Highway to hell

Dispatched on a high-priority search-and-rescue mission, Mack Bolan becomes a moving target in the cold heart of Siberia. He’s on a motorcycle hell ride along a thousand miles of broken, battered highway. Known as the Road of Bones, it’s a mass grave to thousands of slave laborers buried during Stalin’s iron rule.

A defecting Russian intelligence agent’s testimony stands to aim heavy artillery at Russian mobsters in America. To silence her, a hunter-killer team of secret police and gangsters engage in hot pursuit. The enemy has the edge: manpower, weapons and home-field advantage. For Bolan, it’s a one-way trip on an open road effectively sealed at both ends by death squads. Every mile survived brings them both either closer to freedom…or ultimate doom.

So much for stealth

He’d only got halfway to the lights when the man addressed him from a pool of shadows to his left, between a thresher and a skid loader. The lookout spoke in Russian, but his challenge had the tone of “Who in hell are you?”

Bolan let his AK answer back, one Russian to another. Three rounds at a range of six or seven feet, two punching through a plastic cooler the stranger carried, loosing plumes of smoke. His muzzle-flashes lit a startled face before it toppled over backward, out of frame.

He dodged between a swather and a mower, reached a different aisle and pounded toward the bright oasis where the action was. Bolan could hear people scrambling, as a voice called out, “Mikhail? Mikhail!”

Presumably calling the dead guy.

Bolan let the others wonder about the body as he moved in for the kill.

Road of Bones

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Russia will not soon become, if it ever becomes, a second copy of the United States or England, where liberal values have deep historic roots.

—Vladimir Putin

1952-

Don’t you forget what’s divine about the Russian soul—and that’s resignation.

—Joseph Conrad

1857-1924

I’m resigned to do this job regardless of the opposition. I’ll bet my soul on it.

—Mack Bolan

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Mike Newton for his contribution to this work.

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russian Federation

Yakutsk Airport was small by Western standards. One of its two runways was a parking lot for aircraft, while the other handled both arrivals and departures, moving seven hundred passengers per hour at peak efficiency. The international terminal, built in 1996, was showing signs of age. The domestic terminal, meanwhile, was constructed sixty-five years earlier, in Stalin’s time.

Tatyana Anuchin and Sergey Dollezhal were going international, a Ural Airlines flight to Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport in Rome with 160 other passengers and crew aboard a Tupolev Tu-154M—Russia’s equivalent of the Boeing 727. The aircraft had a cruising range of twenty-seven hundred miles, which meant a stop for fuel in Chelyabinsk before proceeding on to Italy. With time on the ground, that meant nine more hours before they cleared Russian soil.

Before they were safe.

“You need to relax,” Dollezhal said.

“I’ll relax in Rome,” Anuchin replied. “Better yet, in London.”

“You give them too much credit,” he chided. “We have a good lead.”

“Oh, yes? Why not hire a car, then?” she challenged. “We’ll make it a holiday.”

“All I am saying—”

She cut him off, hissing, “They’re not as stupid as you give them credit for. They must know that we’re running by now.”

And unarmed, since they had left their weapons in the car at long-term parking, to avoid any problems with airport security. Anuchin felt naked without the MP-443 Grach semiauto pistol she had carried with official sanction for the past nine years, used twice in the line of duty.

All that was behind her now that she was running with Dollezhal.

“We board in twenty minutes,” he remarked.

“And they could just as well be waiting when we land in Chelyabinsk, with two damned hoºurs to kill.”

“It was the best connection we could manage,” he reminded her.

“I know that, but it isn’t good enough.”

“You say I give them too much credit for stupidity, Tanni,” he said, using her nickname. “I think you make them omniscient when they’re not.”

“We’ll see,” she answered, thinking to herself that twenty minutes was a lifetime.

* * *

“SPREAD OUT and sweep the terminal. Eyes sharp,” Valentin Grushin said.

“And if we spot them?” Pavel Antonov inquired.

“No shooting in the terminal,” Grushin replied. “No shooting, period, unless they leave no other choice. Remember they’re wanted for questioning.”

Mikhail Krylov snorted at that. “They may prefer to be shot.”

“It’s their choice, then,” Grushin said. “Just follow your orders.”

They fanned out to cover the terminal, three hunters seeking their prey. Outside the terminal, watching the exits, their fourth man—Fyodor Dushkin—sat at the wheel of a Lada Riva sedan, waiting to signal if the targets slipped past them somehow.

If they were even at the airport now.

Grushin trusted the tip they’d received, but the caller had mentioned no flight in particular, no destination. By now, the targets could have flown the coop on any one of nine airlines, with destinations ranging from China and Thailand to Egypt, Tunisia and most of Europe.

What they would not do, if they were sane, was try to hide in Russia. That was tantamount to slow and painful suicide.

Grushin was tasked to find and seize the targets, not pursue them if they managed to fly out of Yakutsk Airport. If he missed them, his part in the hunt was finished.

But his trouble would have just begun.

The people who employed him paid for positive results in cash. Their currency for failure was a very different proposition altogether.

As he moved along the concourse, Grushin watched for uniformed Militsiya officers, acutely conscious of the PP-2000 machine pistol that he wore beneath his long coat on a leather sling. The weapon measured only 13.4 inches with its stock folded and weighed about five pounds with a fully loaded magazine of forty-four 9 mm Parabellum rounds. For this job, Grushin had foregone the 7N31 +P+ armor-piercing loads, but had some in the car, in case the hunt became a chase on wheels.

In which case, he supposed, they likely would have failed.

A crackle from the tiny earbud that he wore almost made Grushin jump. Krylov’s voice telling him, “I’ve found them. Ural Airlines.”

Flushed with instantaneous relief, Grushin changed course and walked more rapidly across the terminal.

* * *

“SON OF A BITCH!” Dollezhal spit the words as if they tasted foul. “I know that man in the blue windbreaker.”

Anuchin found the man he was referring to and felt her heart skip as she realized that he was watching them.

Five minutes left until their flight was called for boarding, and the chance was lost to them. How many other trackers were there in the terminal, converging on them even now?

“Let’s go,” Dollezhal said urgently.

“Go where?” she countered. “He’s already seen us.”

“Seeing’s one thing,” he replied. “Holding’s another.”

Fearing that they were already lost, she nonetheless stood and shouldered her carry-on with the laptop inside. There was nothing in it to hang them if she had to ditch it, running. All the details were inside her head and in her companion’s, ready for bullets to scramble and wipe out the warning they carried.

Even now, they didn’t run, but walked with purpose, swiftly, Anuchin having no idea of Dollezhal’s plan or destination. When they missed their flight, as they were bound to do, what avenues remained?

“In here,” he said, ducking into a men’s restroom without looking back.

Cheeks flaming from childish embarrassment, Anuchin followed, prepared to ask what he was doing when he clutched her arm and pulled her away from the door.

“Find a stall,” he commanded. “Lock it. Put your feet up.”

As if that would help, when the man had seen them both enter. Still, she followed instructions, chose the middle of nine toilet stalls, closed the door and secured its cheap latch. Then she climbed up on the seat, crouching awkwardly over the bowl.

Anuchin heard the restroom door swing open, followed by a scuffling sound and muttered cursing.

Dollezhal was fighting for his life.

Her first instinct was to rush out and help him, but the phut of a silenced weapon stopped her. Teetering on top of the commode, she waited, trembling, as footsteps advanced toward the stalls and their doors began to slam open.

The first touch on hers met resistance. A gruff voice said, “Here,” and the scraping of shoe soles converged. Knuckles rapped and a voice like a wood rasp inquired, “Are you there, little traitor?”

Irrationally, she kept silent, then bit her tongue to keep from squealing as another phut punched a hole in the cubicle’s door and cracked the tile behind her, stinging her neck with splinters.

“Open up!” a second voice commanded her. “We’re tired of playing now!”

She stood, unlatched the door, leaving room for herself as it opened, with the commode pressing against her calves. Three faces leered at her, three pistols aiming at her face.

“Surprise!” the middle gunman said. “We’re going for a ride.”

CHAPTER ONE

Yakutsk, seven hours later

Yakutsk owed its existence to the tide of war and tyranny. Constructed as a fort by Cossack warlord Pyotr Beketov in 1632, within seven years it had become the seat of power for an independent military fiefdom whose commander sent troops ranging to the south and east. Discovery of gold and diamonds in the late nineteenth century turned Yakutsk into a mining boomtown. The Sakha Republic still supplied twenty percent of the world’s rough diamonds, but Yakutsk owed its final growth surge to Russia’s Man of Steel.

Joseph Stalin was one of those people who chose his own name and made grim history—like Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac killer, but on a grand scale. Born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, he didn’t like the sound of it, and so renamed himself Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin—Russian for “steel”—after joining the early Bolshevik movement and being convicted of bank robbery. Exile to Siberia couldn’t tame him, but it gave him ideas.

Climbing the revolutionary food chain with ruthless cunning, Stalin was Vladimir Lenin’s strong right hand in 1917 and beyond. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin rushed to fill the power vacuum in Moscow, exiling or executing his rivals and consolidating power in a dictatorship that scuttled any dreams of a Communist Utopia on Earth.

