Kitabı oku: «Face Of Terror», sayfa 2

As he took his foot off the brake pedal and returned it to the accelerator, Jessup said, “You think there’s a chance of catching them?”

The Hummer tore up more wild grass as it picked up speed. “I don’t know,” the Executioner said. “But it won’t hurt to give it a shot.”

BEHIND THE WHEEL of the Jeep, Harry Drake looked up into the rearview mirror. “Those bastards in that Hummer are coming after us,” he told Sal Whitlow, who sat in the passenger’s seat of the vehicle. Like Drake himself, Whitlow wore green camouflage BDUs and a boonie hat. A Russian Tokarev automatic pistol rode in a holster on his belt, and a Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 lay across his lap.

“They’ll never catch us.” Whitlow chuckled, turning in his seat to smile back into the pasture. “That yellow submarine’s almost like a tank. But this Jeep and the four-wheel-drive pickups are enough for this terrain.”

“I hope you’re right,” Drake said as he turned slightly to miss a small scrub tree. “And I hope our ticket out of here is waiting where he’s supposed to be.”

“He will be,” Whitlow said confidently, turning back to face the front. “Joe Knox is solid SAS. I met him several times when we trained with the Brits.”

Drake nodded. He was trusting Whitlow’s judgment, as well as his word. They’d served together as Army Rangers during the first Gulf War, then worn the green beanies of the Army’s Special Forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The two men were more than friends. They were like brothers.

Just the same, Drake was glad he’d downed a Lortab and a Xanax—painkillers—with a mouthful of whiskey right before the yellow Hummer appeared. His nerves had been on edge lately, and the mixture of drugs was sometimes all that kept him from screaming out loud.

As the Jeep took a rise, then suddenly plunged downward toward a dry creek bed, Drake twisted his neck and looked at the Ford F250. It was negotiating the rugged ground as well as the Jeep. He turned his head back and saw the Dodge Ram just outside his open-topped vehicle to his right. It was doing fine, too.

Whitlow was right. They had stolen the four-wheel-drive pickups, along with the Jeep, earlier that morning from a farm twenty miles away, and they’d been perfect vehicles in which to deliver the cocaine. And the farmer who had owned all three vehicles wouldn’t need them anymore, either.

He and his wife lay dead on a pile of hay in the barn.

Drake took another quick glance at the Dodge Ram and saw Felix Bundy riding shotgun. Though he couldn’t see past Bundy in the higher vehicle, he knew Donald O’Hara was in the driver’s seat. Both men had been Navy SEALS and served in the Middle East just like Drake and Whitlow. Drake glanced one more time at the Ford F250 as all three vehicles came up out of the creek bed and raced on toward a county section road just past a barbed-wire fence another two hundred yards away. Elmer Scott was behind the wheel of the Ram, with Charlie Ducket riding shotgun for him. The two of them had been U.S. Marine recons and had shot their share of Arabs just like the rest of the team.

Harry Drake instinctively ducked lower behind the Jeep’s windshield as the front bumper burst through the barbed wire. The pickups had fallen in directly behind him, and now he raced up the bar ditch to the dirt road.

Drake frowned, thinking at lightning speed. The county road was a temptation. It would be easier going, with less chance of one or more of his convoy breaking down. But the Hummer would likely catch up to them more quickly if they took the easy route. Besides, once they reached the highway they’d be sitting ducks for Oklahoma highway patrolmen and any small-town cops who got word of what was going on over the radio.

By the time he had decided to go on through the next pasture he was already halfway down the bar ditch anyway. The Jeep popped the barbed wire surrounding the next quarter section as easily as it had the first one, and sent a small herd of Black Angus cattle scurrying away in terror.

As they raced across the pasture, Drake saw the white paint of the helicopter peeking between the branches of a small grove of trees. Behind the controls, he knew Joe Knox would be waiting to take them skyward. He slowed the Jeep and prepared to jump out, abandon it and help the men with the money load the briefcases before they abandoned the pickups.

As soon as he’d ground to a halt, Drake held his hand up to his eyes. Looking out over the pastureland, he could see the yellow Hummer just now crossing the county road and coming up through the hole in the fence that they had made.

“Okay, guys!” Drake yelled above the sound of the whopping chopper blades. “Get that money on board and let’s get out of here!” He slung his AK-47 over his shoulder on the green web sling and hurried to the F250, where he seized four briefcases. “And from now until we’re safely airborne, we change languages just in case!” A grin curled the corners of his mouth, making the ends of his handlebar mustache rise to tickle the sides of his nose.

