Renegade Agent (9 page)

The two guys in the Saab weren't so lucky.

In the rearview mirror, Bolan saw the tag car tear diagonally across the road, momentarily going airborne as it cleared the shoulder. When it hit, the right front corner seemed to catch, and the car did a one-and-a-half flip through midair before landing on its roof.

Scant seconds had passed since Bolan had made his move. The driver of the big Mercedes was milking it for all the speed it had, but the boxy diesel machine was designed for reliability, not racing. Bolan's headlights were on now, high beams cutting a trail to the lead vehicle. It took the Jag only a heartbeat to close the thirty yards to it. One of the baby-sitters in the back seat twisted out the window, an M-16 cradled in his arms. Angry 5.56mm whizzers hemstitched starbursts across the Jag's windshield.

Bolan slumped in the contoured seat and eased more speed out of the rig. A moment later he felt the substantial thump, of his front end tagging the Mercedes, heard the distinctive whine of tearing body metal. The weapon's chatter stopped.

Bolan rose, dropped back ten feet to get the angle, and put three-round bursts into each of the Mercedes's rear tires. The vehicle settled down on its haunches, one tire throwing a ragged strip of rubber off into the night.

Bolan cranked the wheel hard, snaked the Jag around the crippled Mercedes, then tapped the brake and pulled the wheel all the way around with his good right arm. The car ceded around in a perfect one eighty. Leaving the high-beam headlights on, Bolan was EVA almost before the skid was over.

The Uzi hung from a lanyard around Bolan's neck. He sprayed a line of 9mm slugs across the front of the Mercedes, the big sedan still lumping toward him. Headlights blinked out in a shower of glass shards, and superheated steam wheezed from the punctured radiator.

Answering fire raked the Jag.

But by then Bolan was already circling for the Mercedes.

In the blacksuit he was nearly one with the encompassing night, but the NVD goggles revealed the other four players in this game of death as clear as daylight.

Three of the sedan's four doors were open wide. From the far side of the back seat, Toby Ranger and the Green Beret deserter T.W.Hansen had pulled out. Hansen was dragging her roughly by one arm into the scrub grass. Despite the unexpected ambush, the guy had stuck with his primary assignment.

The driver and his partner were crouched behind the cover of the other doors, frantically searching the dark for a target.

They were looking in the wrong direction.

From off to the side, the Uzi spoke again, the hider concealing any revealing muzzle flash. The upper half of the driver's body punched back inside, sprawling him across the front seat. His partner reacted automatically and sensibly, diving across the deck for the cover of the other side.

A precise line of 9mm hollow-points helped him on his way.

A harsh voice broke the momentary silence. "Hold it! You move and the woman dies!"

T.W. Hansen was maybe fifty feet into the scrub grass. He held Toby Ranger's arm in the vise grip of his left hand, and an Ingram M-10 machine pistol in his right.

Bolan let the Uzi hang free from its lanyard, unsheathed the big Beretta, setting the selector on single-shot.

The NVD goggles revealed a pulpy bruise on one side of Toby Ranger's forehead. Her eyes seemed half-closed.

"Show yourself, hands empty," Hansen called. "You do it, right now." It was the odds on gamble for the tall professional soldier, but Lady Luck was riding with the Executioner.

Lady Luck, and the lady named Ranger.

Toby moved suddenly, wrenching hard enough to force Hansen to take a step to keep his balance, yet not hard enough to break his grip. In reaction Hansen jerked her back toward him, and Toby stumbled to one knee. The target was already framed over the Beretta's sight.

Bolan squeezed off the single round, and the heavy 9mm bonecrusher flashed through the night, seeking impediment, and found it in the middle of Hansen's forehead, punching him away and onto his back. When Bolan reached him his eyes were open, and he was still holding Toby in lifeless fingers.

Toby pulled free. She looked up at Bolan, gasped, and got her hands around the fallen Ingram.

She leveled the weapon on Bolan's midsection. "One more step, Mister Whoever-You-Are," she said. She was obviously hurting, and this was costing her more pain. "One more step, and you are stew-meat." Only then did Bolan realize that in the Night Vision Goggles, with their twin extruded vision tubes, he must have looked like some kind of bug-eyed apparition from someplace highly unpleasant.