And he remembered Siberia. Over the next three decades, an estimated twenty-two million passed through Stalin’s Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies, better known as gulags for short. Based on figures released after communism’s collapse in 1991, some 1.6 million internees died in Stalin’s camps between 1929 and his own death in 1953.

But killing hadn’t ended with the cold war in the Russian Federation. Life and death went on as usual. Mack Bolan was in Yakutsk to prevent one death—and likely to inflict more in the process.

Business as usual for the Executioner.

It was a rush job, with time being of the essence. Bolan drove his GAZ-31105 Volga sedan along the Lena River’s waterfront with barges and an island to his right, warehouses on his left, looking for the address where he could—hopefully—collect his package from some people who weren’t expecting him.

And there it was.

He drove past, boxed the block and rolled back toward the water with the makings of a plan in mind. He’d keep it simple: hit and git, if that was possible.

If not…well, Bolan played the cards that he was dealt.

And on occasion, he’d been known to throw away the deck.

He parked within a half block of his target, killed the Volga’s engine and turned to his tools. First up was an AKS-74U submachine gun, nineteen inches long with its wire stock folded, weighing five and a half pounds unloaded. Size aside, it had the same firepower as its parent weapon, the venerable AK-74 assault rifle in 5.45 mm, with a cyclic rate of 650 rounds per minute. On paper, the little gun’s effective range was listed as 350 yards, but with an eight-inch barrel it was used primarily for work up close and personal.

For backup, Bolan wore an MR-444 Baghira semiauto pistol in a fast-draw shoulder rig. The Russian-made sidearm was chambered for 9 mm Parabellum rounds, carrying fifteen in a double-column box magazine.

His less-lethal option consisted of four GSZ-33 stun grenades, a flash-bang model equivalent to the U.S.-made M-84 that generated one million candela to blind a target on detonation, while shocking him deaf and nearly unconscious with 180 decibels of concussive sound inside a five-foot radius. When they were clipped to Bolan’s belt and the pockets of his long coat filled with extra magazines, he left the sedan and locked it, moving toward the warehouse with the address offered by his contact.

Despite the vote of confidence from Langley, filtered back to Bolan through his friends at Stony Man, there was a chance that his informant could turn out to be a rat. In which case, it was fifty-fifty that Bolan would never have a chance for payback.

Not in this life, anyway.

But there was one thing you could say about the odds on any battlefield.

They shifted when the Executioner arrived.

* * *

WHEN THE INTERROGATOR took a break, Valentin Grushin braced him, getting in his face to ask him, “Are you making any progress?”

The pale man regarded Grushin as he might a laboratory specimen, perhaps a frog or piglet offered for dissection. Grushin thought, again, how much the creepy bastard looked like Dracula. Not old Lugosi, long before his time, but Christopher Lee in the great Hammer films from the sixties and seventies.

“She’s tough,” the pale man said. “I give her that.”

His name was Ivan Shukov, but inevitably he was known within the dark world he inhabited as Ivan the Terrible. No surprise there, from what Grushin had heard—and now seen—of his work.

“I would have said you’re getting nowhere,” Grushin said, emboldened by his guns and three companions. “All this time, and nothing.”

All that screaming, and the generator humming, Shukov murmuring his questions as he placed the alligator clips for maximum effect. How many volts? Enough to singe the flesh without inflicting death or permanent disfigurement.

So far.

Grushin wasn’t unsettled by the screaming. He had made some women scream himself—a few from pleasure, others not so much. Insensitivity to suffering was part of what equipped him for his work, a subset of his general indifference to the fate of other human beings.

No. What made his skin crawl in the presence of a man like Ivan Shukov—and there seemed to be a surfeit of them in the world these days—was the disturbing sense that he, Grushin, might fall into the hands of such a man someday.

And then what would become of him?

It would be easy to transgress and fall from grace. A simple comment in the wrong place, at the wrong time, might betray him. Passed along maliciously, amended and redacted, any casual remark could turn into a death sentence. And while he didn’t relish death, Grushin had long since come to terms with personal mortality, accepting that the chances of a long and happy life were slim indeed.

It wasn’t dying that he feared, so much as screaming out his final breath while everything that made him human was extracted, sliced and diced or seared with flame, by someone like Ivan the Terrible.

Had he already gone too far in goading the interrogator? Would his criticism get back to the man in charge, be filed away for future reference and used against him somewhere down the line? Perhaps, but now it was too late to take it back.

“I’m thinking of a new approach,” Shukov said.

“Oh?” Grushin strived for a noncommittal tone.

“Selective applications, heat and cold,” Shukov explained. “You have dry ice?”

“Dry ice? No,” Grushin replied.

“But you can find some, yes?”

Grushin considered it. Where would he locate dry ice?

As if reading his mind, Shukov said, “I suggest the ice plant. Kulakovsky Street. You know it?”

“I can find it,” Grushin said, determined not to ask Shukov for the address.

“A pound or so should be sufficient,” Shukov said. “I have a pair of gloves. And tongs.”

Of course he would.

“I’ll send Mikhail,” Grushin said, wishing he could go himself and get away from Shukov for a while. Ivan the Terrible depressed him, set his teeth on edge and made him feel the need to shower under scalding water.

Too late, Grushin thought. He was already soiled beyond redemption, not that he placed any faith in superstition or the church. Forgiveness, if it mattered, always called for a confession and repentance, whereas Grushin had been raised to keep his mouth shut in the presence of authority.

And truth be told, he wasn’t sorry for the things that he had done. Well, maybe one or two of them, but just a little.

Dry ice coming up, he thought, and bustled off to find Mikhail.

* * *

BOLAN COULDN’T READ the sign, in Cyrillic, outside the warehouse, but he didn’t need to. The address was painted in Arabic numerals, and the numbers didn’t lie.

Unless his contact had.

No way to second-guess it now as he approached in darkness. Seven hours had passed since the package had been lifted, and he understood the kind of damage that could be inflicted in that span of time.

A gunshot to the head took, what, a fraction of a second? But the men he had to deal with would be after information, likely skilled in methods of extracting it. How long that took depended on their subject’s pain threshold and powers of endurance.

No one was immune to torture. Everybody broke, sooner or later, if they didn’t die from shock or blood loss. But would a subject give up what his or her tormentors required, or misdirect them? Would the innocent confess to heinous crimes, while the guilty targeted a fictional accomplice?

Bolan reckoned he had seen the worst of it on more than one occasion. If he’d come too late this time, at least he could avenge the victim and make sure that her interrogators felt a measure of the pain they had dispensed. Or maybe they’d be lucky, and he’d simply kill them where they stood.

But first, he had to get inside.

The large doors on the warehouse loading dock were padlocked, and their rumbling would have been too noisy even if they weren’t secured. He sought another way inside and found it at the southeast corner of the big, old building. An employees’ entrance, he supposed, although its faded sign was gibberish.

He tried the knob and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. No sign of an alarm from where he stood, fishing inside a pocket for a set of picks. Bolan spent sixty seconds on the lock—no dead bolt on the door to make it complicated—and he pocketed the picks again before he crossed the threshold.

The soldier was cautious now, letting the stubby muzzle of his submachine gun lead him through a corridor with concrete underfoot and metal walls on either side. The hallway ran for twenty feet and then turned left at a dead-end partition, granting Bolan access to the warehouse proper.

The building was dark, except at the far end, where two banks of overhead lights blazed his trail. Between Bolan and what he took to be his destination, ranks of agricultural machinery stood silent in the murk. He picked out tractors, cultivators, backhoes, combine harvesters. Moving between them, the soldier homed in on sounds of moaning and a male voice asking questions that he couldn’t translate.

They were still at work, then, but he still might be too late. Beyond a certain point there was no rescue, and the only mercy came with death’s release from hopeless agony. If it came down to that, Bolan was equal to the task.

When he was halfway to the lights, a voice addressed him from a pool of shadows to his left, between a thresher and a skid loader. The lookout spoke in Russian. “Who the hell are you?”

Bolan let his AK answer back, one Russian to another. Three rounds at a range of six or seven feet, two punching through a plastic cooler that the stranger carried, loosing plumes of smoke. His muzzle-flashes lit a startled face before it toppled over backward, out of frame.

So much for stealth.

He dodged between a swather and a mower, reached a different aisle and pounded toward the bright oasis where the action was. Bolan could hear people scrambling, as a voice called out, “Mikhail? Mikhail!”

Presumably the dead guy.

Bolan let the others wonder as he moved in for the kill.

* * *

TATYANA ANUCHIN hoped she was dying. She’d heard the pale interrogator asking for dry ice and tried not to imagine how or where he’d use it. After the electric shocks, it hardly seemed to matter, but she understood that pain was both his passion and profession. Since she had resisted his best efforts to the moment, he could only plan on doing something worse.

She hoped to die before she cracked and told her captors everything. Exactly what she knew and how she had acquired that knowledge, naming sources both unwitting and deliberate. Sergey had been the lucky one, compelling them to kill him outright at the airport terminal. In retrospect, Anuchin wished that she possessed the same presence of mind.

Next time, she thought, and almost found it humorous.

That would confuse them, if she burst out laughing. If nothing else, it would insult the ghoul they’d summoned to abuse her. Anuchin wondered if he was a colleague from the Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii, the FSB, someone whom she might have seen at headquarters and overlooked in passing.