He had chosen his crew carefully, including in his criteria for recruitment their exceptional combat skills, intelligence, willingness to break the laws of the nation that had trained them and they had defended, but even more for one other skill they all possessed.

Each and every one of Harry Drake’s men spoke fluent Farsi, the national tongue of Iran.

“Aye-aye,” one of the Marines yelled. Drake couldn’t tell which one.

But it didn’t matter. What did matter was that they get the half-million dollars in cash on board the chopper and fly out of here before that big yellow monstrosity of a vehicle arrived and its passengers shot them all.

Drake had a bad feeling about that canary-colored Hummer. Not so much the vehicle itself but the men inside it.

Something told him that at least one of the men—the driver, who had shown such competency in taking out their Mafia associates—was a superior warrior to each and every last one of them.

THE MAN DEA SPECIAL AGENT Rick Jessup had been told to call Matt Cooper continued to guide the yellow Hummer as it bounced in and out of the ruts and mounds that made up the cow pasture. Far in the distance, the specks that Jessup knew were a Jeep and two more pickups were gradually growing larger. As they banked down into another creek bed, then up the other side, he was suddenly able to differentiate between the vehicles. The Jeep was a standard CJ-5 model. One of the pickups was a Dodge Ram, the other a Ford F250.

Jessup couldn’t remember the license numbers he had seen for a brief second as the three vehicles had fled the scene a few minutes earlier. But if memory served him right, they had all had local farm tags.

Which meant the men driving and riding in them had stolen them from somewhere close to this area. And they had to have stolen them recently. No reports of missing vehicles had gone out over the police-band radio mounted in the Hummer. That could only mean one of two things: either the rightful owners hadn’t discovered their property missing yet or they were dead.

Considering the fact that his snitch had told him it was radical Islamic terrorists who had sold the coke to the Mafia, Jessup’s money was on the latter possibility.

The DEA man watched the vehicles ahead of them slow, then stop as they reached a lone grove of trees in the middle of the pasture. Just above the treetops, he could barely make out the whirling blades of a helicopter.

“So that’s their plan,” Bolan said from behind the wheel. The words came out sounding hard and stark after the silence that had reigned over the Hummer for the past several minutes.

“They’ll just abandon the pickups and Jeep. My guess is they were stolen anyway,” Jessup said.

Bolan nodded, then turned briefly toward Jessup. “Take the wheel,” he said.

Jessup reached over and grasped the steering wheel.

The Hummer slowed momentarily as Bolan took his foot off the accelerator and thrust himself backward over the seat into the rear passenger area of the Hummer. But it was done so quickly and smoothly—obviously a much-practiced move—that Jessup was able to slide behind the wheel and take control immediately.

A second later, Bolan had climbed back into the front, now in the passenger’s seat where Jessup had been a second before. Reaching down to the floorboard, the big man lifted his Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun.

Jessup got the Hummer back up to speed as Bolan strapped his leg down with the seat belt. A moment later, he was more out of the window than in, and firing 3-round bursts from the H&K subgun.

Through the windshield, Jessup could see tiny figures loading what looked like briefcases from the pickups onto the helicopter. He also saw the small grass and dust storms erupt as his partner’s 9 mm slugs fell a few feet in front of the men.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jessup watched Bolan raise his point of aim slightly. As more subgun explosions sounded from the other side of the Hummer, he looked out of the windshield again and saw two holes appear in the side of the chopper.

But they were still too far away for the submachine gun to be relied on for accuracy. It was a short-range weapon, and trying to force it to become a sniper’s rifle was like using a screwdriver for a hammer.

Bolan tossed the MP-5 over his shoulder into the backseat and lifted the AR-15 that Jessup had used only minutes before on the Mafia men. He leaned out of the window again, and Jessup could see that the assault rifle was angled more horizontally this time. The 5.56 mm NATO rounds should reach the chopper more efficiently.

Bolan pulled the AR-15’s trigger three times in a row, and a trio of rounds sailed across the grassland and pocked the side of the helicopter—just to the side of the open side door. But they did so as the last of the briefcases was loaded, and the last man in cammies reached up, took the hand of another terrorist and allowed himself to be jerked up into the chopper as it began to rise.

