Kitabı oku: «Fire Zone», sayfa 2

2

The Executioner drove expertly and far too fast for the narrow gravel road. The mining company had maintained the road well, but hitting ninety in the straightaways and only dropping to sixty in the sharp turns took its toll on his acquired car. Every turn left that much more rubber behind and caused an increasingly uneven ride. Before long the punishment he dished out to the car caused the engine to begin sputtering.

He let up on the gas just a little when he saw an eighteen-wheeler lumbering along ahead. He was still miles outside Boise, and a quick mental calculation of the distance traveled told him this could be the stolen gold. Using the engine compression to brake, he took his foot off the accelerator and coasted into a slot directly behind the truck so that he ran in its blind spot only inches away from the bumper. The driver would have seen him approaching and by now had to know something was wrong. If he slammed on the brakes, Bolan would have to act instantly.

Such a sudden stop was what he expected. That was what he would do to try to get rid of the annoying tail he presented if the roles were reversed. But the driver tapped his brakes, sounded his horn and began slowing gradually. Suspecting a trap, the Executioner followed suit until both truck and car were at a dead stop.

He slid the .50-caliber pistol from its holster and got out of the car. Holding the heavy Desert Eagle at his side, he edged around cautiously. The truck driver had already exited the cab, looking madder than hell.

“What do you think you’re doing? This ain’t a demolition derby!”

The man waved his arms around like a windmill. Bolan didn’t see a weapon but recognized the tactic as a diversion. He ducked away, looked under the eighteen-wheeler but saw no one trying to sneak up on him from the other side. He did hear muffled noises from inside the truck.

Whirling back, he lifted his pistol. The sight of the huge bore pointed in his direction caused the driver to gasp. His mouth dropped open. He tried to speak but no words came out, and his flailing arms stopped their wild motion as he held them high above his head.

“What’s in the back?”

“I…you a cop?”

“Open it.”

The driver swallowed hard and shuffled around, keeping an eye on Bolan and the pistol in his hand. With his fist he banged twice on the door and yelled, “Mr. Kersey, I’m openin’ up.” The driver lifted the locking rod and stepped away when the door swung open.

Bolan was prepared for a hail of bullets. He was not expecting a man and several frightened women looking out.

“What’s going on?”

“Mr. Kersey, he drove up behind and stopped me and stuck that gun in my face and—”

“Shut up.” Bolan wanted answers. “Why are you in the rear of a semi?”

“Are you some kind of police officer?”

“I’m asking, you’re answering.”

“Well, put that damn thing down. My name’s Jerome Kersey and I’m the superintendent of the Lucky Nugget Mine. I work for Lassiter Industries and—”

“You’re all employees?”

“Who’d you think we were? You ordered us to evacuate, and my staff and I were the last ones out. We had to get into this semi because you said the roads were clogged and didn’t want a lot of cars adding to the traffic jam. You are from the State Police, right?”

Jerome Kersey looked around and frowned when he didn’t see any marked patrol cars.

“What’s going on? I did what you people asked, and now you’re pointing a gun at me!”

“Who told you to evacuate?”

“The state police.”

Bolan’s mind worked fast. He saw the huddle of men and women behind the mine supervisor and knew these weren’t gold thieves. There was no point in asking for ID.

“Sorry about this,” he said, holstering his pistol. “Were you told to ship out the gold bullion from the mine?”

“No, of course not,” Kersey said. “That was all locked in the storage vaults.” Then his eyes narrowed as he looked hard at Bolan. “What are you saying?”

Bolan motioned him out of the truck and to one side where they wouldn’t be overheard. He gave the man a quick once-over and saw no suspicious bulges where a gun might be hidden or a knife sheathed.

“I don’t have much time, so listen carefully and answer fully,” Bolan said. Kersey started to protest. He was in charge of hundreds of employees and was used to giving orders, not taking them. The look on his tall, dark-haired interrogator’s face shut him up. He nodded once.

“The security guards left at the mine are all dead.”

“Dead?”

“The gold has been removed from the storage vaults. I estimate about three-quarters of a ton was taken.”

“I don’t have the exact figures, but that would be close.” Kersey had gone white with shock at realizing the magnitude of his loss. Bolan doubted his reaction was from hearing that his guards were dead. The theft of all the gold would be a career-ending event. “Who did it?”