Someone from the Lubyanka’s basement? Or an operator from the private sector, peddling his skills and predilection to the highest bidder in a cutthroat marketplace?

It hardly mattered now, when she was duct-taped naked to a wooden chair, her flesh a crazy quilt of superficial burns and bite marks from the alligator clips. The jolting pain still resonated in her muscles, in her teeth and jaws. A migraine headache pulsed behind her eyes.

Was it a sin to pray for death? If so, she didn’t care.

Could hell be any worse than this?

Against her will, Anuchin began to imagine the next phase of her live dissection. Dry ice, she knew, was the solid form of carbon dioxide. Its normal temperature hovered around -109 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to cause frostbite on contact. Above -70 degrees, it sublimated into frosty-looking gas, the “fog” so often used on movie sets for old-time horror films.

And as a tool of torture, she recognized that it could prove effective. As to whether it was worse than electricity…well, she’d simply have to wait and see.

If she withstood the ghoul’s next round of questions, how would he proceed? With scalpels or a blowtorch? Acid? Could she hope for shock to spare her from the worst of it, or was he skilled enough to revive her with drugs?

Holding her breath accomplished nothing, as she’d quickly learned. Innate survival mechanisms wouldn’t let her suffocate herself. If her hands were free—

The gunshots startled Anuchin from her fantasy of suicide. Her eyes snapped open, saw her captors facing toward the darkness of the cavernous warehouse. The ghoul was shifting nervously from foot to foot, as one of those who’d snatched her from the airport shouted to the long rows of machinery.

“Mikhail? Mikhail!”

No answer from the shadows.

The thought of rescue never entered her mind. Who was there left to help her? No one from the Ministry of Justice that she served. They wished her dead, silenced forever, buried with the secrets she’d uncovered.

As for private parties, Anuchin couldn’t think of one who had the means to find her coupled with an interest in helping her survive. Certainly, she had no friends within the Russian Mafia, denizens of the thieves world that infested every level of Russian society from top to bottom.

With Sergey dead, she had no one.

A quarrel between murderers, then, with Anuchin caught in the middle. Better that than more torture. She could always hope for a stray bullet to release her from her world of pain.

Was that so much to ask?

Helpless and totally exposed, she closed her eyes again and mouthed another silent prayer.

* * *

WHILE ONE OF BOLAN’S targets shouted for Mikhail, others were fanning out to sweep the warehouse, homing in on the echoes of his first gunshots. He saw one man breaking to his left, another to his right, their mouthpiece fading back to crouch behind a bulky gravity wagon.

That left two figures visible beneath the warehouse lights. A naked woman was fastened to a chair with duct tape at her wrists and ankles, plus a loop around her ribs, slumped with her chin on her chest. Beside her, to her left, a tall man in a raincoat stood and goggled at the shadows with protruding eyes. A glint of stainless steel told Bolan that he held a knife.

Completely useless in a gunfight.

From the tall man’s look and his reaction to the shots, Bolan knew he was the inquisitor. Without a second thought, he raised the AKS and stitched the gawker with a rising burst from clavicle to forehead, shattering his face. The guy went down as if someone had cut his strings, and Bolan saw the woman in the chair turn toward him, blink, then look around to find out where the shots had come from.

Wondering if she was next?

The shooter behind the gravity wagon was playing it safe. His cohorts, flanking Bolan, did their best to keep it stealthy, but their style was obviously more attuned to smash-and-grab than creep-and-sneak. They telegraphed their moves with scuffling feet, letting their target track them in the dark.

Bolan fell back from the bright lights and climbed aboard a midsize Caterpillar tractor, crouching with his back against its open cab. He’d let the hunters come to him—the first of them, at least—and see what happened next.

The gunman coming from his left was faster, shuffling toward Bolan from behind a bale wrapper. He didn’t check the high ground, though, intent on peering under things, where shadows pooled. When he had closed the gap to twenty feet, a burst from Bolan’s SMG ripped into him and dropped him, twitching, on his back.

The dead guy’s backup took advantage of the muzzle-flash and banged away at Bolan with a pistol, but the Executioner was already in motion, airborne, dropping to a crouch behind the tractor as incoming rounds cracked through its cab.

The soldier broke to his left, keeping the bulk of the machine and its big engine block between his adversary and himself. When he was near the tractor’s nose, he knelt, then stretched prone and crawled around beneath the radiator grille, careful to keep his weapon’s magazine from scraping concrete as he went.

He caught the second shooter scrambling toward the tractor, pistol out in front of him and ready for a hasty shot if he was challenged. What he wasn’t ready for was half a dozen full-metal-jacket rounds slashing through his thighs and pelvis, spinning him into the line of fire and ending it with head shots.

Which left one.

Bolan emerged to find the last man standing with a pistol pressed against the naked woman’s head, half-crouched to use her as a human shield.

The soldier found a vantage point beyond the ring of light and stopped there, took a second to unfold his submachine gun’s stock and raise it to his shoulder. As stubby as it was, the little room-broom hadn’t been designed for sniping, but at forty feet he thought the shot was doable.

His weapon had a flip-up rear sight with a front cylindrical post. Its eight-inch barrel produced a muzzle velocity of 2400 feet per second, slower than the full-size AK-74, but an insignificant difference at what amounted to point-blank range.

While his target shouted, sounding more agitated by the moment, Bolan found his mark and held it—just above the guy’s left eyebrow, with the SMG’s selector set for semiauto fire. One shot, and if he missed it…

Crack!

A crimson halo wreathed the gunman’s head as he slumped over backward. Bolan thought the naked woman gasped but wasn’t sure. He crossed the open floor to reach her, opening a knife in transit. Keeping his eyes averted as he slit the duct tape at her wrists and ankles, he reached around to cut one side along her rib cage.

Finally, he met her eyes and saw the fear behind them. When she asked him something, Bolan couldn’t understand it.

“Slow down or speak English,” he suggested.

“Da. Yes. Who are you?”

“A friend, sent to get you.”

“Friend?” She didn’t seem to recognize the term.

He nodded. “We need to go. Do you have any clothes?”

“Shredded,” she told him, covering herself belatedly as best she could with slender arms. “They thought I wouldn’t need them…after.”

Bolan scanned the killing ground and saw a sport coat draped across a second chair, almost outside the ring of light. He collected it and passed it to the woman while he thought about the rest.

The man who’d used her as a shield was several inches taller than the woman, but he had a narrow waist. She’d have to roll the cuffs up on his slacks, but it could work if she cinched up his belt.

“You mind a pair of hand-me-downs?” he asked, his back turned as he began to strip the corpse.

“What do you…oh. No, those will do for now. My shoes are over here somewhere,” she told him, moving gingerly toward the rim of shadow. “With my bag, I think.”

Bolan kept his head turned as she came to get the slacks. When she was covered, buckling the dead man’s belt, she told him, “Don’t forget their guns.”

CHAPTER TWO

Japan, seven hours earlier

Bolan was in the middle of another operation when the call came. He’d been wreaking havoc on a drug pipeline, tracking the flow of heroin from Yakuza controllers through the Philippines, on to Hawaii, where it spilled into the veins of addicts.

He was up against the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s most prosperous Yakuza Family and one of the world’s largest criminal organizations, with an estimated forty-five thousand oath-bound members and countless other close associates. Aside from heroin, the syndicate made billions annually from gambling, human trafficking and prostitution, internet pornography, extortion, gunrunning, stock fraud and labor racketeering.

It had been five days since he’d taken on the mission, and the Executioner was close to wrapping up his game. He’d taken out the clan’s first and second lieutenants, along with a couple dozen soldiers, and was planning a lethal surprise for the clan leader.

But then he got the call from home.

Drop everything and disengage, for now. We have a Level Four emergency.

Something in Russia, Hal Brognola told him, speaking guardedly despite the scrambled line. There was a job that absolutely couldn’t wait, lives hanging in the balance.

One life in particular.

How fast could he get from Kobe to Yakutsk in Sakha Republic? Bolan ran the calculation on his laptop while he had the big Fed on the line. His destination was located nineteen hundred miles northwest of Kobe, travel time dependent on how soon he booked a flight, the aircraft he obtained and when it could take off.

“Charter a plane ASAP,” Brognola had instructed him. “My dime. Call back when it’s arranged, and you’ll be met by someone from the Company. They’ll have the details and your basic kit. I’m sending through a file right now.”

Bolan opened his email, waited thirty seconds, then said, “Got it.”

“Good. I’m here until you call about the flight.”

The soldier cut the link and checked his watch. Eight-fifteen on a Saturday night in Kobe meant that it was 6:15 a.m. on Friday morning in Washington, D.C., thanks to the international date line. Brognola was a day and fourteen hours behind, but would be tracking the Russian event in real time.

Whatever it was.

Bolan booked his flight before reading the file. A charter company at Kobe Airport could put him aboard a Learjet 60 in two hours, if he had five grand and change to spare. Confirming that, Bolan was told the flight should take about four hours, which would put him on the ground in Yakutsk somewhere in the neighborhood of two-thirty to three o’clock on Sunday morning.

Fair enough.