Bolan pulled the trigger several more times as the Hummer raced closer. But they were still too far away for his rounds to be effective, and to complicate things further, his target was moving as well as distant.

Jessup drove on. When the helicopter was perhaps a hundred feet in the air, the pilot turned its nose directly at the oncoming Hummer. Jessup watched as a man in green camouflage, secured to the helicopter by a ballistic nylon strap, leaned out of the same sliding side door through which the men had boarded.

Resting on his shoulder was an OD-green bazooka.

“Twist the wheel!” Bolan yelled. And even as he spoke, he dropped the AR-15 and reached across the Hummer with both hands.

The bazooka’s charge exploded out of the mammoth barrel even as the back blast flew past the rear of the helicopter. Together, Bolan and Jessup turned the wheel as if their very lives depended on it.

The explosion ten feet to one side of their vehicle created a crater in the prairie ground roughly the same size that a hand grenade buried beneath the surface would have made. Bolan looked back up at the sky and saw the man with the bazooka disappear back into the helicopter. Then the chopper rose higher into the air, turned and flew away.

Jessup turned the Hummer back toward the helicopter as it grew smaller in the distance. Both he and Bolan stepped out of the yellow vehicle and watched.

“Any idea where they might be going?” Jessup asked.

Bolan shook his head. “Even on ground this flat, they’ll be completely out of sight in another minute or so. Especially if they stay as close to the ground as they were. They could keep going, turn right or left, or even fly a few miles one way or another and then double back past us.”

“They might figure we’ll wait here and see,” Jessup suggested.

“They might,” Bolan said. “But it’s not likely. They can spot this yellow Hummer a long time before we see them in the air. Come on.” He got back behind the wheel of the big vehicle as Jessup jumped into the passenger’s side. They drove only slightly slower as they returned to where the three Toyota pickups lay in ruins.

“It’s gonna take a while to get all that coke rounded up, inventoried and loaded,” Jessup said as they neared the overturned truck. “Want me to radio in for some assistance?” He started to reach for the microphone mounted on the dashboard.

Bolan shook his head and Jessup’s arm froze in midair.

“I’ve got a faster and much more efficient way of handling things,” the big man said as he pulled up next to the overturned truck. Quickly dropping down from the Hummer, the Executioner walked to the back of the Hummer and grabbed a five-gallon can of gasoline. Then, walking from truck to truck, he dribbled a trail of gas in his wake, removing the cap to each pickup’s gas tank when he reached it.

Finally, Bolan dripped gas in his tracks as he walked backward to the Hummer once more. Punching the cigarette lighter into the dash, he turned to Jessup as the DEA man got in on the other side. “You don’t smoke, do you?” he asked.

“No,” Jessup said.

Bolan nodded. Pulling the cigarette lighter out of the Hummer’s dash, he glanced for a second at the glowing orange disk inside it, then dropped it out of the window.

The gasoline-soaked prairie grass next to the Hummer immediately started to burn, and the flame worked its way down the individual trails that led to the Toyotas, cocaine and dead men.

Throwing the Hummer into gear, Bolan tore up more grass and dirt as he floored the accelerator and raced back to the county road. He had driven through broken barbed-wire fence and traversed the bar ditch to the road when the explosions began.

2

Bolan watched the flames leaping in the rearview mirror as he drove the Hummer back toward the highway. Next to him, Jessup had turned sideways in his seat and watched as the three exploded pickups, the dead mafiosi and a half-million dollars of cocaine burned. “Well, Cooper,” he said finally, turning back to face the front. “That’s certainly a lot easier than bagging it all for evidence and transporting it for safekeeping until the trial—which won’t be necessary now anyway.” He paused and took a deep breath. “You sure we aren’t going to have to answer for this? I mean, calling this unorthodox behavior for a law-enforcement officer would be the understatement of the century.”

“Don’t sweat it, Jessup,” Bolan said. “Yes, I’m in charge of this operation. But I’m not a law-enforcement officer.”

The DEA man threw his head back against the neck rest atop his seat. “Oh, that’s great,” he said. “So you’re a spook. CIA? Department of Defense? Homeland Security?”

“Uh-uh,” the Executioner said. Ahead, he could see where the dirt rose up to the two-lane highway leading from Guyman to Boise City. “None of those.”

