LITMIR.BIZ

      Prologue

      Sykesville, Maryland

      It was Mack Bolan’s second day at the Wildest Dreams Covert Ops Fantasy Camp. So far he’d been impressed by the camp’s regimen, which approximated the Stony Man blacksuit trainee program back at his own base of operations in Virginia. Already he’d undergone rigorous exercise workouts, field drills, martial-arts seminars, and an afternoon devoted to countersurveillance techniques and evasive driving maneuvers.

      For the blacksuits, tests of this sort were more of a review, as most were culled from law enforcement or the military and had already proved themselves fit, as well as competent to engage the enemy. In sharp contrast, the two dozen initiates at the fantasy camp were, with few exceptions, unprepared for the physical challenges they’d coughed up nearly four grand apiece to take part in at the former Fort Hadley Army base. Most of Bolan’s bunkmates were a motley crew of Walter Mittys, overweight desk jockeys and delusional Rambo wanna-bes who, by the end of the week, would no doubt welcome a return to the humdrum of their nine-to-five jobs. Not surprisingly, within five minutes of lights-out, everyone in the barracks—including the few campers who’d weathered the day’s challenges without collapsing—had surrendered to exhaustion and was fast asleep.

      Everyone, that was, except for Mack Bolan a.k.a. the Executioner.

      He lay still a few minutes longer, then quietly slipped out of his sleeping bag and threw on the camou fatigues he’d been issued shortly after arriving at the camp the previous day before under the name Mel Schiraldi. With his dark hair trimmed to a buzz cut and his cobalt-blue eyes cloaked by a pair of brown contact lenses, Bolan bore a passing resemblance to the real Mr. Schiraldi, a Baltimore fitness instructor who’d made his reservations with Wildest Dreams more than three months earlier. Schiraldi had been convinced to let Bolan take his place in exchange for an all-expenses-paid Caribbean cruise and five thousand dollars in spending money, all courtesy of the Sensitive Operation Group’s discretionary fund. A small price to pay, SOG director Hal Brognola had reasoned, to allow Bolan to infiltrate the fantasy camp without drawing the suspicion he would have received as a last-minute walk-in.

      Once he’d dressed, Bolan quietly carried his boots past the other bunks. Moonlight shone through the barracks windows, illuminating the wooden floorboards. Bolan took care to step on the joints where the wood was hammered down tight and less inclined to creak under the weight of his hard-toned, two-hundred-plus-pound frame. It was a trick Bolan had picked up through his years of stalking the omnipresent beast he called Animal Man, a beast that at various times had taken the shape of everything from Mafia hit man to al Qaeda terrorist. This night, Bolan was out to stalk yet another manifestation of that beast.

      The rear doorway of the barracks opened onto a crushed-gravel path that wound through thickets of overgrown bramble to the latrines. It was late spring, and the small stones were cold against the Executioner’s bare feet. Once he came to a break in the shrubbery, Bolan abandoned the path and headed through tall grass to a knoll canopied by the branches of an ancient magnolia grove. Bolan paused at the base of one of the trees and donned his socks, then pried loose the thick heels of his customized boots.

      Each of the heels was hollowed out to form a storage cavity. One heel contained a set of foldaway lock picks and a miniature earbud transceiver. Wedged into the other cavity was the closest thing to a weapon that Bolan had at his immediate disposal: a palm-sized neoprene plastic box that contained a high-powered flashlight, GPS transmitter and a firing tube loaded with a single .22-caliber round. Bolan hoped to complete his mission without being drawn into a firefight, but if it came to that, the minigun would at least be a step up, however small, from taking on the enemy unarmed.

      Bolan extended the transceiver’s retractable flex mike and clicked it on before planting it in his ear. Within seconds he was in contact with Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi.

      “I’m on the prowl,” Bolan whispered.

      “Gotcha,” came the tinny reply through his earbud. “GPS signal’s coming in strong.”

      “Stand by, then. I’m going in.”

      Bolan tapped the earbud, shutting down the transmission. He quickly snapped the heels back into place, then slipped on his boots and made his way to the last of the magnolias.

      Downhill from his position was a cinder-block storage building no larger than a one-car garage. Earlier in the day, while driving a BMW Z3 on an obstacle course through the surrounding foothills, Bolan had glimpsed a Ford pickup truck pull up to the shed. The road had quickly led him beyond view of the vehicle, but once he’d finished his road test—deliberately nudging a few pylons so as to not advertise his expertise behind the wheel—Bolan had passed the compound just as two men transferred a heavy crate from the truck to the outbuilding. Judging from the crate’s apparent weight and coffinlike dimensions, the Executioner had felt certain that he’d confirmed that the fantasy camp served as a cache for stolen arms reported missing three days earlier from the U.S. Army’s proving grounds in nearby Aberdeen.

      Such thefts were disturbing enough when they involved firearms and conventional ammunition. But in this case, along with an assortment of M-16s and government-issue autopistols, the thieves had gotten their hands on an even more worrisome weapons trove. The implications of the heist were grave enough to earn mention in the daily intelligence brief that had crossed the President’s

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