He skimmed the file then, hitting the essentials, knowing there’d be ample time to study all its details in the air. Two agents of the FSB—Russia’s Federal Security Service, successor to the infamous KGB—had been collaborating with the CIA and Interpol to blow the whistle on a network of corruption that involved the upper echelons of government and commerce in the Russian Federation. The specifics weren’t provided, being strictly need-to-know, but Bolan got the picture.

There had always been corruption in the Soviet “worker’s paradise” under one-party rule, but the floodgates had opened with Communism’s collapse in 1991. Overnight, the world’s largest state-controlled economy was jostled into line with what some pundits liked to call the “Washington consensus,” adopting the alien concepts of liberalization and privatization.

The net result was economic chaos.

Liberalization meant eliminating price controls, which sparked hyperinflation and near-bankruptcy of Russian industry under President Boris Yeltsin. While Russia’s elderly and others living on fixed incomes watched their lifestyle go to hell, shady entrepreneurs and black marketeers spawned under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika restructuring movement of 1985-90 rose to the top of the heap like scum on a stagnating pond. The Russian Mafia, formerly an underground network of thugs and swindlers, went public—then global—in an orgy of bribery, extortion and violence.

The result, inevitably, was a backlash of opposition, translated into widespread support for antireform candidates. Yeltsin’s campaign to Westernize Russia by fiat, including dissolution of Parliament in September 1993, sparked open rebellion in Moscow. While Spetsnaz troops stormed Parliament, killing 187 dissidents and wounding more than four hundred, separatists in the Chechen Republic were charting a course toward civil war and a new age of domestic terrorism.

Meanwhile, a handful of wealthy oligarchs secured a stranglehold on Russian banking, industry and the mass media, throwing their weight behind Yeltsin’s reelection campaign in exchange for sweeping concessions. Public dissatisfaction with flagrant corruption and the endless war in Chechnya propelled the ex-FSB chief to the presidency in 2000—but what had really changed?

Only the names of those in charge, as far as Bolan could tell. The president ran with the oligarchs as the previous one had, while using his office and their widespread power to muffle dissent. The watchdog agency Human Rights Watch branded the man a “brutal” and “repressive” leader on par with the dictators in Pakistan and Zimbabwe. Rumor linked his backers to the assassinations of several investigative journalists, while Scotland Yard suspected Russian intelligence agents of murdering an ex-FSB whistle-blower in London.

Now, if Brognola’s information was correct, another Russian agent’s life was on the line for trying to expose corruption at the top. Bolan wasn’t sure what he could do to help, but he would try—without expecting any radical reform of a society that had been steeped in mayhem, graft and privilege since Grand Duchy of Moscow was established in the fifteenth century.

And do his best, damn right.

The Yamaguchi-gumi would be waiting when he finished up in Russia. If he finished. If he lived.

And after that?

Another pipeline would take up the slack, of course. No victory was ever final in the hellgrounds. Only those who fell were out of action. Their intent and motivation would survive.

Raw greed and malice never died.

As long as Bolan lived, there would be more work for the Executioner.

But at the moment, here and now, he had a plane to catch.

* * *

BY THE TIME Bolan arrived at Kobe Airport with a small suitcase and laptop in a carry-on, the Learjet 60 was already fueled and waiting. Its two pilots were wrapping up their preflight checklist, while a young receptionist—bright-eyed and fresh-looking despite the hour—signed Bolan in and ran his credit card.

It was a limitless Visa, embossed with the name of “Matthew Cooper,” which matched Bolan’s passport of the moment, and his California driver’s license. In fact, the alias aside, his credit card was perfectly legitimate. Whatever bills he managed to accumulate from month to month were paid in full from Stony Man Farm, in Virginia.

When all the paperwork was done, the receptionist thanked Mr. Cooper for his business and directed him outside to board his flight. Bolan hadn’t booked a return flight, since he’d have to judge the situation on the ground once he arrived. Returning to Japan might not be feasible. Indeed, he wasn’t sure that any airport service would be open to him once he’d managed to collect his package from the kidnappers who presently had custody. There were too many ifs for him to plan that far ahead.

If he was met, as planned, at Yakutsk Airport.

If the contact he had never met before provided proper gear and workable directions to his target.

If he found the agent he was on his way to save still breathing, fit to travel.

If he managed to extract the subject without getting either of them killed.

Then he could think about the quickest, safest way to put Yakutsk behind them and get out of Russia with their skins intact. And in the meantime, if Brognola’s fears proved accurate, they’d be running from a dragnet that included both official hunters and whatever private thugs the FSB was able to enlist through its connections to the Russian underworld.

A cakewalk, right.

As if.

They were northbound over the Sea of Japan when Bolan reopened Brognola’s file on his laptop. According to what he’d received, there’d been two FSB whistle-blowers. Lieutenant Sergey Dollezhal had fourteen years in harness, starting with the Federal Counterintelligence Service, or FSK, which had become the FSB in 1995. He was a legacy, in fact, the son of a former KGB colonel.

Make that had been, since his fatal shooting at the Yakutsk Airport several hours earlier.

Dollezhal’s partner and accomplice in rattling the powers that be was Sergeant Tatyana Anuchin, nine years on the job and partnered with Dollezhal for the past six. Brognola had no details on the cases they had worked, nor was it relevant. Somewhere along the line, they had grown disaffected against the corrupt shenanigans they’d witnessed on a daily basis and had reached out cautiously to Interpol.

Dramatic works of fiction commonly portrayed Interpol—the International Criminal Police Organization—as a gung-ho group of global crime fighters. In fact, from its inception back in 1923, the group has served a single purpose: to facilitate communication and cooperation between law-enforcement agencies of different nations. Its agents didn’t make arrests, nor did they prosecute suspected felons. They had no police powers at all.

But they liaised, and so it was that Interpol put Dollezhal in touch with someone from the CIA, who shared his information with the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE. A deal was struck, including terms of sanctuary in exchange for information leading to indictments and eventual testimony at trial.

It was a risky bargain overall, considering the countless possibilities of weak links in the chain. As recently as June 2010, a former president of Interpol had been convicted in South Africa on charges of accepting six-figure bribes from drug traffickers. That case wasn’t unique, and there was also leak potential with the CIA, the FBI and ICE.

But Dollezhal and Anuchin had taken the chance. For thirteen months they’d smuggled evidence and information out of Russia—files and photographs, transcripts of conversations, various financial records—all their handlers needed for indictments, though it likely wouldn’t stand in court without corroborating testimony from the two agents themselves.

Which brought them to the final phase: escape.

And it had failed.

Somehow, somewhere, they’d been exposed. A hit team had surprised them, literally at their exit flight’s departure gate with minutes left till takeoff. Dollezhal had gone down fighting in the terminal men’s room; his partner had been carried off to who knew where.

Well, someone knew.

The screws were tightened, bribes were likely offered and the information was secured. An address in Yakutsk, if it wasn’t too late by now.

But who would intervene?

The FBI and ICE were too far out of bounds, would never get cooperation from Russian authorities if those authorities had been responsible for murder and kidnapping. That left Langley, but the Company still had to work with leaders of the FSB, at least in theory, so its chief had passed the buck.

To Stony Man.

Which put Bolan on the red-eye out of Kobe, winging toward Siberia. At least it wasn’t winter, but that wouldn’t matter if he failed.

Regardless of geography, all graves were cold.

Yakutsk

YAKUTSK WAS LOCATED 280 miles south of the Arctic Circle. It had some 212,000 inhabitants, but Bolan was only looking for one as he stepped off the plane from Kobe.

Brognola’s file had named his contact as Yuri Fedchenko, age twenty-seven, a CIA contract employee presumably unknown to the authorities. He would be waiting with a car for Bolan, rented legally in Matthew Cooper’s name, together with some tools that might be useful in extracting Tatyana Anuchin from her life-or-death predicament.

And this was where the plan could fail, before Bolan had walked a dozen yards on Russian soil. There could be shooters waiting, either licensed by the state or hired to do a bit of wet work on the side, and that would be the end of it.

The end of him.

But Bolan didn’t step into an ambush when he left the plane. The only person waiting for him was his contact, not quite smiling as he reached for the soldier’s hand and pumped it once. Fedchenko’s English took some getting used to, but he managed to communicate.

There was a warehouse on the river. He supplied the address and a map of Yakutsk with the shortest route marked with a crimson felt-tipped pen. The car he’d brought for Bolan was a GAZ-31105 Volga four-door with a full tank of gas. In its trunk, examined once the Japanese pilots had made their way into the terminal, the Executioner found hardware waiting for the next phase of his task.

Bolan checked the gear, confirmed as best he could that all of it was functional, the magazines fully loaded. He couldn’t test the flash-bangs without wasting them and raising hell outside the airport terminal, but that was life.

Or death, if any of the hardware let him down.

“How many men are guarding her?” he asked Fedchenko.

“Four were seen at the airport. Whether they have more at the warehouse, I can’t say.”

“What are they? Do you know?”

The Russian looked confused. “Sorry, please?” he said.

“The crew,” Bolan said. “Are they FSB? FSO? Mafiya?”

Fedchenko shrugged and said, “It could be anyone.”

“Where can I drop you?” Bolan asked as they climbed into the sedan, Bolan behind the steering wheel.

Fedchenko named an all-night coffee shop along the route marked on his map, and Bolan reached it seven minutes later, thanked the man and then continued on his way alone.

