Ripple Effect

CHAPTER ONE

Cocoa Beach, Florida

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, walked along a quiet, nearly vacant beach at sunrise. It was nearly vacant, since a beach bum and his lady had apparently camped out the night before, somehow avoiding the nocturnal beach patrol to plant their sleeping bags above the high-tide water-line. They were engrossed in each other as he passed, ignoring him, waking to yet another day of—what?

Good luck, he hoped, and wished them well.

A small crab scuttled out of Bolan’s path, chasing the white Atlantic surf as it retreated. In his short-sleeved shirt, Bolan was conscious of a chill wind off the ocean, but he trusted that the sun would warm him soon enough.

Right now, the chill felt good, a respite from the heat he knew was coming, guaranteed.

It was a rare day when he could escape the heat.

He’d spent the past two nights at the Wakulla Inn, taking a unit with a kitchen and more bedrooms than he needed, just to have the space. Two days of beachfront R and R had tanned him, while meandering along the main drag, two blocks from his pad, briefly immersed him in the tourist scene. He’d poked around Ron Jon’s and other surf shops, happily admiring the bikinis, scowling at the baby sharks and alligators slaughtered into knickknacks for the Yankee set.

And life went on.

But not for long.

That morning, he was meeting Hal Brognola, their connection arranged on Sunday evening via sat phone linkup from Stony Man Farm. Bolan hadn’t asked why Hal wanted to meet in Florida, instead of someplace close to Washington. It simply wasn’t done.

As luck would have it, he’d been passing through Atlanta with some time and narcotraffickers to kill, when Hal had buzzed him to request a face-to-face. They met in person six or seven times a year, on average, but usually in proximity to Wonderland, D.C., where the big Fed held down a desk at the Justice Department, six blocks from the White House.

Bolan had never seen Hal’s office. It would be a no-win situation, all around, since he had been America’s most-wanted fugitive—until his death, some years ago, in New York City. Now, with a new face and several identities to spare, he did the same things that he’d done before, but with the covert blessing of his Uncle Sam.

He felt relaxed, ready to roll on whatever assignment Brognola might have for him. He didn’t try to second-guess the man from Justice, having learned from long experience that it would be a futile exercise. Brognola would present the facts and arguments for intervention. Bolan had the option of refusing any job that went against his grain, in which case it would pass to other hands, but he had never exercised that right.

One reason: he and Hal were well attuned to life, society and the preventive maintenance required to keep America the beautiful from turning into something else entirely. Bolan respected the Constitution and the laws that guaranteed all citizens their civil rights, but there were times when something happened to the system and it didn’t work as planned.

Sometimes corruption was to blame, or loopholes in the law that might take years to plug, while predators took full advantage of the gaps to victimize the innocent and weak. At other times, the system’s built-in safeguards made the wheels of justice turn too slowly, costing lives and human misery before a verdict could be rendered, then appealed, then reaffirmed by higher courts.

Brognola found some of the targets for him. Bolan found some others on his own. Financing from the nerve center of operations came from covert budgetary pigeonholes, while Bolan’s pocket money often emanated from the predators themselves. He had no qualms about relieving drug dealers or loan sharks of their blood money, and if the scumbags suffered catastrophic injuries while he was taking out a loan, what of it?

There were always more scumbags in waiting, never any shortage in the world that Bolan had observed.

Downrange, he saw a solitary figure striding toward him, hands in pockets, a fedora planted squarely on its head. He couldn’t swear it was Brognola, but odds against a stranger showing up at the appointed time, in that getup, were next to nil.

Brognola called to him from fifty feet away. “Would you believe I’m on vacation?”

“Not a chance,” Bolan replied.

“Okay, you’re right. Let’s take a walk.”

They walked and talked. The basic pleasantries were brief, whatever passed for personal emotion understood between these battle-hardened warriors and beyond the reach of words. Despite a friendship so deep-seated that both took it rightfully for granted, they had business to discuss.

“Vacation,” Brognola mused. “Sure, I’ve heard of that.”

“You ought to try it,” Bolan said.

“Maybe next year. And look who’s talking.”

“I’ve just had two days.”

“That’s two in how damned long?”

“Who’s counting?” Bolan asked him.