“I’m trying to find out. How long have you been away from the mine?”

“Thirty minutes, maybe a little longer.”

This surprised Bolan. The gold thieves were even more expert than he had thought. Kersey and his staff had barely left the mine before the thieves had moved in. With this new information for his timeline, Bolan doubted killing the guards had taken more than five minutes. That meant the thieves had loaded just shy of a ton of gold and transported it before he had arrived. The slice of time allotted had been enough for them to vanish into thin air.

“Did you hear or see any helicopters?”

“Of course I did. Observation planes all over. Some heavy-lifter choppers with fire retardant or water or whatever the hell they use to put out fires. They’re all over the sky.”

Bolan considered this and discarded an airlift being the method of removing the gold. Every plane would be tracked closely by air controllers directing the slurry bombers to the fire. Any unauthorized plane would be spotted instantly. And Kurtzman had not mentioned any, so there weren’t any.

“This is an incredible gold mining region. More than three million ounces have been extracted since the mine opened,” Kersey said. “You’re kidding about my gold being taken out of the vaults, aren’t you?”

“One large truck would carry it all,” Bolan said. “I didn’t pass such a truck. Yours was the first vehicle of any kind I saw on the road. Are there other roads leading away from the mine?”

Kersey shook his head. Bolan had studied the map and not seen any.

“The entire Boise Basin is filthy with gold,” Kersey went on. He was beginning to ramble. “Centerville, Idaho City and—”

“What about logging roads?”

“This is a national forest. There’s no logging allowed. They hardly allow the railroad crews in and the trains are all diesel electric.”

Bolan had heard enough. He slid behind the wheel of his stolen car and wheeled around, kicking up a cloud of dust as he roared back in the direction of the mine. There had been a side road, but he had ignored it because it didn’t go anywhere but to the railroad tracks running near the mine. For whatever reason, Lassiter Industries had not run a spur line to bring in supplies and ship out gold. But the railroad was still close enough to make that a viable method of getting away with almost a ton of gold.

The dirt road came up on him fast. He stomped on the brakes, swerved the sedan around ninety degrees and lined up with the rutted lanes. Accelerating onto the rocky road, the car bounced around, sending him lurching back and forth in the driver’s seat. Bolan gritted his teeth and drove into the forest. These trees had somehow escaped the fire. As he drove, he appreciated the genius of the robbery even more. The fire had been set to go up the hills and away from this area. Sparks might have ignited the dry underbrush here, but the prevailing winds had made sure that hadn’t happened. Bolan wondered what contingency plan the gold thieves had if this part of the forest had been turned into a blast furnace like the rest of the timberlands.

He skidded around a tight curve and crashed head-on into a truck. He had an instant to brace for the crash, but the other driver was taken entirely by surprise.

The sounds of tearing metal and breaking glass filled Bolan’s ears as the car crumpled around him, but the shock of the air bag deploying into his chest almost knocked the wind from him. The Executioner rocked back, then pushed the deflated bag away. He was covered with talcum-fine powder lubricant used in the air bag and his chest felt as if an angry giant had tried to stomp him flat. Recovering, he kicked open the car door and dived out.

There were two men in the truck. The driver slumped over the wheel, but the passenger shoved an HK53 out the window and fired. Bolan hit the ground and rolled, coming to a prone position with his pistol ready. The shooter in the truck cursed. In his nervous haste, he had fired on full-auto rather than using three-round bursts and had emptied his magazine at all the places Bolan was not. The Executioner fired a single round through the side of the truck door. His target let out a groan, pushed the door open and fell to the ground where he flopped about in pain.

Bolan rose and sighted in, only to jerk to the side. A slug ripped through the air where his head had been a split second earlier. He landed hard on his side and fired three quick rounds. One went through the truck’s windshield. The other two grazed off the now-starred glass. Through the spiderweb of cracked glass, Bolan saw that the driver was now moving. The crash had only stunned him.

The Executioner made a quick decision. He got to his feet and circled the truck until he got to a spot where he saw more movement inside. Bolan fired twice more and completely destroyed the windshield.

“Don’t shoot. I surrender. I’m coming out.”