The next potential ambush site would be the warehouse. Bolan hadn’t smelled a setup yet, but caution kept him breathing. He had known Yuri Fedchenko less than half an hour, hadn’t met the men behind him who had dealt with Brognola, and trust could only stretch so far.

There’d been a time when Bolan and Brognola both had faith in Langley, but a brutal act of treachery had changed all that. Today, the big Fed kept the Company at arm’s length when he could and triple-checked their information prior to putting agents in the field, if time allowed.

This night, there was no time to spare. No room for judgment by committee. It was either take the job and run with it, or leave a brave agent to die.

Some people Bolan knew would probably have let her go without a second thought. Why help a Russian agent, even if her information might jail felons in the States and drag some of her homeland’s dirty laundry into daylight? Russia and the U.S. had been rivals for the best part of a century, with only slight improvement under glasnost, perestroika and the rest of it. One less Russki was good, no matter how you sliced it.

Bolan disagreed.

He honored courage, sacrifice and good intentions—though it was a fact they often paved the road to hell. If he could save Tatyana Anuchin’s life and put her on a witness stand back home to land some spies and mobsters in a prison cell, Bolan felt bound to try.

But recognizing sacrifice didn’t mean that he planned to offer up himself as one. Bolan had never been a kamikaze warrior prone to suicide. He weighed the odds on every move he made, once battle had been joined, and if some of those moves seemed suicidal to the uninitiated, that was an illusion. He was thinking all the time, six moves ahead.

He did his best, anticipating what an enemy might do in any given situation, but he couldn’t know exactly what would happen. Not until he pulled a trigger and sent death streaking downrange. At that point, Bolan knew that flesh and blood had to yield to firepower.

His own included, sure.

And if he failed, that was the end of it. There’d be no time for Brognola to find another operative, get him in the air to Yakutsk before Anuchin broke or simply died under interrogation. It was now or never, all or nothing.

He drove along the waterfront, the Lena River on his right and flowing northward toward the Arctic Ocean. On its far side lay the Lena Highway, accessed during spring and summer via ferry, or across the frozen river’s ice in winter.

When Bolan spied the address he was seeking, he immediately checked for lookouts on the street and snipers on the rooftops. Finding none, he sketched the outline of a plan and drove once more around the block to verify his first impression of the target.

All that now remained was for the Executioner to act.

He would postpone consideration of the future until he had Anuchin safely in his hands.

CHAPTER THREE

Yakutsk

Bolan drove aimlessly, letting the woman calm down. She was hurting, of course. He’d seen the marks of torture on her flesh before she dressed, and while they all looked superficial, he knew he couldn’t judge her pain threshold or personal resilience on such short acquaintance.

“You’re safe now,” he told her.

“Safe?” She made a little hissing sound that could have been sarcastic laughter filtered through exhaustion. “What is safe?”

“We’re getting out of here,” he said.

“You think so?”

“That’s the plan.”

After a silent interval, she said, “I told them nothing. It was close, though. If the dry ice had arrived…”

Bolan recalled the first goon he had met, the plastic cooler leaking smoky vapor as he dropped.

“You showed them how strong you are,” Bolan said.

“Then why do I feel weak?”

“You’re losing the adrenaline rush.”

In fact, it didn’t matter if she’d cracked or not, as long as she survived and followed through on testifying when the time came. The opposition had to have a fair idea of what Anuchin and her partner had uncovered, and the use to which it would be put. The torture was to verify her knowledge, prior to silencing the final witness and securing—as they hoped—a free pass on impending charges.

“I am cold, as well.”

“That’s shock,” he said. “You need to rest. Stay warm. I wish we had a place where you could shower, maybe get some better clothes.”

“There is a place,” she told him, sounding groggy. “Keep on this way, then turn north on Ordzhonikidze Street.”

“You’ll stay awake and help me spot the sign?” he asked, not teasing her.

“I’ll try. If not, you’ll see a large Pervaya Pomosch pharmacy located on the northwest corner of the intersection. Let it be your guide.”

“And after that?”

“I’ll be awake, don’t worry. I have too much pain for sleep.”

He let that pass, knowing from personal experience that a commiserative stranger couldn’t help. Instead, he asked, “Is this a safehouse that we’re going to?”

“I hope so,” she replied, forcing the vestige of a smile.

“It isn’t FSB?” he asked.

“Private,” she informed him. “Rented with Sergey so we could meet, collect our evidence, discuss what we had learned without an ear in every corner.”

Bolan wondered if there had been more between the partners than idealism and a scheme for cleaning up the agency they served. Maybe the safehouse doubled as a love nest when they felt the need.

And if it had, so what?

If Anuchin and the late Dollezhal were hoping for a long-term cleanup of the FSB—much less the Russian Federation—Bolan pegged them as naive. Assuming they could bring down the top men, clean house beyond the normal game of hanging scapegoats out to dry, what then? Had either one of them imagined that they would be welcomed back as heroes to resume their duties for a grateful state?

Fat chance.

Still, they had tried. And Anuchin might succeed to some extent, if he could get her out of Russia in one piece and safely back to the United States.

Huge if.

He saw the pharmacy, turned north and drove another quarter mile before the woman had him turn again, and yet again, running parallel to Ordzhonikidze Street through a residential neighborhood. Six houses down, she had him pull in on the left.

“I have a key to the garage, unless they took it,” Anuchin told him, rummaging around inside her bag. “No, here it is.”

Bolan accepted it, unlocked the small attached garage and raised its door. No gunmen waited in the glare of headlights. He walked back to the GAZ and nosed it inside. Anuchin got out, found a light switch and stood by waiting until he had closed the door, then turned it on.

“In case someone is watching,” she explained unnecessarily.

“I think they would have jumped us,” Bolan said.

“You’ll think I’m paranoid,” she suggested.

“After tonight? Not even close,” he promised.

Nodding almost thankfully, she turned and led the way into the house.

Moscow

“WHAT DO YOU mean, ‘all dead’?” Eugene Marshak demanded.

“Just what I say, sir,” Stephan Levshin replied. “All dead. Our men, that is.”

Marshak might have slapped Levshin if they hadn’t been separated by three thousand miles and six time zones. As it was, he clenched his teeth and said, “Major, if you cannot express yourself more clearly, I will find another officer who can. Now, would you care to try again?”

“Yes, sir,” Levshin said stiffly. Wounded pride be damned. The man was growing arrogant. “Our escorts for the package have been killed, Colonel. Along with the examiner.”

“Better,” Marshak allowed, although the news was bad—nearly the worst it could have been. “And what about the package?”

“Gone, sir.”

So it was the very worst scenario.

“Can you explain this?” he asked.

“The mechanics of it only, sir,” his second in command replied. “At least one individual surprised them. The casings tell us he was armed with a Kalashnikov, one of the 5.45 millimeter models. Two of the escorts returned fire, with no apparent effect.”

“You think one man?” Marshak pressed him.

“Yes, sir. From the appearance of the scene.”

“I’ll have to tell our friend,” Marshak said.

“Yes, sir.”

No names, although the line was meant to be secure. Who really knew these days?

“I don’t suppose there’s any way to find out what they learned, if anything?”

“No, sir. Without the package…” Levshin left the obvious unspoken.

“No.” Marshak released a weary breath. “You must retrieve it, Major. At all costs. I will arrange for reinforcements as required.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I don’t believe the package has left the area. There’s been little time, and it may have been damaged.”

“Ah.”

Some hope, at least, if the interrogator’s ministrations made it difficult for Tatyana Anuchin to travel. Still, she’d managed to escape, aided by whom? At least one killer and a wild card in the game, unknown to Marshak. If the man—or men—were good enough to sneak up on the capture team and take them down, could he—or they—smuggle the woman out of Yakutsk?

Out of Russia?

That was unacceptable. Unthinkable.

“You understand how bad it is for all of us, unless we put it right,” Marshak reminded Levshin.

“Absolutely, sir. Our friend’s men failed you. I will not.”

“See that you don’t,” Marshak replied, and cut the link.

Six dead in Yakutsk now, counting the traitor Dollezhal. Digging so many graves in permafrost was tiresome, but there had to be room enough for half a dozen bodies in the Lena, surely. Failing that, Stephan could drop them down a mine shaft.

Out of sight, and who would give a damn?

Grigory Rybakov, of course. Four of the dead were his men, out on loan to help the FSB and cover his own ass at the same time. To plug the leak before it drowned them all.

And how bad would it be if Sergeant Anuchin escaped?

Russia’s constitution banned extradition of citizens to stand trial abroad, but in rare cases trial on foreign charges might proceed in Russian courts, with “necessary foreign experts” participating in the prosecution. That wouldn’t save Rybakov’s men in the States or in Europe, of course, but Marshak cared little for them.

He was concerned about himself, the damage to his reputation, his career—and yes, to his accumulated fortune—if the bitch who had betrayed him wasn’t found and silenced. He could deal with an internal inquiry, assisted by superiors who had as much or more to lose than Marshak did.

But if the case went public, he was lost.

A colonel made a nice fat sacrifice for others higher up the chain of rank. A general, perhaps, or someone in the prime minister’s cabinet. Maybe the prime minister himself?

