LITMIR.BIZ

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snapping off three rounds in rapid fire, stamped a pattern on her target’s chest and slammed him to the ground.

      Bolan advanced with caution, made sure that the dead were all they seemed to be, then took another risk and let the woman have a clear shot at his back, while he ran to examine Jorge Guzman’s wounds.

      Guzman was grappling back to consciousness as Bolan reached him, tried to raise his pistol, but he didn’t have the strength to stop Bolan from taking it away. Blood bathed the left side of his face and stained the collar of his shirt.

      “Wha-What? Am I…Are we…?”

      Bolan examined him and said, “You’ve got a nasty graze above your left ear, but the bone’s not showing. Scalp wounds bleed a lot. It doesn’t mean you’re dying.”

      “Not…dead?”

      “Not even close,” Bolan replied. “You may need stitches, though.”

      “Hospital…no…report….”

      “I can take care of him,” a new voice said from Bolan’s left. He glanced up at the woman as she nodded toward Guzman. “I’ve stitched up worse than that, believe me.”

      Bolan helped Guzman to his shaky feet and held him upright, left hand on the other man’s right arm. It left his gun hand free as he turned toward the woman, saying, “Maybe we should start with names.”

      “Of course,” she said. “I’m Gabriella Cohen, and I work for the Mossad. We share, I think, a common goal.”

      CHAPTER THREE

      Two days earlier, Northern Virginia

      The Blue Ridge Mountains looked entirely different from the air than they appeared to earthbound motorists and hikers. Bolan was reminded of that fact each time he flew to Stony Man Farm.

      Airborne, he always tried to picture how the area had looked before the first human arrived, despoiling it with axes, saws and plows, road graders and the rest. Sometimes Bolan thought he was close, but then the pristine image always wavered, faded and was gone.

      Maybe next time, he thought.

      The Hughes 500 helicopter was a four-seater, but Bolan and the pilot had it to themselves.

      On any graduated scale of secrecy, the Farm and its activities would rank above “Top Secret,” somewhere off the chart. From day one, Stony Man’s assignment—seeking justice by extraordinary, often extralegal means—had been one of the deepest, darkest secrets of the U.S. government. Beside it, aliens at Roswell and the stealth experiments performed at Nevada’s Area 51 paled into insignificance. Aside from on-site personnel and agents in the field, only a handful of Americans knew Stony Man existed.

      Fewer still knew the extent of what it did, had done and might do in the future.

      At its birth, the concept had been simple: organize a unit that, when necessary, in the last extremity, would set the U.S. Constitution and established laws aside to deal with urgent threats and/or to punish those whose skill at gliding through the system made them constant threats to civilized society at large.

      Some might have called it vigilante justice; others, sheer necessity. In either case, it worked because the operation wasn’t public, wasn’t influenced by politics, and didn’t choose its targets based on race or creed or any factor other than their danger to humanity. Sometimes, Bolan thought it was more like dumping toxic waste.

      “Ten minutes,” the pilot said, as if Bolan didn’t know exactly where they were, tracking the course of Skyline Drive, a thousand feet above the treetops. Cars passing below them looked like toys, the scattered hikers more like ants. If any of the hardy souls on foot looked up or waved at Bolan’s chopper, his eyes couldn’t pick them out.

      Bolan had been wrapping up a job in Canada when Hal Brognola called and asked him for a meeting at the Farm. Quebec was heating up, with biker gangs running arms across the border from New York. Some of the hardware, swiped from U.S. shipments headed overseas, traveled from Buffalo by ship, on the St. Lawrence River, while the rest was trucked across the border at Fort Covington. Don Vincent Gaglioni, Buffalo’s pale version of The Godfather, procured the guns and pocketed the cash.

      It had to stop, but agents of the ATF and FBI were getting nowhere with their separate, often competitive investigations. By the time Bolan was sent to clean it up, they’d lost two veteran informants and an agent who was riding with his top stool pigeon when the turncoat’s car exploded in a parking lot.

      Bolan had sunk two of the Gaglioni Family’s cargo ships with limpet mines, shot up a convoy moving overland, then trailed Don Gaglioni to a sit-down with the gang leaders outside Drummondville, Quebec. The meeting had been tense to start with, but they’d never had a chance to settle their dispute. Bolan’s unscheduled intervention, with an Mk 19 full-auto grenade launcher had spoiled the bash for all concerned.

      It had been like old times, for just a minute there, but Bolan didn’t set much store in strolls down Memory Lane. Especially when the path was littered with rubble and corpses.

      There was enough of that in his future, he knew, without trying to resurrect the Bad Old Days of his one-man war against the Mafia. A little object lesson now and then was fine, but there could be no turning back the clock.

      Which brought him to the job at hand—whatever it might be. Brognola hadn’t called him for a birthday party or a house-warming. There would be dirty work ahead, the kind Bolan did best, and he was ready for it.

      Which was not to say that he enjoyed it.

      In Bolan’s mind, the day a killer started to enjoy his killing trade, the time had come for him to find another line of work. Only a psychopath loved killing, and the best thing anyone could do for such an individual was to put him down before he caused more misery.

      Soldiers were trained to kill, the same way surgeons learned to cut and plumbers learned to weld. The difference, of course, was that a warrior mended nothing, built nothing. In battle, warriors killed, albeit sometimes for a cause so great that only blood could sanctify it. Some opponents were impervious to grand diplomacy, or even backroom bribes.

      In some cases, only brute force would do.

      But those were not the situations to be celebrated, in a sane and stable world. Peace was the goal, the end to which all means were theoretically applied.

      Back in the sixties, bumper stickers ridiculed the war in Vietnam by asking whether it was possible to kill for peace. The answer—then, as now—was “Yes.”

      Sometimes a soldier had no choice.

      And sometimes, he was bound to choose.

      “We’re here,” the pilot said as Bolan saw the farmhouse up ahead. Below, a tractor churned across a field, its driver muttering into a two-way radio. There would be other watchers Bolan couldn’t see, tracking the chopper toward the helipad. Fingers on triggers, just in case.

      They reached the pad and hovered, then began to settle down. Bolan looked through the bubble windscreen at familiar faces on the deck, none of them smiling yet.

      It wasn’t home, but it would do.

      Until they sent him off to war again.

      “GLAD YOU COULD MAKE IT,” Hal Brognola said, while pumping Bolan’s hand. “So, how’s the Great White North?”

      “Still there,” Bolan replied as he released his old friend’s hand.

      Beside Brognola, Barbara Price surveyed Bolan with cool detachment, civil but entirely business-like. The things they did in private, now and then, might not be absolutely secret from Brognola or the Stony Man team, but Barbara shunned public displays. She was the perfect operations chief: intelligent, professional and absolutely ruthless when she had to be.

      “You want some time to chill? Maybe a drink? A walk around the place?” Brognola asked.

      “We

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