Hellfire Crusade Read Online Free PDF Page A

for their help and walked back through the house. Chapman nodded and dutifully logged Logan's time of departure.
    Bolan was still thinking about Kevin as he pulled away from the curb. He doubted that the youngster had drawn up those blueprints for a homemade bomb in order to demonstrate the nuclear industry's lack of security. More likely that was just a lawyer's argument to get him off the hook.
    Bolan figured that Kevin Baker had probably done it to show his classmates he wasn't simply smarter than them but that he was light-years ahead. It was the same with the computer break-in-maybe he had done it to impress a special girl, maybe just to attract attention.
    Well, the boy had drawn attention to himself all right... from the wrong kind of people. And Bolan had attracted notice by his visit to the Bakers.
    Someone else was logging the comings and goings from the Belleair estate.
    Bolan cruised at moderate speed along the edge of the golf course, keeping a careful watch in the rearview mirror. The dark blue van that had been following him turned back; an Audi took its place. When Bolan turned right the other car did the same, carefully adjusting its speed to maintain a constant distance. A coincidence? Or were they tailing him? It was time to find out. Bolan pushed the pedal to the floor.
    Bolan felt the surge of power push him back into the cushioned seat. He scanned the deserted street ahead. The road he was on ended at a junction barely four hundred yards away.
    The lights turned to a green signal arrow.
    The tires screeched in protest as he spun the wheel in a slithering high-speed turn.
    Bolan's unexpected acceleration had caught the other driver off guard; now the Audi was racing to catch up.
    It could not have been the police or the FBI.
    Bolan was sure of it. If Chapman had used the red phone to check him out, the cops would have scooped him up at the house. Anyway, it wasn't their kind of car.
    And he doubted if it was the Mob. No, the Mafia would have gotten straight down to business, looking for a fast return on their risk, either by ransoming the boy or squeezing the information they wanted out of him.
    Unlike the Bear, Bolan could think of several disturbing reasons why organized crime might want to get their hands on a nuclear device. But it was unlikely they would hang around the neighborhood to monitor the investigation.
    Of course a political kidnapping was a whole different ball game. Anyone treading that dangerously close to creating an explosive international incident would be very interested in knowing exactly how the investigation was proceeding.
    The Executioner was nearly three blocks in the lead. There was a small shopping plaza coming up.
    He jerked the wheel to the right and plunged into the quiet backwater of a light-industrial zone. The foreign car took a tire-smoldering shortcut through the plaza car park in an effort to slice their quarry's lead time. The car swerved past a small girl bicycling across to the convenience store, clipped an abandoned shopping cart, which went spinning into a lamppost, and flew into the roadway beyond.
    Red warning lights were flashing ahead. A slowmoving short-haul freight was coming through from the right.
    Bolan gunned the last ounce of juice from the engine.
    He swung over into the left-hand lanes and raced the lumbering diesel for the right-of-way. There was no room for error — a cinder-block warehouse filled the land right to the edge of the tracks — and no leeway for a loss of nerve. The rental car bounced over the tracks as the engineer sounded a desperate warning.
    Bolan squeezed through the narrowing gap and jetted into the street like a cork shot from a bottle.
    A fiery trail of sparks hissed out as the heavy vehicle landed, fishtailed and straightened out on the right side of the highway.
    The train blocked his view in the mirror.
    Bolan hit the brakes and gritted his teeth. He was doing everything in his power to lose his pursuers, but playing