Before any of his superiors went down, they would be pleased to let him take the fall, resign in shame, perhaps receive a token prison term. There’d be a pension of some sort when he was finally paroled, of course…unless he had an accident in jail, or even prior to trial. Such things weren’t unknown in Russia.

They were commonplace, in fact.

The answer was to find Anuchin and destroy her, with the man or men who cared enough to rescue her. And those who had employed them, if he had the opportunity.

And it had to be accomplished soon.

* * *

WHILE ANUCHIN showered, Bolan used his cell phone for a call to Yakutsk Airport. The Russian agent had gone through the telephone directory with him and had compiled a short list of three charter airlines operating from the local airport.

Bolan passed on Yakutskiye Avialinii, which Anuchin described as an official airport subsidiary, and tried his luck with the second company in line. Private Jets Charter Service had an English-language website and an operator who agreed that they could fly two passengers to Tokyo aboard a Dassault Falcon 50 or a Hawker 800 on three hours’ notice for nine thousand dollars U.S.

The soldier put the nonrefundable deposit on his Visa card, and drifted to the bathroom, knocking hard enough for her to hear him in the shower.

“Almost done,” she told him.

“Take your time,” he called back through the door. “Our flight takes off at seven-thirty.”

She turned the shower off and said, “You’ve booked a plane?”

“It’s set,” he answered. “All we have to do is check in with their booking agent at the terminal.”

There was silence from Anuchin then, except for sounds of rustling fabric. Bolan guessed a towel, then clothing she had taken from a closet in the safehouse. Feeling like a voyeur, he retreated to the living room.

She joined him moments later, dressed in slacks, a blouse and sweater, with a towel around her head. There was a certain stiffness to her movements, which was no surprise after the ordeal she’d been through.

Still, she declared, “That’s better.”

“You can rest awhile before we go,” Bolan said. “Longer, on the flight.”

“They must have asked you questions.”

“Just my name, and whether I could pay,” Bolan replied.

“Your name. Which is…?”

They hadn’t got around to formal introductions yet. “Matt Cooper,” Bolan said. “And yours, I know.”

“Of course, you must. You’re CIA?” she asked.

“A cousin, several times removed.”

“You realize the airport will be watched,” she said.

“I know it’s possible.”

“Call it a certainty. They’ve caught me once already there,” she stated. “You have no reinforcements?”

“No,” he said. “Just me.”

“I fear it’s hopeless, then,” she told him.

“That’s the spirit.”

Anuchin sat and began to dry her short hair with the towel.

“There are two ways to reach or leave Yakutsk,” she said. “If not by air, then over the Kolyma Highway, which begins at Nizhny Bestyakh, on the east bank of the Lena. We can only reach Nizhny Bestyakh by ferry, which my enemies will also watch.”

“Let’s try the charter first,” Bolan replied, “before we count it out.”

“Of course,” she said. “But you must be prepared to fail.”

“If that’s the way you feel,” he said, “you should have thought about it at the start, before you put your own neck and your partner’s on the chopping block.”

That obviously stung her, but she took it, nodding.

“You’re correct. We were a pair of fools.”

“It’s never foolish when you try to do the right thing,” Bolan said. “Sometimes it has a price, but that’s the way things work.”

“A great price, yes?” Anuchin said. “First, Sergey’s life. Now yours and mine.”

“We’re not dead yet,” Bolan reminded her. “A little confidence could help you stay alive. But if you’re giving up, why don’t you tell me now. I don’t need any deadweight on my shoulders while I’m running.”

“Confidence, of course,” she said. “And weapons, yes?”

“I’ve got a fair stash from the warehouse,” Bolan said.

She tried a smile and said, “Let’s see them, then.”

* * *

NIKOLAY MILESCU SIPPED a cup of bitter coffee he had purchased at a kiosk in the international arrivals and departures terminal, watching the travelers who scurried past him, hoping for a glimpse of a familiar face—the person he’d been sent to capture, or to kill, if all else failed.

Milescu had a photo on his cell phone of the woman he was hunting. She wasn’t the type he favored, though he wouldn’t kick her out of bed. Too bad for her, she’d never get to know him in that way and learn how he could please a woman.

All the future held in store for her was pain.

The problem: she was hard to hold.

In fact, the woman had been picked up once already, at that very airport, but she had been liberated by a man or men who left the snatch team dead. Milescu’s boss said one man was responsible, but why take chances? So he’d sent four other guns along, put Milescu in charge and promised them a fat reward if they secured the fugitives.

Alive or dead.

Milescu personally didn’t think it likely that the woman would return to catch another flight, after she had been kidnapped from the terminal the previous night, but people frequently did stupid things. He would remain alert and stay in contact with his soldiers, placed strategically around the airport.

With that in mind, he palmed his Motorola phone, the Tundra model that combined normal calling and web access with push-to-talk service, effectively making the cell phone a small walkie-talkie. Keying the button to contact all four men at once, he commanded, “Report in by number.”

“Number two,” Vasily Ryumin answered. “Nothing yet in the domestic terminal.”

“Three here,” Naum Izvolsky said. “Baggage claim is clear.”

“Number four,” Viktor Gramotkin replied. “Nothing but peasants in the parking lot.”

Milescu waited to hear from Gennady Stolypin, stationed on the roof to watch the charter hangars through binoculars. When half a minute passed with no response, he keyed the phone again.

“Waiting for check-in, Number Five.”

“Hold on,” Stolypin answered him belatedly, ignoring all decorum. “I have someone just arriving… Can’t see who it is yet.”

“Where?” Milescu asked. “Which hangar?”

“Private Jets,” Stolypin answered. “Wait a second, while I… It’s a GAZ four-door. Can’t say what model from this distance. There, it’s stopped. The driver’s getting out…a man. And now, a woman. Let me check the photo. Yes! It’s her! I can take them down from here!”

Stolypin had a VSK-94 sniper’s rifle with him on the roof, the silenced model, semiautomatic, with a 20-round box magazine of 9 mm SPP rounds.

“No!” Milescu snapped over his walkie-talkie, up and moving toward the nearest exit. “Do not fire! You know the order.”

“Yes,” Stolypin answered back. “Alive or dead.”

“With higher pay if she’s alive. Just watch and wait, until we get there.” To the others then, in case they weren’t in motion yet, he said, “All hands to Private Jets, south of the terminal!”

His men confirmed with clicking signals, staying off the air. They would be closing on the target, moving swiftly but without a frantic sprint to draw attention from the terminal’s police officers.

Milescu reckoned he should thank the woman, if he got the chance. Her desperate stupidity had saved him from a long day sitting at the airport, wasting time while someone else hogged all the glory.

Now, his task was simple—neutralize the woman’s escort, one way or another, and collect her for the boss. Take both alive, if possible.

And deliver them to a fate worse than death.

Private Jets Charter Service

“I DON’T SEE ANYONE,” Tatyana said. “Do you?”

“Not yet,” Bolan replied.

Which proved precisely nothing. They could be under surveillance from a distance, and he wouldn’t know it until bullets from a sniper’s rifle dropped them on the tarmac, dead or dying by the time the echo of the shots arrived. The Executioner had done that sort of work himself, times beyond counting, and he knew the risks involved.

But sitting in the sedan, outside the hangar, wouldn’t keep them safe.

“Sit tight a minute,” Bolan said, and stepped out of the car. He left the key in the ignition for her, just in case, but saw no adversaries as he scanned the runway. No one lurking in the hangar’s shadow. No vehicles close enough to box them in.

The problem now: they had to discard their weapons prior to boarding, or they’d run afoul of customs when they got to Tokyo. Japanese law forbade private possession of firearms, except for strictly regulated sporting shotguns and air rifles, with maximum penalties of ten years in prison and a fine of one million yen per offense.

Bolan nodded, alert as Anuchin stepped out of the car. The hangar stood no more than thirty feet away, their Hawker 800 already rolled out and prepared for departure. In profile, it was nearly eight feet shorter than the Learjet 60 Bolan had arrived on, but its wingspan ten feet greater.

Eighteen minutes to boarding, by Bolan’s watch, if they got through the sign-in procedure on time. And from there—

Bolan knew a curse in Russian when he heard one. He followed Anuchin’s gaze and saw two men approaching at a run from the direction of the airport terminal. As he watched, a third man cleared the exit, laboring to catch the other two.

So much for signing in.

“Come on!” he snapped, turning back toward the car. When he was halfway there, a sharp crack on the pavement marked a near-miss from a distant rifle, somewhere high and well beyond the runners.

Bolan dropped into the driver’s seat and gunned the sedan’s engine. Anuchin was a second later, and she had to slam her door as he was wheeling out of there, tires screeching on concrete. The choice was fight or flight, and Bolan picked the option that would maximize their chances of survival with a long-range shooter in the mix.

He fled.

The runners weren’t in range to use whatever weapons they were packing as he roared away from them. The rifleman had no such handicap, however, and his second shot glanced off the roof of their vehicle with a resounding bang!

Still no sound from the piece itself, and since the sedan couldn’t aspire to supersonic speed, that meant the rifle had a sound suppressor. Its shots wouldn’t alert police inside the terminal unless he took a hit and crashed the car.

In which case, Bolan figured, they were dead.

