âIt is my hope that we as a nation can work through this.â
Trofimov was somber. âBut I will not lie to you. It will be difficult. We will have to make some hard decisions about our standing in the world. We will have to come to terms with the barbarism that lurks, even now, within our armed forces. This will not sit well with many of us, but I know we are up to the challenge. For TBT News, this is Yuri Trofimov.â
Schrader switched off the miniset in disgust. âCan you believe that?â
âWhat happened?â Bolan asked.
âTheyâre reporting that a bunch of our guys attacked a village in Afghanistan,â Schrader said, âtotally unprovoked. Burned the place to the ground. Shot women and children, and the news report says TBT has a videotape with our guys doing it and laughing about it.â
Bolanâs jaw clenched. Things were getting ugly. And they were about to get uglier.
The graveside service was drawing to a close. Family members paid their respects in turns, filing past the casket as it sat poised on its winch straps. Even for a funeral, the mood was grim; the body language of the mourners was tense, brittle with anticipation. That much was obvious as Mack Bolan, the man known to some as the Executioner, watched through a pair of compact Zeiss binoculars. He knelt on a hill in an older part of the cemetery, surrounded by grave markers that were, in some cases, almost a century old. Partially hidden behind a gnarled weeping willow that stood, incongruously, among the oldest of the tombstones, Bolan monitored the narrow, paved access road leading through the cemetery and past the temporary awning sheltering the mourners below.
The soldier checked his watch. If intel from Brognola and Stony Man Farm panned out, it could happen any minute now.
He didnât need to check the weapons he carried; they were as much part of him as his hands, after so many missions. The custom-tuned and suppressed Beretta 93-R pistol was holstered in its customary place under his left arm. The massive .44 Magnum Desert Eagle rode in a holster on his right hip. Across his chest, he wore an olive-drab canvas war bag on its shoulder strap, over the close-fitting combat blacksuit. His pants were tucked into well-worn combat boots. His battle gear, including a Boker Applegate combat dagger clipped in a Kydex sheath in the appendix position, was concealed under his black M-65 field jacket. On the ground near his right knee, a Pelican case waited, the customized Remington 700 rifle inside another work of art by Stony Man Farmâs armorer.
Mack Bolan knelt, watched and waited, a black-clad and silent wraith watching over the final resting place of so many Americans.
The Executioner reflected upon what had brought him to this place. The scrambled phone call from Brognola had left a taste like ashes in his mouth.
âSomeone,â the man from Justice had said, calling from his office in Washington, âis killing our soldiers.â
âIâm listening.â
âWe thought, at first, that it was random,â Brognola went on. âMurders occur, of course. It stands to reason that some of them would affect returning servicemen and-women. But Aaron takes a special interest in veterans, especially wounded vets, and he started flagging the news reports in a database in the Farmâs computers.â
âUnderstood.â Bolan nodded, unseen by the big Fed on the other end. âAaronâ was Aaron âthe Bearâ Kurtzman, head of the Farmâs cybernetics team and a wizard with computers of all types. If it existed in the ether, if it could be located within a network somewhere on the planet, Kurtzman could find it. The computer expert was confined to a wheelchair, the result of an ill-fated attack on the Farm some years before.
âWhat began to emerge,â Brognola said, âwas a disturbing pattern. Aaronâs computers pulled up report after report of murders across the countryâinvolving a returning veteran of combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. Six men, three women. In two of these cases, the reports included similar crime-scene evidence, including cryptic notes about âpeaceâ and âloveâ and âending barbarous imperialism.â When we dug further, we found that it wasnât just those two. These notes were found at all nine crime scenes.â