Bolan wanted the man alive but knew a trap when he heard it. These men were professionals and did not surrender after a few shots were exchanged.

“Here’s my rifle.”

A SIG SG-551 short-barreled assault rifle came tumbling out and landed in a patch of weeds beside the road. Bolan saw that the receiver was partially open. The rifle had fired once and then jammed.

“I’m coming out. Please don’t kill me.”

Bolan fired the instant he had a decent shot. The man fell from the cab and landed facedown on the ground. He pushed up and turned to face Bolan. The expression on his face was not one of betrayal at the violation of a surrender but one of utter hatred because he had been outwitted. Then the hand grenade he had intended for Bolan exploded beneath him and lifted his body three feet straight up in the air. The lifeless body crashed to the ground.

Swinging around, Bolan trained his Desert Eagle on the first man out of the truck. He cursed. The man had sneaked off. Bolan needed information, and only one of the mercenaries was left alive to tell him what he needed to know.

He ducked low and looked under the bed of the truck. Nothing. Advancing in a crouch, he went to the rear of the truck and chanced a quick look inside. All he saw was a stack of suitcase-sized wooden boxes partially covered with a tarp. No one could hide under that. Wherever the passenger had gone, it wasn’t to get into the truck to die. Bolan ejected the magazine in his pistol and reloaded. He wanted a full clip when he found his man.

A quick glance showed how his target had rolled into a shallow ditch alongside the road and then crawled away fast. The Executioner’s quarry had reached a small stand of junipers. Knowing he faced a wounded man who was carrying at least a sidearm and maybe grenades like the driver, Bolan used a large tree as cover. He listened hard but heard nothing moving. The animals in the woods had fallen silent, telling him a human had disturbed them. He listened but heard nothing until a deep inhalation told him where to look. Then he caught the scent of sweat, blood and something unpleasant—cooked flesh.

He slipped around the tree and looked up. Partially hidden ten feet up among the foliage of an oak tree limb lay his camo-dressed prey. Bolan fired three times. The heavy .50-caliber slugs ripped enough wood away from the limb to bring it down. Amid the foliage the stunned man stirred and tried to get away. Bolan fired again but just missed and then had to dodge behind the juniper as the merc fired wildly in his direction.

Bolan took no pleasure at being right about how the man was armed. He had a job to do and was taking too long. All the gunfire would attract the rest of the gang. Judging from the ease with which they had moved through the Lucky Nugget Mine complex, he estimated at least ten had taken part in the operation. Added to the ones in the field setting the fires, he might face twice that if he let them home in on him.

“Who are you working for?” Bolan called out, not expecting an answer.

To his surprise, he garnered a heartfelt “Go to hell.”

The accent was faintly European, but Bolan doubted the man had learned English as his second or even third language.

“Africa? South Africa? Afrikaans?”

Bolan wanted to fix his location in the man’s thoughts by calling out all the inane questions. He scaled the tree and kept climbing until he came to a limb strong enough to support him. Bolan slithered out on it like a snake and then trained his weapon on the man below where he struggled to get away from the bullet-riddled tree limb.

His finger drew back smoothly as he squeezed off the shot. The heavy slug tore through the mercenary’s right shoulder, driving him flat onto the ground. His right arm twitched as he tried to lift his pistol. As he reached over with his left hand, he froze. His head came up and he looked down the barrel of Bolan’s Desert Eagle.

“Don’t,” was all Bolan had to say. The man collapsed and lay on the ground, seemingly beaten. Remembering how the driver had been so contrary, Bolan kicked the pistol away from the man’s hand, patted him down and then grabbed his broad belt and heaved. He tossed the man a few feet away, waiting for a hand-grenade detonation.

Nothing.

“Who do you work for?”

“The highest bidder,” the mercenary said. He struggled to raise his body off the ground. His left hand pressed into his belly as if he needed the support to hold in his guts, then he painfully sat up. “Just like you,” he grated out.

“Who do you think I work for?”

The mercenary tried to shrug, but the bullet he had taken to his right shoulder caused him to blanch in pain instead.

“Same as me. Highest bidder.”

“Where’s the gold?”

The man laughed harshly and turned his head. Bolan read more into the man’s quick glance to the right than he did in the words. The mercenary rubbed his left hand along his belly.

“Where were you going in the truck?”