Anuchin had retrieved one of the weapons liberated from her captors, a compact PP-19 Bizon submachine gun, but it wouldn’t do her any good unless he stopped the car, or someone tried to cut them off before they cleared the airport’s ring of access roads.

Which, in the circumstances, was entirely possible.

A last shot from the sniper struck their trunk before Bolan swung left around a cargo terminal, putting its bulk between the shooter and himself. Another moment put them on the highway leading back to Yakutsk, with no evident pursuit.

At least, not yet.

“So, we’re not flying out,” Anuchin said.

“Not today,” Bolan agreed.

“And we cannot hide in Yakutsk.”

“I wouldn’t like the odds,” he said.

She slumped. “In that case, there is nothing left except the Road of Bones.”

CHAPTER FOUR

First thing, they ditched the sedan their enemies had seen, however briefly, at the airport. Its replacement was a four-door Lada Priora, stolen from the Kruzhalo shopping center along with a spare set of license plates to complete the short-term disguise. That done, when they were relatively safe, Anuchin briefed Bolan on what lay ahead once they crossed the Lena River.

“They will be watching the ferry,” she cautioned. “They know that we have no way out now, except overland, which means the Kolyma Highway.”

“I don’t fancy a swim with the gear,” Bolan told her.

“No, that can’t be done. It’s too far and too cold, even this time of year. We’ll require a small charter to take us across. Leave the car in Yakutsk and make other arrangements in Nizhny Bestyakh.”

“What kind of arrangements?” Bolan asked.

“Something rugged, for the road ahead,” Anuchin said. “If we had a Lada Niva we could try it, but I think a motorcycle is more suitable. Also much easier to find on such short notice. You can ride on two wheels?”

“Not a problem,” Bolan said. “But what’s this thing about a road of bones?”

“Officially,” she said, “it’s the M56 Kolyma Highway, linking Yakutsk and Nizhny Bestyakh to Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. The distance is something over two thousand kilometers, close to thirteen hundred miles by your reckoning. Those who live along the highway call it Trassa—the Route. They need no other name, since it is literally the only road in the district.”

“Where do the bones come in?” Bolan asked.

“Stalin ordered construction of the highway in 1932, using inmates from the Sevvostlag, the Northeastern Corrective Labor Camps. Work continued using gulag labor until 1953, when the highway reached Magadan—a labor camp itself, in those days—and Stalin, at last, had the decency to die. We call the highway Road of Bones for those who died while building it and were buried beneath or beside it. How many? Who knows?”

“So, it’s a straight shot on this road from Nizhny Bestyakh to Magadan?” Bolan asked.

“Hardly straight,” Anuchin replied. “There are rivers to cross, with or without bridges, and parts of the so-called highway are crumbling away. Between us and Magadan there are two villages, Tomtor and Oymyakon. Both claim to be the coldest place on Earth, in winter. This time of year, they’re simply…chilly.”

“So, aside from special wheels, we’ll need new clothes,” Bolan observed.

“And camping gear, if we can carry it.”

“One bike or two?” Bolan asked.

Looking embarrassed, Anuchin said, “I’ve never driven one.”

“Okay,” Bolan replied. “That limits how much we can pack, keeping the weapons.”

Bolan tried working on the calculation in his head. A trip of thirteen hundred miles on normal roads, with stops for gas and minimal rest, should take about one day at a steady speed of sixty miles per hour. Slow it down for the terrain that Anuchin had described, however, and the clock went out the window. Add the fact that they would almost certainly be hunted, once her enemies—now Bolan’s—found out where they’d gone, and you were looking at a road trip on Route 666.

A little slice of hell on Earth.

The soldier considered it and asked, “When do we start?”

* * *

“I’M WONDERING,” Stephan Levshin said, “whether any of you need to be alive.”

The five men facing him looked nervous, rightly so, since they had failed at what was meant to be a relatively simple task. Although he stood alone before them, and all five of them were armed, Levshin was unafraid. These so-called soldiers were disgraced and dared not lift a hand against the man who pulled their strings.

When his remark produced no comment, only shifting eyes and feet, he said, “You had the targets literally in your sights, but let them slip away. How does that happen? Does anyone care to explain your failure?”

Grudgingly, the leader of the party—Nikolay Milescu—answered. “They went to a charter company,” he said. “We spotted them outside the terminal, but not in time. When we moved in, they drove away.”

“Alerted by the clumsiness of your approach,” Levshin said. “And since you did not have a vehicle nearby, pursuit was hopeless. Right?”

Milescu nodded miserably. “Yes, sir.”

“Which one of you was the sniper?” Levshin asked.

A hand went up. Its rat-faced owner said, “I was,” remembering to add the “sir” a split second too late.

“What is your name?”

“Stolypin, sir. Gennady.”

“Have you practiced with your weapon?” Levshin pressed him.

“I’m familiar with it, sir.”

“What was the range from which you fired this morning?”

“Say one hundred meters, sir,” the sharpshooter replied.

“Using a telescopic sight?”

“Yes, sir,” Stolypin replied.

“And yet, you missed—what was it? Three times?”

“No, sir,” Stolypin said.

“No? You didn’t miss three times?”

“I missed the man, sir. Once, as he was running.”

“And your other two shots? What became of them?”

“I hit the car both times, sir.”

“Did it stop?” Levshin asked.

Stolypin swallowed hard. “No, sir.”

“Another failure, then,” Levshin said. “What shall I tell Moscow, when I am asked if you deserve to be employed? More to the point, if you deserve to live?”

“We can fix it,” Milescu said, sounding desperate.

“How will you do that?” Levshin challenged him. “Invent a time machine and go back to the moment when your idiot incompetence spoiled everything?”

“No, sir,” the gunman said, “but we can find them. We can bring them in or kill them, as you like.”

“So, are you psychic now? If you combine your five pea-brains, can you reach out and tell me where the targets are right now?” Levshin asked.

Milescu swallowed the sarcasm and replied, “They need to get away from Yakutsk, sir. If they can’t fly, that means they have to cross the river. Travel east. There are no airstrips. They must drive to Magadan, and either sail from there or fly from Sokol Airport.”

“And your plan,” Levshin replied, “is…what, exactly?”

“Stop them at the Lena crossing, sir. Or, if we miss them there—”

“Meaning you’ve failed again,” Levshin said, interrupting.

“—then we fly ahead to Magadan and meet them when they get there, sir.”

“I think not,” Levshin said. “If you can’t catch them on the ferry, if that very simple task defeats you, I don’t think that you deserve a flight to Magadan. If that happens—if you should fail again, and your superiors decide to let you live—you’ll follow up and take them on the road. The trip would do you good, I think. Make men of you, perhaps.”

Milescu muttered something that was probably, “Yes, sir,” while his companions stood slump-shouldered, staring at their shoes.

“Go on now,” Levshin ordered. “And if any of you have religion, pray you don’t fuck up again.”

* * *

THE LENA FERRY was a death trap. Bolan knew that if they weren’t ambushed on arrival at the dock, or killed on board, they would find shooters waiting for them on arrival in Nizhny Bestyakh. No matter how he broke it down, they had to find another way across the river.

And with no bridge anywhere nearby, that meant a charter boat.

Another problem: if their enemies had any sense at all, they wouldn’t just stake out the ferry terminal; they’d also have watchers on the Yakutsk waterfront, to head off any end-runs via private boats. That meant contact with a pilot couldn’t happen on the docks.

Where else would they find sailors at that hour of the morning?

“Drinking breakfast,” Anuchin offered. “Vodka is the Russian equalizer.”

There was no shortage of taverns in Yakutsk, as Bolan soon discovered. Bars catering to river boatmen were located near the waterfront, but not directly on the docks, dispensing food and alcohol around the clock as crews departed or arrived on varied schedules. In winter, when the river froze, Bolan supposed they were a place for stranded sailors to commiserate over the tedium of being stuck on shore.

In any case, he didn’t think the hunters seeking Anuchin would be looking for her in saloons at breakfast time.

The first place that they tried had two early customers, both of them obvious holdovers from the previous night, well advanced in pursuit of oblivion. The second bar had better prospects—six in all—and two of them were relatively late arrivals, only warming up their shot glasses.

Anuchin donned a smile and approached the better-looking of the nearly sober pair, a robust forty-something character with gray hair showing underneath a yachtsman’s cap that had seen better days. Hell, make it better years. Bolan stood by while she confirmed the skipper could speak English, more or less, then led him to a table in the corner nearest to the tavern’s door.

“You want to go Nizhny Bestyakh, but not on ferry, eh?” The captain smiled. “Afraid someone will see you, da? Maybe a lovers’ getaway?”

“I see we can’t fool you,” she said, flicking a glance toward Bolan that was shy and bawdy, all at once. Some actress. “Naturally, we would expect to pay a premium for causing you such inconvenience.”

The skipper beamed. “I still remember love, you know,” he said. “But I must also eat and pay for fuel, eh? So…six thousand rubles?”

Something like two hundred U.S. dollars. Bolan nodded, told him, “Done,” and peeled off a dozen 500-ruble notes.

Their new best friend in town—Yevgeny Glushko—made the money disappear into a pocket and asked Anuchin, “So, when did you wish to go?”

“There’s no time like the present, eh?” she answered.