“Right. Okay. So, what I’ve got is something sticky. It’s a problem that I can’t turn loose.”

“I’m listening.”

“What do you know about Guantanamo?”

“It’s ninety miles that way,” Bolan said, with a thumb jerk toward his shoulder. “Cuba. Big Marine base, captured from the Spanish back when Teddy Roosevelt was still a rough-rider. Maintained as U.S. territory since the Castro revolution, more or less to spite Fidel.”

“What else?” Brognola urged.

“Detention blocks for terrorists and terror suspects taken in Afghanistan, Iraq and who-knows-where.”

“Camp X-ray,” Brognola confirmed. “It’s part of why we’re here.”

“They need another sentry?” Bolan asked.

“I doubt it. Sentries they have plenty of. Also interrogators.” Bolan caught a faint tone of distaste in the big Fed’s voice, covered reasonably well. Both of them recognized that sometimes information had to be gathered swiftly, forcefully. And neither of them liked it one damned bit.

“Interrogators?” he reminded Brognola when silence stretched between them for the better part of a minute.

“Right. A few days back, one of the inmates tried to hang himself and botched it. They revived him, and decided he was worth a closer look. Why now, I’m guessing was the rationale. Why would this nobody, who claims he’s innocent, decide to off himself one afternoon for no apparent reason?”

“It’s a question,” Bolan said.

“And they got answers,” Brognola confided.

“Which involves us…how?”

“I guess you know the rule of thumb for suspects held since 9/11, right? Arrest a hundred, and you may get four or five who know a guy who knows a guy. Arrest a thousand, maybe you find one or two who are those guys. This guy who tried to lynch himself knows people. My guess, he got tired of sitting in his cell, ignored, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. He figured they’d be getting back to him, sooner or later, and he wanted to eliminate the chance of letting something slip.”

“Too bad for him he couldn’t do it right,” Bolan observed.

“Too bad for him, but maybe good for us.”

“How so?”

“Because he knows things,” Brognola said. “Not a major player, now, don’t get me wrong. His face isn’t on anybody’s deck of cards. They never heard of him at Langley, until three, four days ago. At least, they never really thought about him. Way down at the bottom of some list that gathered dust. No one you’d give the time of day. They might’ve turned him loose, another six months or a year, except for the attempted suicide.”

“But now he’s in the spotlight.”

“Sitting right there on the grill,” Brognola said. “Maybe you smell the smoke from here. And one way or another, they persuade this guy to spill his guts. Turns out, he’s been around and knows his way around. Hamas, al Qaeda, PLO—little Hasam Khaled’s got friends all over.”

“But he’s not a major player?” Bolan asked.

“Not even close,” Brognola replied. “But he’s the man nobody notices. Loyal to a fault, likely involved in bombings or some other shit, but mostly, he’s just there. Maybe he brings the big boys tea and sandwiches, stands guard outside the tent or tags along behind them with his AK when they take a stroll. But all the while, he hears things.”

“Which he’s sharing with the Gitmo gang,” Bolan said.

“Bingo. Some of it’s history, you know, like Joe Valachi telling all about the 1930s Mafia in 1961. Khaled isn’t that old, but neither are the groups he’s been involved with. What I hear, he’s talking personalities and troop deployments, plans that failed, others that hit the bull’s-eye, schisms in the ranks—the whole nine yards.”

“That covers lots of ground,” Bolan observed.

“Too much for us to think about. Except, maybe, one thing.”

Bolan said nothing, waiting for it.

“There was one name that stood out,” Brognola said. “I mean, a lot of names stood out, but this one was American.”

“Unusual.”

“In spades. You’ve heard about the so-called American Taliban caught in Afghanistan, and that guy with the shoe bomb that didn’t go off.”

Bolan nodded, still waiting.

“Well, those are the norm when al Qaeda or some rival group gets a Yank in the ranks. Disaffected young men, for the most part. They look for a cause with excitement attached. If they’re rednecks, they go for the Klan or militias. Same thing. Self-improvement through hate.”

“But the new name is different,” Bolan said, not asking.

“And then some,” Brognola replied. “This one worries the hell out of Langley, the Pentagon, maybe the White House. It worries the hell out of me.”

