LITMIR.BIZ

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chest, just below the armpit. The seven-inch blade severed the man’s main artery and he bled out before his heart beat five times.

      A pool of the man’s blood covered the floor of the flybridge and drops followed the soldier down the ladder to the deck, where they mixed with the water that had splashed on deck during the night. Inside the salon, pools of blood covered the upholstery of the lounge and settee, dripping off and soaking into the carpet below. Bolan walked past the bodies and went to the master stateroom. He threw the door open and fired the AK into the ceiling above the bed. Shards of fiberglass rained down on the leader’s sleeping form.

      The man lunged as Bolan had expected. What he didn’t expect was that he would have a Glock pistol in his hand. The scarred man swung the weapon around toward the soldier, but before he could get the muzzle pointed in Bolan’s direction, Bolan fired off several rounds into the man’s face. In a split second his scars vanished, along with the rest of his features. And any hope the Executioner had of interrogating the man disappeared with his face.

      3

      Monterey, California

      “There’s no way in hell that Darrick’s crash was an accident,” Eddie Anderson told Matt Cooper, the sales rep for a Russian oil company. Anderson didn’t question why a gasoline salesman was asking him about his late brother—he’d told everyone he talked to that he thought that his brother had been murdered. Most people wrote it off as the petulant outbursts of a young man in the throes of grief. But grief and anger didn’t hamper his on-track performance; if anything, they enhanced it. Anderson won the race in Qatar by a huge margin, beating his teammate—the current champion, a hotheaded Spaniard named Daniel Asnorossa—by seven seconds.

      Asnorossa earned his championship the previous year mostly because Anderson had crashed several times and had failed to finish three races while Asnorossa finished every race among the top five riders. Anderson won four races—three more than Asnorossa—and earned the rookie-of-the-year award. He’d been hired as Asnorossa’s backup rider, but this year everyone treated the upstart American like the team’s top rider.

      Bolan missed Anderson’s victory. He hadn’t been able to get to the track before the entire MotoGP circus packed up and shipped off to the United States for the following weekend’s race at Laguna Seca. After searching his captors’ bodies, which turned up nothing but fake Qatar security force IDs, along with paddock passes for the Losail circuit, he’d ditched them in the Persian Gulf.

      He hadn’t been able to steam into one of Doha’s heavily patrolled harbors in a blood-soaked boat registered to God knows who, especially with his light skin that immediately identified him as a Westerner. Qatarians didn’t trust foreigners, and he would have been sure to attract attention of the official variety. He waited until nightfall, then abandoned the boat and swam to a relatively deserted beach. In the meantime he avoided attention by doing what anyone aboard a sport fishing boat would do when out on the water—he fished. There was nothing else he could do because the Arabs had taken all of his electronic equipment, including his cell phone, along with all of his weapons and ID.

      After hitting shore he made his way back to his hotel room, where he was finally able to contact Stony Man Farm on a secure line. By the time he’d contacted Kurtzman, it was too late to stop the plane carrying the Team Free Flow equipment, which had already been offloaded and was en route to the Mazda Raceway.

      By the time Hal Brognola could organize a raid on the Laguna Seca paddock, the plutonium would almost certainly have been removed from the container. Bolan only hoped it hadn’t already been used to make a bomb.

      While Stony Man’s top pilot, Jack Grimaldi, flew Bolan to the Monterey Peninsula Airport, Kurtzman sent Bolan new information regarding the Free Flow Racing organization. Apparently things weren’t going so well for the Malaysian scooter manufacturer. The costs of developing a full-sized motorcycle for the U.S. and European markets exceeded everyone’s expectations and Free Flow was in a state of chaos, with a revolving roster of top executives, none of whom seem to survive even a year within the organization.

      The one person who seemed to float above the turmoil was Musa bin Osman, Free Flow’s vice president in charge of racing. That was in part because the racing organization was one of the few departments at Free Flow earning money, thanks to the generous sponsorship of a Saudi oil company. That was where things got interesting. The oil company was suspected of being a front for laundering money for several al Qaeda affiliates. The deeper Kurtzman dug, the more terrorist ties he discovered. Musa bin Osman had studied under the suspected mastermind behind the 2005 Bali bombings and many other terrorist attacks. He seemed to have close ties with Jemaah Islamiyah, the most active al Qaeda affiliate group in Malaysia.

      Bolan knew that his Matt Cooper identity had likely been compromised, at least as far as the Team Free Flow organization was concerned, but it was still his quickest way to gain access to the racing paddock so he continued to play the role of a fuel sales rep for a Russian oil company. He had Barbara Price try to make an appointment to meet with Jameed Botros before he’d even landed at Monterey, but the earliest he could see the Saudi would be Thursday. In the meantime he scoped out the area around Laguna Seca.

      To keep up appearances, he met with a couple of reps from satellite race teams—teams that leased the previous year’s factory race bikes. Such teams had some factory support—some more than others—but mostly they fended for themselves and were hungry for any sponsorship. By Thursday Cooper had tentative agreements with two teams. More importantly, he’d picked up on an undercurrent of mistrust between Team Free Flow and the other MotoGP organizations.

      On Thursday Bolan rode the BMW R1200GS he’d rented in San Francisco to the Free Flow garage to keep his appointment with Botros. The entire San Francisco area became an orgy of motorcycle activity during the week of the big race, and there was no better way for the soldier to blend in than to ride a motorcycle. Plus motorcycles were far more effective at slicing through the dense traffic that descended on the area for the race.

      He’d chosen the BMW because it was one of the most agile motorcycles ever built. The big bike was too heavy for serious off-road work. But in the hands of a physically large rider like Bolan, it could scoot down some pretty rough trails if it had to. Bolan had ridden just about every motorcycle built since he began his vigilante war against the Mafia many years ago, and he’d also received training from some of the world’s best on- and off-road motorcycle racers over the years, so he knew how to muscle a big bike over rough terrain.

      The Executioner knew damned well that he was being set up, that if this meeting wasn’t a trap, at the very least it would be the prelude to a trap. Botros and his crew might not try to kill him in the garage complex. They might keep a low profile at the track and attack Bolan somewhere off site. Or they might just try to kill him in their garages. But the soldier had made a commitment to recover the stolen plutonium before the terrorists had the chance to use it, and getting closer to the Team Free Flow crew, the only people who knew for sure where the plutonium was located, was the best way he could think of to find it.

      Bolan knew that someone could try to kill him at any moment. The soldier had no way of knowing where or when that attempt would take place so he’d have to rely on years of experience and instincts honed to an almost preternatural degree to survive the next few days. That, and the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle on his hip and the Beretta 93-R machine pistol he carried in the shoulder rig beneath his jacket.

      Bolan parked the BMW near the Team Free Flow garages just in time to see Eddie Anderson being escorted from the building complex by a couple of Middle Eastern-looking men. One could have been Scarface’s brother, or at least his cousin. The Arabs weren’t having an easy time of it. Most successful motorcycle racers were built like jockeys, and Anderson was no exception; he stood maybe five-four in his racing boots and couldn’t have weighed much, but he was giving the two Arabs as good as he got.

      “Get your damned hands off of me!” Anderson told Scarface’s cousin. “I know he was murdered and I know you guys did it!” The man tried to push Anderson to the ground but the wiry little rider ducked and grabbed the man’s wrist, flipped his arm around behind his back, and pushed him face first

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