He pulled the goggles off, keeping both hands visible. The Ingram in Toby's hand lowered, forgotten.

"Captain Cavalry," she breathed. "In the flesh." She managed to stand. "If you aren't a sight for sore eyes." Toby tried to take a step toward him and pitched forward instead. Bolan caught her soft bulk against his chest and lowered her gently back to the grass.

It was a reunion, for sure. But the popping of champagne corks and the rehashing of old times would have to wait.

Toby was out, but she didn't seem to be badly hurt. The laceration on her forehead was the only visible sign of abuse. Bolan's hard fingers, moments before gripped around gunmetal, took her wrist with infinite gentleness. The pulse was regular and strong, and her breathing, though a little ragged, was steady.

Bolan stripped off Hansen's jacket and covered Toby with it, then replaced the Night Vision Goggles in position and moved out along his backtrack. The Saab Turbo was a ruggedly constructed machine, built to take even the kind of roll this car had endured without major structural damage. The same was not true of the human body.

The shotgun rider was slumped out of his seat belt into what had been the roof, his head bent over at nearly a ninety-degree angle to his torso, his neck snapped like a wishbone. The top of the driver's head was not even there, except as a gory smear on the upholstery; Bolan's three-round burst had obviously found a tight grouping in its target.

When he got back, Toby was sitting up.

"What's broken?" Bolan's tone was gruff.

There were too many other things be really wanted to say and ask, but right now there was only time for business.

Sooner or later — the later the better F— rank Edwards was going to miss his five hardboys.

"Nothing." She took the hand he offered, let him pull her to her feet. "I'm okay, Captain Quick, honest Indian." In the Jaguar he dug a first-aid kit from a pack. He swabbed the forehead wound with an antiseptic towelette; once the dried blood was gone it didn't look too bad, as if someone had hit her a glancing blow with a gun barrel or a hand on which a ring was worn. Bolan squeezed antibiotic ointment from a tube, smeared it over the cut, covered it with a small adhesive compress.

When he was finished, Toby twisted the rearview mirror to where she could get a look at herself. She made a half-hearted attempt to push tangled blond hair into some kind of order, then gave it up and slumped back into the seat.

"I'm beat, Captain Hard," she said, her usual sardonic tone thin and forced now. "The last thirty-six hours have been something of a drain — to say the least."

"Toby," Bolan said, gently but firmly. "I need to have everything you can give me, and I need it now."

Immediately she sat up straighter. "I'm down, but I didn't say I was out. From here on it's a two-pronged blitz, Captain Courageous."

Bolan let that pass. Sure, Toby had proven herself on the field of battle more than once, and he had no theoretical objection to her fighting at his side. He had put the days of purely solo warfare behind him for good when he had accepted the support and sanction of the man in the Oval Office. Still, though he could push it to the back of his mind, what he'd once had with Toby would always be there, and a part of his concentration, no matter how minor, would be concerned with her safety. A situational decision could be made when they reached the situation.

"Are you blown, Toby?" Bolan asked.

"I think so. With Edwards it's not always easy to tell where you're at. He's sharp, Mack," she said seriously. "My cover was bound to unravel sooner or later. First of all, I know he checked my record out all the way back to Adam. Believe it or not, the guy still has an ear to the CIA ground. Sure, he didn't learn anything that proved I hadn't gone renegade like him, but up until then I was too damn clean. For a guy with his sensitive nose, it would have smelled fishy." Toby brushed absently at a grass stain.

She was wearing a jump suit of white parachute cloth, cut to accentuate the swelling curve of her hips, the front zipper pulled low enough to expose the valley of her full breasts. "Second, he caught me yesterday ( God, it seems like a week ago ( in Valais, making contact with Stony Man base. Making the call was a risk, but I thought it likely I was already blown, and what Edwards had planned needed to be stopped pronto. He didn't really hear anything ( but it was sort of suspicious, from his point of view. For sure he thought I was calling the States."

"Do all of his people know you're on the outs?"