“It’s a congressman? Senator? What?”

“Don’t I wish. If it was, we could stake out his office, tap into his phone lines, whatever. The Bureau could do it and slap him with charges from here to next Easter. It isn’t that simple.”

“Go on.”

“First, the guy’s not in-country. You’ve heard of free radicals? This one’s the ultimate. Maybe we know where he is, maybe not. It’s a toss-up, and knowing’s not bagging.”

“Okay.”

“But he’s not just elusive. He’s skilled, see? He knows the guerrilla game inside and out, and it’s not just in theory. He’s been there, in combat, for our side and theirs. In between he was anyone’s soldier if they could afford him. Turns out, some of our enemies have oil and cash to burn.”

“Sounds tough,” Bolan agreed.

“He’s tough, all right.” Brognola stopped dead in the sand, sun rising at his back. “In fact, he’s you.”

“Say what?”

“I don’t mean you, you. But he’s like you. Special Forces. The same training, same background, plenty of real combat experience before he took a discharge and went into business for himself.”

“Who is this guy?” Bolan asked.

Brognola fished inside his jacket and produced a CD in a plastic case. “His file’s on here, in PDF,” the man from Justice said. “Long story somewhat short, his name is Eugene Talmadge. Born in 1967, joined the Army out of high school. Graduated to the Green Berets at twenty, with a sergeant’s stripes. Like you.”

Bolan was less than thrilled with the comparison, but kept his mouth shut, listening.

“Combat-wise, he served in Panama, the Noriega thing down there—”

Bolan supplied the operation’s name. “Just Cause.”

“That’s it. Then, he was back for Desert Storm in 1991, followed by action in Somalia and Bosnia. Peacekeeping, I believe they called it at the time. In 1995 there was an incident with one of his superiors. It’s in the file, sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“The way it reads, Talmadge had words with a lieutenant and teed off on him. The looey wound up close to brain-dead. Talmadge got a compromise verdict at his court-martial. Guilty of assaulting a superior, acquitted of attempted murder and some other stuff. The Army yanked his pension and he walked with a dishonorable discharge.”

“You don’t buy the verdict,” Bolan said, not making it a question.

“Oh, I’m sure about the verdict,” Brognola replied, “but not about the case. Transcripts are classified, but I got Aaron and his techies at the Farm to do some hacking for me, on the q.t. It turns out that Talmadge’s defense was basically eradicated from the public record.”

“Being?”

“Namely,” Brognola said, “that he caught this officer and gentleman trying to rape a female corporal. Apparently, when Talmadge pulled him off, the looey lost it, started swinging on him, and the rest his history.”

“They hung him out to dry for that?”

“Apparently,” Brognola said. “Today, they’d probably be prosecuting the lieutenant, but the atmosphere in 1995 was different. They had adultery scandals going on, reports of sexual assaults at West Point and Annapolis. I’m guessing that one more black eye was one too many.”

“And Talmadge came out pissed.”

“I’m guessing yes. He shopped around for jobs, but with the DD and his lack of college training, it was pretty much a hopeless case. Before starvation hit, he started doing what he’s good at, but for higher pay than Uncle Sam had ever given him.”

“A merc,” Bolan said. It was more or less predictable, the same course followed throughout history by soldiers of all nations who were left without a service or a war to fight.

“A merc and contract hitter,” Brognola amended. “Once again, it’s in the dossier. To summarize, we’re sure of work he did in Africa, Myanmar and Brazil. That’s soldiering. Talmadge is also the prime suspect in at least eleven contract murders spanning Europe and North Africa, with one in Canada. He does good work, cleans up after himself. No charges pending anywhere.”

“Which brings us back to Gitmo,” Bolan said.

“It does. Our songbird dropped his name last week. No, it didn’t ring a bell at first, but Langley started digging, and the Pentagon pitched in. It set alarm bells ringing when they found his file.”

“What’s he involved in?” Bolan asked.

“Washington supposed it must be some kind of guerrilla training. Make that hoped. Sources confirmed that Talmadge has been seen in Syria, Iran and Pakistan. Also in Jordan, once or twice, hanging around the Bekaa Valley. That’s dope money and Islamic terrorists. He could’ve been on tap for either, or for both. So, training, right?”