“Okay,” Jessup said. “I’ll quit wondering exactly who you are or who you work for. It doesn’t matter. You’re one hell of a…” He stopped talking for a second, looking for the right words. When he didn’t find them, he continued, “You’re one damn fine fighter. You immediately adapt to whatever situation presents itself.” Across the front seat, the Executioner saw him frown. “But do you not have to answer to anyone? Anyone at all?”

“Just the President,” Bolan said. “And we get along just fine.” He withdrew his scrambled satellite phone and tapped in a number. A few seconds later, Jack Grimaldi answered the summons.

“Yeah, Striker,” the ace pilot acknowledged. “What’s up?”

“We got the dope but missed the money,” Bolan told him. “We’re headed back to Guyman now to meet you.”

“You can do that if you want,” Grimaldi said, “but there’s no need to. I took a little recon flight an hour or so ago. Spotted your bright yellow vehicle on the road. But the important thing here is the terrain I saw. It’s so flat, I’d have to try hard to find a place where I couldn’t land.” He stopped speaking for a second so Bolan could take it all in, then said, “Want me to come to you? It’ll be a lot faster.”

“Sounds fine,” the Executioner said. He pulled off the highway onto the shoulder and threw the Hummer into Park. The entire roadway was asphalt, pocked with holes the size of volcanoes and, in general, rougher riding than the cow pastures had been. Pulling a small handheld Global Positioning Unit—GPU—out of his shirt pocket, he read the Hummer’s coordinates to Grimaldi. “When you start smelling smoke and seeing flames below, you’ll know you’re close.”

“That’s affirmative, big guy,” Grimaldi said. “I’m revving her up now. See you in a few.”

Bolan heard a click in his ear and folded his phone back before dropping it and the GPU into his pockets again. Then he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “You never know when we’ll get another chance to rest once this mission gets off the ground,” he told Jessup. “So I’d suggest you take advantage of it now.”

IT SEEMED THAT BOLAN had just closed his eyes when he was awakened by the distinctive sound of twin Pratt & Whitney PW305 turbofan engines. He turned to Jessup, grabbed the DEA agent’s arm and gently shook him to consciousness.

Bolan smiled when the pilot landed and brought the Learjet 60 to a halt less than twenty yards away. His friend controlled whatever craft he was flying as if it were an extension of his body. Aircraft were to Grimaldi what firearms and other weapons were to the Executioner.

When Jessup was awake, both men got out of the Hummer, walked down and then up across the bar ditch, then climbed over the fence. The Executioner found the door to the Learjet already open when he reached it, and Jack Grimaldi grinning at him below his sunglasses.

A second later, Bolan had strapped himself into his seat next to the pilot and Jessup took the seat behind Grimaldi. The ace pilot revved the engines, and the plane began to pick up speed again in preparation for takeoff.

The Executioner withdrew his sat phone and tapped in the number to Stony Man Farm, America’s top-secret counterterrorist headquarters. Bolan maintained an arm’s-length working relationship with Stony Man, and his and the Farm’s missions often coincided.

Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller, didn’t answer until the fourth ring. “Sorry, Striker,” she said. “I was busy transferring some data to Bear.”

Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman was in charge of the banks of computers and personnel who gathered the Farm’s electronic intel. Kurtzman spent most of his life in front of a computer. Once a strong bear of a man, he had been paralyzed from the waist down during a gun battle years ago and was now confined to a wheelchair.

And he was the best. There were simply no programs into which he couldn’t hack if given enough time, and there was no computer that came close to the power of his own brain. He had proved invaluable to Bolan and the other teams that worked out of the Farm.

“So what’s new on the western front?” Price said.

“We got the Mafia scum and the coke,” Bolan told the honey-blond mission controller. “Just missed the sellers.”

“Did you hear any of them speak?” Price asked.

Under normal conditions, the question would have sounded straight out of left field. But Bolan knew why Price had asked him. “Uh-uh,” he said. “We never got close enough to hear voices. They spoke to us with bullets and a bazooka.”

“A bazooka?” Price said.

“That’s right,” the Executioner said. “They missed.”

“Obviously,” Price said. “You need to talk to Hal?”

“Yeah,” the Executioner said. “Put him on.”

