Firepower, John Cutter [best summer reads .txt] 📗

worked hard to put together a platoon of white nationalists — and Captain Densmore had broken it up.

Never again, he’d vowed, after his discharge, would he bear a humiliation from an enemy of the cause. He could barely stay in his seat now; he was itching for orders to find this Bellator and kill him.

Still, whatever Gustafson’s orders were, Colls would follow them. Gustafson had found Colls on the streets in Atlanta, living in an old Buick LeSabre, drunk and angry and aimless. The general had given him a new life, a new direction. Colls had been waiting for a leader, a true believer like Raoul Gustafson, all his life. General Gustafson was the man to lead the Brethren in the coming race war.

The fifty-man core Brethren had been training for seven years. Thanks to an online recruitment drive, they’d doubled their ranks. It was true they had a good many amateurs among the new men — like Foster and Adler. He’d only taken those two with him today, when he saw the hiker on the security video, to give them a chance to engage in a routine detail. Now and then he had to turn away some hiker or a homeless person looking for a place to hide in the forest. He’d expected no trouble. The General quietly paid off a couple of Forest Service men responsible for this part of the forest, and whatever the Brethren wanted was okay, long as they were careful about fire safety.

But Bellator had been a surprise…

There was something about the man. Something quietly dangerous. Like an IED he’d see exposed on the roadside, back in Iraq. It was just there, a motionless tangle of wires around a plastic explosive packet — waiting to explode.

The minutes passed as Mac Colls fidgeted in the hard chair. He thought about getting that cup of coffee.

But then Gustafson came out of the comm room, his wide, froggish face creased by a frown. He tossed a print-out onto his desk. “Look at that. I was able to obtain a file on Bellator. Our man in the Pentagon gave us what he could. That the man you encountered?”

Colls opened the folder and looked at the computer-printed color photo. “That’s him, sir. That’s the man.”

The General sat at his desk and tented his fingers. “My man had the goods on your troublemaker. Bellator is a Yale grad, Phi Beta Kappa. Multi-athletic. Big in college triathlons. Joined the Army Rangers, took officer’s training, made lieutenant. Fought in Afghanistan. Double handful of medals. Made captain. Then he transferred to Delta Force…”

“Delta Force! Holy shit — sir.”

“Yes. His time in Delta Force is classified and we don’t know what he did for them, except some of it was in Iraq, some in Somalia, and some of it was Syria, and there was one secret mission to Pakistan. There were other missions where no location is given. Then his time’s done, he decides not to re-up. But the feds keep track of him. He hires on with an outfit called Pro-Active Security International. Kind of a Blackwater type situation. That went south and he quit the company. He’s spent the last two years building a big house on that island in the Puget Sound, on property left to him by…” He looked at the file. “One ‘Jack Sullivan’. An associate of his father’s.” General Gustafson shook his head. “This man Bellator is deadly. You boys got off easy! The CIA codename for him was Charon. You know who Charon is, Mac?”

“No sir.”

“In Greek myths, he’s the boatman who takes you to Hell.”

Mac grunted. Vincent Bellator had seemed a normal man — big, yes, but not extraordinary. Not at first. He had short, dark brown hair, a lean square-jawed face weathered by a lot of time spent outdoors. During the whole encounter he’d seemed detached, mildly amused.

But Colls’ mouth went dry as he remembered looking into Bellator’s eyes once Vince got the AR-15 in his hands. Death had been waiting in those chilly gray eyes.

You can live or die, it’s your call. That was the message he’d read there.

Colls shrugged. He wasn’t going to let the son of a bitch intimidate him. “Sir — we can still kill him. He doesn’t have to see it coming.”

“Kill him? Not unless we have to! Mac, I don’t want to kill Vincent Bellator. I want to recruit him!”

CHAPTER TWO

Katydids called stridently through the velvety night as Vince finished his hike in a fading Indian Summer warmth, passing through a grove of pine trees to Dead Springs. Approaching the clearing at the base of a low hill, he wasn’t surprised to see Chris’s mother, Rose Destry, sitting on the porch of the old cabin. She was hunched on the deck of the roofed front porch, her feet on the ground, in a pool of light from the lantern hanging overhead. They’d never met, but they’d talked on the phone, and he had seen pictures of her that Chris had shown to him.

They’d arranged to meet today — but he was a little disconcerted to find her here already. He was going to be burying one of Chris’s body parts here. How was his mother going to feel about that? He was self-conscious about the AR-15 he carried on a strap over his right shoulder, too.

“Rose!” he said, stepping out into the thin moonlight. She sat up and squinted his way. “It’s Vince Bellator.”

“Vincent!” She stood up, smiling. “Come on to the cabin!”

He walked by the Dodge Ram extended-cab pickup parked to his right and joined her in the lantern light.

They looked each other over. She was a short, plump woman in blue jeans and a black and gray plaid shirt, untucked. Her long copper-colored hair, streaked with gray, hung behind her in double braids. There were old smile lines on her round