“Sounds like it,” Bolan said.

“Until we started looking at his travel record and comparing it to contract hits. A Mossad district chief in Stockholm. An Iranian defector in Versailles. Two Saudi dissidents in Rome. One of Osama’s breakaway lieutenants in Vienna. It goes on like that.”

“He’s helping them clean house.”

“At least,” Brognola said. “One thing I’d say about our boy, he won’t discriminate. From what’s on file, he likes the highest bidder while the money’s flowing, and he moves on when it stops. No job too dirty, in the meantime. In Vienna, where he used C-4, the target had his wife and daughter with him. Talmadge took all three. The girl was four years old.”

“Hard to believe he hasn’t left some kind of trail for the forensics people,” Bolan said.

“It’s like I said. He’s you.”

“Enough with that, okay?”

“Sorry.” Brognola looked contrite, or something close to it. “No offense. I mean to say that he’s professional. Back in the day, you left a trail because you wanted to. Psy-war against the opposition, right? You rattled them by showing where you’d been, and sometimes called ahead to tell them who was next.”

Brognola’s first contact with Bolan had occurred while the big Fed was FBI and Bolan was engaged in a heroic one-man war against the Mafia, avenging damage to his family and rolling on from there to make syndicate mobsters an endangered species.

“It was a different situation,” Bolan said.

“My point exactly,” Brognola replied. “Talmadge has no cause of his own, no faith in anyone or anything except himself. He’ll work for them, kill for them, but he’s not committed. If he left a sign at any of his hits, it would reflect the group that hired him, not Gene Talmadge.”

“But you’ve tracked him anyway.”

Brognola shrugged. “You know how these things work. Combine the testimony of informants and survivors with the various security devices found in airports—biometric scanners are the bomb, apparently—and we can place him near the scene of various assassinations, bombings, this and that. We don’t have photos of his finger on the trigger, but it comes down to the next-best thing. Besides, it isn’t like we’re taking him to trial.”

And there it was. The death sentence.

“The action you’re describing to me has been going on for—what? Eleven years?”

“At least,” Brognola said.

“So why the sudden urgency?” Bolan asked.

“Ah. Because our songbird down at Gitmo didn’t only drop a name.”

“Go on.”

“According to Khaled, al Qaeda has our boy on tap this time, to ‘teach Satan a lesson he will not forget.’ Khaled has no specifics on the nature of that lesson, but we didn’t like the sound of it.”

“That’s understandable,” Bolan allowed.

“So, there you are. We’ve got one kick-ass warrior, seemingly devoid of anything resembling conscience, working for a group that wants to take us off the map. We’d like to stop them—him, specifically—and do it in a way that doesn’t make the Pentagon look like a nuthouse with the inmates in control. You in?”

Bolan frowned, feeling the deadweight of the CD in his pocket. “Yeah,” he said at last. “I’m in.”

A QUARTER OF AN HOUR LATER, back at the Wakulla Inn, Bolan reviewed the CD on his laptop. It began with all the ordinary paperwork for the induction of a U.S. Army private, with the details of its subject’s early life.

Eugene Adam Talmadge had indeed been born in 1967—April 23, to be precise—in Boulder, Colorado. His high-school grades were average, except in sports, where he excelled. A college football scholarship had been on offer, but he’d turned it down to wear a uniform, and then a green beret.

Bolan was somewhat puzzled by that choice, coming in 1985, when there was no threat of a military draft and no war currently in progress to attract daredevil types. Maybe Talmadge decided that he was unsuited to a college campus, even with the free ride offered by its sports department. Maybe he was hoping to accomplish something on his own, not have it handed to him on a silver platter just because he was a jock. Trouble at home? Something so personal it didn’t make the files?

Bolan would never know.

Talmadge had been a standout boot in basic training, and had taken to the Special Forces school at Benning like a duck to water, acing every course except the foreign-language training, where he struggled for a passing score in Spanish. When it came to weapons training and explosives, unarmed combat and survival, though, Talmadge had everything the service could desire, and then some.

Talmadge had killed his first two men in Panama, a couple of Manuel Noriega’s gorillas who weren’t smart enough to lay down their arms in the face of superior force. There was no intimation of a trigger-happy soldier in that case, no hint of any impropriety.