“Going to blow it up. No evidence.” The man lifted his left hand. Bolan fired a round through the man’s head but not before a weak, determined finger pressed the button on a small radio detonator he had retrieved from some hidden pouch. The ground shook so hard it made Bolan think he’d gotten caught in an earthquake. Then the door opened on the blast furnace, and fire raced toward him from the direction of the truck. It had been wired as a gigantic firebomb intended to cover the mercenaries’ tracks.

Instead, it had given birth to a new forest fire that threatened to devour the Executioner.

3

The heat threatened to boil the flesh from Bolan’s face. Throwing his arm up to protect his eyes, he saw the worst had happened. The mercenaries had been driving back to the junction of the main road to blow up the truck. The resulting fire would cover their tracks completely.

He had to admit their scheme had almost worked—and it had almost killed him. If he had not pursued the mercenary he had blown out of the tree so aggressively, he might have been near their truck when it blew. As it was, though, he couldn’t get to his car to escape. Through the wall of scorching-hot flame, he saw the paint on the car he had stolen begin to blister. Then the entire car erupted in a secondary explosion as the flames reached the gas tank.

Bolan headed deeper into the forest. His flesh tingled from the heat. If he didn’t put some miles between himself and the fire, he would be charbroiled in only a few minutes. He fell into a distance-devouring jog that carried him along the dirt road toward wherever the mercenaries had come from. As fast as he was, as determined to escape the fire as he could be, the conflagration crept closer and began to warm his back. He put his head down and put on a little more speed, shifting his gait from a jog to a run.

It did no good. The inferno behind him filled the sky with burning sparks that cascaded over the landscape for hundreds of yards. Even sucking smoky air into his burning lungs, Bolan covered a mile in a little over five minutes. And he still wasn’t far enough away to feel safe. It was as if the fire toyed with him, letting him get a little farther toward safety before roaring to catch up and spit burning embers onto his clothing. Thinking to veer away from the fire at an angle, he turned off the road and found the dry undergrowth ablaze. He cut back to the road, hoping to go in the other direction, but found it similarly blocked.

He realized these excursions to either side of the road only wasted time and let the fire surge closer, so he continued along the road, eyes watering and lungs screaming from the acrid smoke. Bolan hoped to find out why the mercenaries had come this way but saw no trace of them or what they had been up to.

Running through the smoke-filled air was making it difficult to breathe. The atmosphere looked like L.A. on a smog-alert day and tasted like the inside of a barbecue pit. Over the loud crackling of fire dogging his every step, he heard the whup-whup of a chopper overhead. Bursting into a small clearing, he saw the small helicopter and waved.

The pilot saw him and came lower, buffeted by strong ground winds kicked up by the fire. Landing was out of the question because takeoff would be impossible. The pilot gestured frantically, pointing to a spot away from the road, then he gunned the engine, rose vertically and beat a hasty retreat.

Bolan wished the pilot had tried for the pickup. No guts, no glory, but the pilot was not a military flyer, and Bolan could not hold his caution against him. It just made his own evacuation more difficult, but the only chance he had was to trust the pilot’s judgment…even if the man might be one of the mercs who had stolen the gold.

The idea died almost as it formed in his head as a working hypothesis. If he had been another of the force that had robbed the gold mine, all the pilot needed to do was leave. Bolan would stumble about until the fire eventually overtook him—unless he was actually on his way clear of the fire. Knowing the danger of analysis paralysis, Bolan lowered his head and, putting every ounce of energy into the run, headed in the direction the pilot indicated. He burst into another clearing before he realized he was leaving a heavily wooded patch and saw a half-dozen firefighters setting up a small camp. Dressed in their bright yellow fire-retardant gear and respirators, they looked like creatures from another planet.

One turned and pushed up his face mask, letting his oxygen line drape down, so he could shout, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Had a car wreck.”

“You from the mine?” The man gave Bolan a quick once-over and dismissed him as an idiot who let himself get caught by staying too long after the evacuation warning had been issued.

“Just out for a drive when the fire cut me off from the main road.”

“That fire was set,” the firefighter said. He looked more intently at Bolan. The Executioner did not have to be a mind-reader to know the firefighter thought Bolan might have set the new fire.