Bolan heard a click in his ear as Price put him on hold and went about her search for Hal Brognola, the Farm’s director. But he was also a high-ranking official within the U.S. Department of Justice. High enough, at least, that no one questioned his frequent and unexplained absences from Washington, D.C., during which time he manned the reins of Stony Man. He was also Bolan’s link to conventional law enforcement, and could get most things done with a simple phone call.

The Learjet continued to gain altitude, then leveled off as Bolan waited. A few minutes later, he heard the voice of another old friend.

“What’s happening, big guy?” Hal Brognola said into the phone.

“Just finished with the coke deal. Killed the bad guys, exploded the dope. There may be a few hundred cattle who get wired if the wind blows in the right direction, but that should be the only damage.”

Brognola laughed. “Better them than humans,” he said. “Barb already told me. Sounds like you came close to catching the pushers, too.”

“Yeah. Too bad we weren’t playing horseshoes.”

“Any idea who they were?” Brognola questioned. “Any chance they were this Islamic terrorist group that’s been robbing banks and creating other forms of havoc all over the place?”

“Hard to say, Hal,” the Executioner replied. “We didn’t get close enough to really get a good look at them. And as I suspect Barbara already told you, we couldn’t hear them speaking.”

“So tell me what your hunches are, big guy,” Brognola said. “They usually turn out to be as accurate as anything that can be proved.”

“My guess is that they’re the same bunch that hit the bank in Kansas City yesterday. They drove two pickups and a Jeep to the scene but had a helicopter waiting for them to make their getaway. I’d guess the chopper is theirs, which makes the Oklahoma panhandle only a hop, skip and a jump from K.C. The other vehicles I suspect they stole locally. And recently. There haven’t been any such theft reports come out over the police-band radio.”

“Anything else?” Brognola asked.

“Just that they were well trained. Either in one of the Middle-Eastern terrorist-training camps or some country’s armed forces. They worked with a certain military precision that I can’t quite put my finger on. And one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The guy who fired the bazooka at us—there was something about him I can’t put my finger on. But my gut tells me he’s no more Arabic than you or me.”

“Why’s that?” Brognola asked.

“I can’t say for sure. Maybe something about the way he moved. I really don’t know.”

“You sound like you’re leaning away from the radical-Islamic-terrorist theory,” Brognola said.

“Not entirely. But I’m certainly questioning it.”

“When you think about it, these guys have done a lot of things to make it look like their crimes were for religious and political reasons,” Brognola said. “Almost gone out of their way to convince people of it.”

“That’s what I’m beginning to think,” the Executioner said. “Stop and think about it, Hal. There’ve been three kidnappings and a little over a half-dozen bank robberies attributed to these men. The only witness left alive was that pregnant woman yesterday. She said they spoke Arabic. But do you think she could tell Arabic from one of the other Middle-Eastern languages? Like Farsi, maybe?”

“I doubt it,” Brognola said. “In fact, I’m not sure half of my own agents could.”

“Right,” the Executioner said. “I’m not saying they aren’t radical Muslims of some sort. Just that we can’t be sure yet.”

“So what can I do for you at this point?” Brognola asked.

Bolan glanced to Jessup in the backseat. The DEA man was sitting forward again, straining to hear every word that Bolan said. Turning his attention back to the phone once more, the Executioner said, “I’d like you to pull whatever strings you have to in order to get Jessup assigned to me for the duration of this mission. Think you can pull that off?”

“All it’ll take is a phone call,” Brognola said. “What have you got planned next?”

Bolan glanced behind him, toward the Learjet’s storage area. He had come straight to this mission from another strike in Australia, and was running low on ammo and other equipment. It was definitely time to restock.

“I’m coming in,” the Executioner told Brognola. “We’re running short on supplies.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then Brognola said, “You still have Jessup with you, right?”

Bolan knew what the pause had meant. Stony Man Farm was a top-secret installation. From the road, it looked like a regular working farm in the Shenendoah Valley. Knowledge of its location, as well as its function, was strictly on a need-to-know basis. And Jessup didn’t need to know.

“I’ve got him but I’ll take care of it,” the Executioner said. “Talk to you later.” He hung up.

Reaching under the seat next to Grimaldi, the Executioner pulled out what looked like a black cotton sack. But a small hole right in the middle would have raised the eyebrows of anyone seeing the bag for the first time.

Bolan turned around to Jessup. “I’m sorry to have to do this, Jessup,” he said. “But it’s necessary that you ride the rest of the way to my base of operations wearing this.”