In combat, people died.

In Desert Storm, Talmadge had earned a reputation for himself. On the advance from Kuwait, through Iraq, he’d personally taken out at least two dozen members of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, earning a Silver Star and a Purple Heart in the process. The citation that accompanied his Silver Star praised Talmadge for his bravery and focus under fire, resulting in the rescue of two wounded comrades and elimination of a hostile rifle squad. Details were classified, suggesting that the mission also had a covert side.

His flesh wounds didn’t keep him out of action long. Talmadge had shipped out for Somalia in winter 1992, as part of Washington’s attempt to regulate that nation’s rival warlords and bring order out of chaos. That attempt had failed, but Talmadge scored nine more verified kills during four months in-country. His part in the rescue of a downed Black Hawk crew earned him a DSC—Distinguished Service Cross—and yet another Purple Heart.

He did all right, Bolan thought, moving onward through the soldier’s life on paper.

The sutures were barely removed from Talmadge’s Somalian wounds when new orders dispatched him to Bosnia-Herzegovina, land of ethnic cleansing and religious hatred spanning centuries. More warlords, more atrocities, more combat pay. Talmadge hadn’t been wounded in that conflict, but he had logged seven kills the record keepers knew about. No decorations that time for a job well done.

The Army’s standard paperwork included his record for the next year and a half, until the bitter end. Bolan discovered that the incident in 1995 had happened at Fort Benning. A lieutenant, name deleted, was the so-called victim, with a list of fractures and internal damage ranging from his skull down to his knees. The witnesses included two civilians and a corporal, name deleted, who was almost certainly the female Brognola had mentioned in his summary.

And as Brognola had explained, the transcripts of the court-martial were missing, classified for reasons unexplained. The logic of that void was inescapable: the facts were secret. Ergo, there could be no explanation why they had been classified, or else the secret would’ve been revealed.

Catch-22.

Bolan took Brognola’s appraisal of the case as valid, recognized the anger and frustration Talmadge had to have felt at being railroaded. Any remarks he may have offered to the court-martial were classified along with all the rest, leaving the slate blank. Only the verdict now remained, its stinging condemnation of a former hero sure to follow him for the remainder of his life.

Under the circumstances, Bolan was a bit surprised that Talmadge hadn’t sought revenge against the Army. Then again, when he considered what Talmadge had done throughout the intervening years—what he was doing now—perhaps he had. Brognola might be wrong about the former Green Beret’s coldhearted profit motive. Talmadge fought for pay, of course—he had to eat, like anybody else—but in his work for Middle Eastern terrorists, he had been striking out against the West.

And striking back at Uncle Sam.

Bolan was no armchair psychologist, but it didn’t require a Ph.D. to recognize that Talmadge had his pick of causes and employers in a world where violence was the norm. He could’ve spent more time in sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia if his only goal was money in the bank.

Instead, by working for Hamas, al Qaeda and the like, Talmadge had actually chosen sides, but with a difference. He wasn’t some deluded college convert to Islamic fundamentalist extremism, or a celebrity who craved publicity at any cost. He was a soldier, and he’d made a choice.

Bolan thought he understood Gene Talmadge now, and he could even sympathize with him. Up to a point. But sympathy ran out when Talmadge cast his lot with terrorists and criminals. There was—at least to Bolan’s mind—a world of difference between a mercenary soldier drifting aimlessly, involved in brushfire wars without regard to ideology, and one who set himself on a collision course with the United States and civilized society.

Whatever wrongs Talmadge had suffered at the hands of his superiors, he’d given up the moral high ground when he hired on with al Qaeda and its allies to perpetuate a bloodbath fueled by hatred and fanaticism. Bolan knew that something had to be done, and he seemed the best qualified to do the job.

Brognola’s latest information placed the target in Jakarta, where al Qaeda was supposed to have a thriving outpost. Bolan’s contact on the ground would be an agent from Homeland Security, who had been keeping track of Talmadge and his playmates since the news from Gitmo started making waves.

Whether the Special Forces renegade would still be there when Bolan reached the scene was anybody’s guess, but every journey had a starting point.