"Probably not. It was..." she glanced at her watch "...only about an hour ago. Hansen and his boys busted into my room, told me to dress, and hustled me out. They claimed the boss wanted me on ice for a while, but I was afraid Edwards had given them orders to interrogate as well." Suddenly she shuddered involuntarily. "Edwards told me a story once, soon after I hooked up with him ( I don't know if he was trying to impress me or intimidate me. He said that one of the African tinhorn dictators had a special way of questioning prisoners to get them to give him the names of opposition sympathizers. The prisoner was strapped down on his back so he could only lift his head, and a rat was placed on his stomach, and over the rat a glass bowl. Then the bowl was heated. The rat only had one way out. Edwards said if the prisoner didn't pass out, he could watch the rat eat its way through his guts."

"Easy," Bolan said gently. "That's enough."

Toby squared her shoulders, as if shaking off the image. "Anyway, thinking about that, being awakened in the dark and so on, I didn't go quietly at first." She touched at the dressing on her forehead. "That's how I got the souvenir."

"So as far as most of Edwards's cadre know, you're still one of the gang?"

"Possibly. Even probably. Today is another big day for Edwards. I don't think he'd want the word to get out about any kind of trouble."

"What's going down, Toby?"

"Exactly what I thought when I made contact yesterday. Edwards is organizing an international intelligence agency with loyalties only to the highest bidders. It's incredible, but I'm afraid the guy can make it work ( and on a far greater scale than we ever suspected. For example, even though the word has gone out to every friendly intelligence agency in the world that Edwards is believed guilty of treasonous activities and no longer has any official CIA status, the guy can still tap into nearly all of his old sources."

"Through other traitors still in place?"

"No, Mack. That's the hell of it. Through loyal, committed operatives. You see, that whole shadow land they call espionage is built on a foundation of suspicion and intrigue. Edwards has let it be leaked to a select few on the inside that he was never fired from the agency at all; it was all a scam to get an operative into Libya and buddy-buddy with Khaddafi. And in a crazy kind of way it could make sense."

Sure, Bolan thought, in a topsy-turvy world where a government agent could become a turncoat representing himself as an agent, anything made sense, if you spent enough time trying to figure it out, trying to pigeonhole it into one of the cubicles of rational experience. But there was nothing rational about international terrorism, and those like Edwards who shored it up. Edwards was a traitor, and by proxy a mass murderer. And all the rationalization in the world was not going to neutralize him.

Direct action was the only response to the Frank Edwardses of the world, the kind of direct action that the Executioner held a patent on.

"Edwards has a broad base of direct support as well," Toby went on. "He already has commitments with agents from around the world. Men like himself, willing to give up any idea of allegiance, except to profit. He's been in contact with people in the British MI5, the French SDECE, the Israeli Shin Bet, the German BND. And he's not limiting himself to the Western allies, either. He's also hooked up with agents of the KGB, the Social Affairs Department of Red China, and Castro's DGI."

Incredible, for sure. Once his network was set up, he would be in a position to subvert the intelligence activities of every major power in the world. The precarious balance of the rock of world peace would go straight to hell, and when it toppled it would start an avalanche that could only end in total destruction.

"Mack!" The alarm in her tone cut into his reflections. Instinctively his fist tightened on the Beretta.

But Toby was looking at the chest of the nightsuit.

The black material was stained with something darker.

"You're hit," Toby said.

Bolan unzipped the front flap. "Just grazed. It happened yesterday." But the compress over the exit wound was soaked with fresh blood.

"Grazed?" Toby echoed skeptically.

Bolan got out a fresh field bandage and slapped it over the old one. But again the pain in the torn muscle had become sharper; no doubt the firefight just past had not done it any good.

"I'm all right," Bolan said. He rezipped the outfit, but Toby was still staring at the bloodspot. "How is Edwards financing this scheme?"

Toby turned her frown on Bolan again.

"Several sources. His first scheme, after he split with the CIA, involved brokering illegally exported arms, mostly American-made, to terrorists and various other sorts of criminals. The weapons ( everything from automatic pistols to heat-seeking missiles ( were smuggled to London.

That was where Sir Philip Drummond came in.

He made sure that there was either storage in the International Zone at Heathrow Airport, which meant no customs inspection, or that if there did have to be an inspection, the customs agents were bought off or fixed in some other way. Meanwhile, Edwards would use his connections to doctor up an end-users certificate, which is a document by one government friendly to the U.S. that states that armament stored in another country had been duly and legally purchased.