“Something exploded behind me. A truck,” Bolan said. “The fire’s coming this way fast.”

“We know.” The firefighter turned to glance at a laptop showing an aerial view of the area. Bolan got his bearings and realized how lucky he had been sticking to the road in his escape. If he had veered to either side of the road for long, he would be fried by now. The detonation had sent out flames in a V pattern.

“Get him out of here,” ordered another firefighter with three bright orange stripes circling the arms of his yellow fire suit.

“You in charge?”

“I don’t know who you are, but a helo recon pilot just reported you were trying to get away. Said he saw a blown-up truck and a car in the middle of where the fire originated.”

“My car,” Bolan said.

“Buck, get this guy out of here. We don’t have time to worry about civilians. We gotta clear as much brush as we can to slow the advance, and we’re running out of time.”

The one who had spoken initially reached out and took Bolan’s arm.

“You heard the man. We go. You stay out of the fire, and I get to come back and do my job.” The bitterness in Buck’s voice told the story. He was a dedicated firefighter, and Bolan took him away from his job.

“Point me in the right direction. I can find my way out.”

This easy way out appealed to Buck. He rubbed his lips with a gloved hand, made a face, then inclined his head toward the far side of the clearing.

“I’ll get you on a trail leading downhill to the command station. Masterson only told me to get you out of danger. He didn’t say anything about nursemaiding you all the way into Boise.” He pointed and started walking clumsily as he fumbled with the dangling respirator.

“You want to stay in your rig?”

“Takes forever to get it on and take it off. Just don’t go too fast for me to keep up.”

Bolan and Buck walked side-by-side toward the far edge of the clearing. Bolan turned around once to see the towering flames a quarter mile behind. The fire spread faster as it found more dried underbrush. The treetops were exploding with a sound like distant bombs.

“The crowns of the trees are catching fire,” Buck said, obviously worried. “That’s bad. The fire spreads faster jumping from treetop to treetop than when it burns along the ground.”

“You see anybody in the area?” the Executioner asked.

Buck stopped and stared at him. Bolan was sure the firefighter saw the butt of the Desert Eagle in its shoulder holster under his left armpit but said nothing about it.

“Just other firefighters. Two of us have already gotten caught by it.” He saw Bolan’s expression and explained. “The fire. It’s like some wild, uncontrollable beast. Two friends of mine were treated for smoke inhalation and are on the way to the hospital. More of us will join them before it’s over, since this fire covers such a wide area.”

“Arson,” Bolan said. “I caught two of the firebugs, but they got away.”

“You a cop? FBI?”

Bolan had no problem verifying that if it helped him find out more from the firefighter. Stony Man Farm specialized in counterterrorism, and setting such fires counted as terrorism, but the mercenaries he had already brought down only used the forest fires to cover their tracks. Gold theft was their primary mission in spite of the havoc they created.

“Homeland Security,” he said, which was close enough to the truth to be believable.

“You’re doing a piss-poor job of policing the borders,” the firefighter said unexpectedly.

“One job at a time.”

“Yeah, look, keep going in this direction. You’ll reach a creek. Follow that downstream until you see our base camp. There’s a couple hundred people there, so it’s hard to miss.”

Buck started back to his crew to fight the fire, but his radio crackled and the frightened voice sounding from it caused him to grab it frantically.

“Come in, Masterson. Repeat. Repeat. What’s your report?”

“Your team got caught and is surrounded by the fire,” Bolan said. He had experience enough to decipher almost any message coming through intense static and dropping words.

“Go, get out of here,” the firefighter said. He worked at the walkie-talkie but got no response.

“I can help. You can’t do anything by yourself.”

“I can get to them. We have to evac now.”

“It’ll be with casualties,” Bolan said. He had a mission to complete, but he wasn’t going to let Buck try to save the others in his crew alone. That would only add one more death to the impressive list of destruction the gold thieves had already racked up.

“They’ll chew my ass good for this, but you’re right. I need help, and I don’t care if you’re only a civilian. Come on!”

Two of them doubled the chance of rescuing the trapped firefighters.

“I’ll need some equipment in your camp,” Bolan pointed out. He did not give the firefighter a chance to argue. Seconds mattered. They retraced their steps, but Buck did not slow when they came to the stacks of equipment. He plunged on toward the wall of smoke masking the edge of the fire zone.

