

      But first, they had to reach the War Room, situated in the farmhouse basement, theoretically secured against direct hits with conventional munitions. That remained untested, and if all of them were lucky, it would stay that way.

      They rode the elevator down and disembarked into a corridor that led them to their destination, through a coded secure access door. Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman was waiting for them in the War Room. He was seated in the wheelchair that had kept him mobile since a bullet clipped his spinal cord, during an armed assault on Stony Man.

      Bolan shook hands with Kurtzman, then moved around the conference table to take a seat to Brognola’s left, while Barbara took the right-hand side. Kurtzman remained at the keyboard that controlled the War Room’s lights and AV apparatus for events such as the current mission briefing.

      “Akram Ben Abd al-Bari.” Brognola managed the pronunciation flawlessly, smiling grimly as he said, “You recognize the name, of course.”

      “It rings a bell,” Bolan replied.

      Brognola didn’t need to tell those present that al-Bari had been among the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives since 2001, with a four million dollar price tag on his head, dead or alive. Although the names on that dishonor roll were not officially prioritized, only al-Bari’s boss—known in the trade as O.B.L.—rated a higher bounty. Both had managed to evade manhunters during the Afghanistan invasion and remained at large, with open warrants naming some four thousand murder victims from the 9/11 raids and other terrorist events dating from 1993.

      Behind Brognola, Kurtzman displayed revolving photos of al-Bari on the large screen. Like the human monster’s reputation, the images were several times larger than life-size. Bolan had seen them all before, including the grainy captures from the latest video that had been aired last month on CNN and BBC, promising hell on Earth for the American Crusaders and their lackeys.

      “Also among the missing,” Brognola announced, “Ra’id Ibn Rashad, his number two.”

      More photos appeared on the big wall-mounted screen. Rashad’s brown, bearded face was seldom seen on Western television, and while he didn’t rank among the Ten Most Wanted, he was close. One million dollars waited for the bounty hunter who could bring him in alive, or prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was dead.

      Delivering his hands would do it.

      Or his head.

      “Big fish,” Bolan said, “but they’re still not in the net—are they?”

      “No, you’re right,” Brognola said. “But now we have a good idea of where to drop our line.”

      “That sounds familiar.”

      There’d been countless leads on al-Bari, Rashad, and O.B.L. himself, over the years. One thing the tips all had in common was that none of them had panned out. Agents and mercs had died on some of those wild-goose chases. But most had simply ended in frustration, time and money wasted in pursuit of shadows.

      “Sure it does,” Brognola said. “Except…”

      Another photo came up on the screen. This one revealed al-Bari and Rashad in conversation, over plates of food Bolan couldn’t identify. The angle of the shot made him suspect it had been snapped clandestinely.

      “That’s new?” he asked.

      “Taken ten days ago,” Brognola said.

      “Location?”

      “Somewhere in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. We don’t have exact coordinates.”

      That stood to reason. If the Pentagon could put their finger on al-Bari and Rashad, they likely would have plastered him with smart bombs and cruise missiles, then apologized to the Islamabad authorities at leisure—if at all.

      Bolan could see where this was going.

      “Someone has to go in and confirm it,” he said, not asking.

      “Right. And take whatever action may be feasible, once confirmation is achieved.”

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