Rick Jessup just shrugged. Then, taking the hood from Bolan, he pulled it down over his head and positioned the hole over his nose so he could breathe.

Then Jessup settled back in his seat, and Bolan turned back and did the same.

AS SOON AS HE’D PUNCHED the proper code buttons on the panel next to the steel door, Bolan heard the buzzer and pushed the door open. The Executioner held the door for Jessup, ushering the still-hooded man inside. He then loosened the cord around Jessup’s neck and removed the hood.

Hal Brognola was already seated at the head of the long conference table in Stony Man Farm’s War Room. A manila file was open in front of the Justice man on the table, and the stub of an unlit cigar was clenched between his teeth.

Seated to the Stony Man director’s left was a distinguished-looking man wearing a navy-blue business suit. Although obviously older, he had a full head of medium-length white hair and a short beard and mustache of the same snowy hue.

Bolan had never seen him before in his life.

“Come in, come in,” Brognola said, looking up briefly from the papers in his file. “Take a seat, both of you.”

The Executioner dropped down onto the padded chair to Brognola’s right. Jessup blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to adjust to the new light, as he took the seat next to Bolan. He continued to squint as Brognola looked up, frowning slightly at Bolan.

“Where’s Jack?” the big Fed asked.

“I put him in charge of overseeing the Lear’s restocking,” Bolan answered.

“You can fill him in while you’re in the air,” Brognola said.

Brognola glanced at the man with the white beard and hair. “First, I’d like to introduce Mr. John Sampson.”

Sampson leaned across the table and shook hands with both Bolan and Jessup. Bolan introduced himself as Matt Cooper. Jessup used his real name.

Brognola spoke again. “Mr. Sampson’s reason for being here, and his role in this mission, will become apparent as we go.” He looked back down at the open file in front of him and said, “So far, this group we’re interested in has been responsible for seven bank robberies in the Midwest, three kidnappings—with two of the victims found dead even though the ransom was paid—and they appear to have a Mexican connection for both cocaine and heroin. That deal you just broke up, it was—”

“I wouldn’t say we broke it up,” the Executioner interrupted. “The guys with the money got away.”

“At least the dope won’t hit the street,” Brognola said, using almost the identical words Jessup had chosen back in the Oklahoma panhandle. He cleared his throat and then continued. “The third kidnap victim is the daughter of a Georgia state senator,” he said. “The FBI’s negotiating her release even as we speak.”

“A release that won’t happen until she’s dead,” Bolan said.

“That’s what the two earlier kidnappings would suggest,” Brognola came back.

“How much are they demanding, Hal?” Bolan asked.

“An even million.”

Jessup let out a high-pitched whistle.

“Are we sure that all these crimes—the drug deals, robberies, kidnaps—can be attributed to the same group of men?” Bolan said.

“Reasonably sure,” Brognola said. “In all of the bank jobs they wore Nam leaf cammies and black ski masks. There’s enough similarities in their method of operation inside the banks to tip the scales that way, too. Some variance in height and weight descriptions, skin color on their hands and such. But that’s to be expected.”

The Executioner nodded. He knew that if a hundred people watched the same crime go down, you’d get a hundred different versions of the story. The human mind played tricks on the average citizen who encountered the unusual life-or-death situation, and investigating officers had to take such things into account.

“The primary link, though, is that everyone at the banks—and I mean everyone— agreed that they spoke a foreign language when communicating with each other. Most thought it was Arabic but weren’t sure.”

“Arab terrorists are always the first to come to mind these days,” Bolan noted. “It doesn’t mean that they aren’t Arabs. But it doesn’t mean that they are, either.”

All of the heads around the table nodded their agreement. Then Brognola said, “And when they shouted out orders to the customers, it was in broken English and heavily accented.”

“Broken English is easy enough to fake, too,” Bolan said. “Not that I’m discounting the possibility that they’re Arabs of some kind. Just playing the devil’s advocate here.”

“I know,” Brognola said, nodding.

“What about the negotiations on the kidnappings?” Jessup asked.

“Same thing,” Brognola said. “All done in broken English, with a heavy accent of some kind. There’s another kind of strange aspect to these abductions, though,” he added.

“And it is?” the Executioner said.

“They haven’t warned the parents about going to the police. Fact is, they’ve ordered them to. Told them they wouldn’t negotiate any ransom or releases with anyone except the FBI.”