Bolan scooped up a respirator and goggles. The rest of the equipment—fire-retardant jacket, boots and equipment for clearing brush—was meant for the firefighters who would remain close to the blaze for a long time. He wanted only to rescue the men trapped so he joined Buck and immediately regretted not putting on a jacket or a fire helmet. Tiny sparks landed on his arms and in his hair, burning holes and causing distracting pain. But he had put up with worse in his day. He began squashing the tiny fires in his clothing as if swatting mosquitos.

“It moved fast this way. We never saw it coming because the copter pilot said it was following a dirt road, not coming downhill toward us.”

“The wind changed direction,” Bolan said. He adjusted the face mask and respirator before plunging through the wall of fire. The fierce flames clawed at him like some wild animal, but he burst through and came out in a curiously empty area already burned clean of vegetation. Two of the firefighters were flat on the ground and not moving. Another sat, clutching his leg and uttering curses mostly about the fire. The other two worked to make contact using their walkie-talkies.

“The stream,” Bolan shouted, making himself heard over the roar of the fire. “Where is it?”

“We’ve got fire-resistant blankets. We can weather it. We’re only on the edge.” Buck did not sound confident. One of the unconscious men was the fire team leader, and there did not seem to be anyone left willing to make independent decisions.

“They won’t make it,” Bolan said. He rolled over the unconscious fire team leader, then hefted him up over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Bolan did not wait for the others but headed in the direction Buck had indicated earlier.

He had hardly gone a dozen yards when he found a new wall of fire. Courage had less to do with his action than knowing this was his only chance to survive. Bolan put his head down and charged like a bull. He broke through the dancing flames and came out on the other side. If his luck had not held, he might have found himself in the midst of the raging fire rather than on scorched earth. Weaving through the blackened trees, he headed downhill with his burden and soon found the narrow but deep stream. He dropped his load into the middle of the water. Making sure the unconscious man’s head was propped above the surface, Bolan turned and started back to help the rest of the firefighters.

He got only a few yards back uphill when he spotted four men stumbling along.

“Where’s Buck?”

The lead firefighter shook his head. He tried to grab Bolan’s arm to stop him, but the warrior was not to be deterred so easily. He broke the grip and ran back. The wall of voracious flame he had breached before was gone now, moving on with a speed that amazed him. He swiped at his goggles, removing a thin sheen of soot that had kept him from seeing Buck limping along. The firefighter’s right leg refused to bear his weight. If he kept hopping that way, he would never get to safety.

In a flash, Bolan got to the firefighter’s side and slipped an arm around him to lend some support.

“You’re some kind of madman,” Buck grated out. “Nobody’s paying you to look after me. Hell, they’re not even paying me that much. I’m a volunteer, like the rest of my team.”

Bolan steered Buck off at an angle, goaded by the increasing heat at his back. They finally reached the creek and sloshed into it.

“Where’re the others? Where are they?”

“Get down into the water,” Bolan ordered. He shoved Buck to a sitting position. “They’re a bit farther upstream.”

“You saved Lee? Lee Masterson?”

Bolan immersed himself in the stream and felt every burn and blister on his body turn to ice as the water washed over him. He still had to use his respirator to breathe, but the fire now ran parallel to the stream.

“We’re gonna make it,” Buck said. “You saved me.”

“You’d have made it on your own.”

“Don’t be so sure of that. I think my leg’s broken from a spill I took. If it turned into a compound break, there’s no way I could have made it to safety. Hell, I couldn’t have made it to the railroad tracks, much less here.”

“Railroad?”

“There’s one that runs parallel to the stream, a mile farther downhill,” Buck said. “But what good’re train tracks? They’ve cleared the regular traffic just to be on the safe side. I wish we could get supplies sent by train.” Buck closed his eyes and choked back his pain. Talking kept his mind off his injury. “Even then, the higher-ups don’t like to depend on trains. The heat can actually melt the tracks and warp the rails. Then we’d have a derailment as well as a fire to deal with.”

“Clear the traffic? There was a train that came by recently?”

Buck moaned softly as he clutched his leg.

Bolan rummaged through the firefighter’s pack and found a morphine syringe. He expertly opened the ampule, then injected the drug directly into the injured leg.