“You’re in luck!” Glushko declared. “My boat is fueled and ready. We can leave at once.”

“You have a car?” Bolan asked.

“Car? No car. I walk from pier.”

“Relax,” Bolan replied. “I’ll drive.”

Moscow: 3:22 a.m.

FOR BREAKFAST, Colonel Eugene Marshak had a glass of bacon-flavored vodka. He regretted that he had no eggs to go along with it, but since real food meant waking up his wife, he settled for another glass of bacon.

Waiting for the cursed telephone to ring.

He wasn’t drunk, couldn’t allow himself that luxury as long as loose ends in Yakutsk were threatening to weave a noose around his neck. Marshak’s superiors were watching him—perhaps a few of them were losing sleep, as well—and if he didn’t solve the problem soon, that task would pass to other, more capable hands.

Which meant the end of him, for all practical purposes. He likely wouldn’t be imprisoned, as was common in the bad old days, but being stripped of rank and influence was tantamount to social death. He would be unemployable, beyond some menial position. He would lose the Moscow flat, his summer dacha on the coast.

Mariska would most certainly abandon him, which might turn out to be the only bright spot in the whole disaster. She could leave with nothing, since there would be nothing left to steal, and Marshak could descend into an alcoholic haze without her shrill, incessant carping to disturb him.

Or he could assert himself, demand more of his soldiers in the field and solve the problem now, before it spun further beyond control.

The phone rang once, and Marshak scooped it up. “Yes!”

“I’m afraid there’s been another problem, sir,” Stephan Levshin told him.

“Why am I not surprised?” Marshak replied with acid in his voice. “Explain yourself.”

“I sent five men to watch the airport,” Levshin said. “The targets came, but managed to evade them.”

“Five against how many?” Marshak asked.

“Two, sir. The woman and a man.”

“Were shots fired?”

“I’ve contained it, sir,” Levshin said.

“Contained it how?”

“A silencer was used. The only damage was to the escaping vehicle.”

“So, then, at least this was a quiet failure, eh? Unlike the last one,” Marshak said.

Levshin had no response to that. The empty phone line hummed and crackled until Marshak spoke again.

“Do you at least have some idea of where they’re going? What they hope to do?”

“They must get out of Yakutsk to survive, sir,” Levshin said. “They cannot fly, which only leaves the road.”

“Which road?” Marshak demanded.

“Sir, there’s only one from here.”

Marshak considered that and understood. “To Magadan, is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A cold and lonely road, as I recall,” Marshak said.

“No escape, sir. That’s a promise.”

“Which you should be careful not to break,” Marshak advised.

There was more silence on the far end of the line. This time, it brought a smile to Marshak’s face. It felt good to intimidate subordinates, remind them of their proper place.

To stress his point, he declared, “I will be following your progress, Stephan. If it seems to me that you require further assistance, it will be provided.”

Levshin sounded nervous as he answered, “Sir, I’m confident that I can solve this problem with the staff on hand.”

“A staff reduced by careless losses, as it is,” Marshak replied. “If I decide to send you help, you’ll be advised.”

“Yes, sir.” A nice hint of dejection was audible in his voice.

“And, Stephan?”

“Yes, sir?”

“You realize that both of us are under scrutiny. If you fail, I am judged a failure.”

“Sir—”

“And I will not go down alone.”

Marshak replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle, poured himself another shot of bacon and began rehearsing his report to his superiors.

* * *

THEIR VESSEL WAS the Zarya, which Bolan knew meant “sunrise.” It was forty-odd-feet long and might have been a trawler once, before it was converted to river commerce. Several years had passed since it was painted, and the metal fittings didn’t gleam, but it felt solid underfoot and there was power in the engine room, once Glushko got it rumbling.

They’d been doubly cautious on the waterfront, leaving the car a long block from the Zarya’s berth and walking in with weapons close at hand. If they were spotted, no one tried to make a move. Bolan allowed himself to hope the hostile forces might be spread too thin to cover every point of exit from Yakutsk, but he and Anuchin were agreed to be prepared for trouble on the other side, when they arrived.

As for the possibility of being hit before they got across…well, they would have to wait and see.

When they had cleared the dock, he found some privacy and dialed Brognola’s number on his satellite phone. It was fourteen hours earlier in Washington—say, 6:40 p.m.—so he tried the home number and heard it ring twice before the big Fed picked up.

“Are we scrambled?” Bolan asked.

“Wait one.” A click on the line told him his old friend had engaged the scrambler, turning their words to gibberish for any eavesdroppers between D.C. and the Sakha Republic. “Okay. Are you clear?”

“Change of plans,” Bolan said. “We got blocked at the airport.”

“So, now what?” Brognola asked.

“Now we improvise,” Bolan replied. “We’ll be traveling overland.”

The big Fed processed that, maybe called up a map in his mind. “That’s a long way to run,” he observed, “if they’re dogging you.”

“Without wings,” Bolan told him, “it’s all that we’ve got.”

“Roger that. And you’re coming out…where?”

“Magadan,” Bolan said.

“Okay. Hang on a second.” He came back seconds later: “They have an airport, Sokol. You can catch Alaska Airlines there.”

“Unless it’s covered,” Bolan said.

“You’re right. They wouldn’t be that careless,” Brognola agreed. “It’s also on the Sea of Okhotsk, so you’ve got a clear shot out to the Pacific, once you’re past the Kuril Islands.”

“Quite a swim,” Bolan said. “What is that, about five thousand miles to San Francisco?”

“Smart-ass. I was thinking we’d have someone meet you,” Brognola replied.

“Sounds better,” Bolan admitted, “but they’ll likely meet with opposition. Maybe the official kind.”

“I’ll have a word with someone at the Pentagon and see what they can slip under the radar, so to speak.”

“Appreciate it,” Bolan said. “I’ll try to stay in touch as we proceed.”

He didn’t need to say what it would mean if there was no callback. The downside of a covert op on hostile ground was understood, a given, and remained unspoken. Bolan wasn’t superstitious in the least, but there was nothing to be gained by tempting fate.

“Stay frosty, eh?” Brognola said.

“We may not have a choice,” Bolan replied. “Siberia, you know?” He cut the link and found Anuchin watching him. “I’m working on a lift, from Magadan,” he said, and thought now all they had to do was make it there.

* * *

MARSHAK HAD WAITED as long as he dared. The others wouldn’t thank him for letting them sleep, if matters spun out of control in the meantime.

He had arranged a three-way conference call, the lines secure against all outside listeners, although Marshak himself was taping every word. It was a hedge against disaster. Call it life insurance.

His companions on the line were Kliment Gabritschevsky, second deputy director of the Ministry of the Interior, with responsibility for the Public Security Service; and Grigory Rybakov, pakhan—“godfather”—of the Izmaylovskaya gang, Moscow’s oldest and strongest clan of the Mafiya. Between them, they wielded more power than most elected officials in Russia.

“What news from the East?” Gabritschevsky inquired when they had disposed of the curt salutations.

“A new disappointment, I fear,” Marshak said. “The traitor returned to Yakutsk Airport with an accomplice, but Stephan’s soldiers were unable to detain them.”

A jab at Rybakov, since he’d supplied the man Levshin was using in Yakutsk. The mobster took it silently, while Gabritschevsky said, “That’s troubling, Colonel. If you can’t even contain two people, what does that say for the state of national security?”

“They are contained, Deputy Minister. If they remain in Yakutsk, I will root them out. If they attempt to flee, they have a single avenue remaining.”

“Ah. The Road of Bones,” Gabritschevsky said.

“That’s correct, sir.”

“Listen,” Rybakov cut in. “If you need more soldiers on the ground out there, just say so.”

“Four are dead already,” Marshak answered. “Five, with the interrogator. I may need real soldiers if you want the job done properly.”

“What do you have in mind?” Gabritschevsky asked.

“Spetsnaz,” Marshak said, the Russian special purpose regiment, trained in counterterrorist techniques and black ops that included hostage rescue, sabotage and targeted assassination.

“That’s a big step,” Gabritschevsky cautioned.

“It’s a big fall, if they get away,” Marshak replied.

Rybakov spoke up to say, “You mentioned an accomplice.”

“Yes.”

“Is this the man who killed my people?” Rybakov asked.

“I believe so,” Marshak told him. “There’s no proof, of course, but he is traveling with the woman.”

“Proof enough,” Rybakov said. “I want his head.”

“Talk to your men,” Marshak replied. “The ones still living. This makes twice they’ve let him slip away.”

“Perhaps I should send Boris out to supervise,” Rybakov said, referring to his second in command, a thug named Boris Struve.

“Send who you like,” Marshak said. “But the FSB retains command, unless I hear an order to the contrary from my superiors.”

Rybakov remained silent, but Gabritschevsky said, “We’ll leave the chain of command intact, for now. Use Spetsnaz sparingly, if you require its services. Nothing to draw attention, eh?”

“I understand, sir,” Marshak said.

“And get results!” the deputy minister commanded. “We’re all depending on it.”

“As you say, sir.”

Marshak’s hand was steady as the other lines went dead, but there was no mistaking Gabritschevsky’s meaning.

He was running out of time.

CHAPTER FIVE

Bolan and Anuchin took turns watching the docks through Captain Glushko’s old Zeiss binoculars as the Zarya completed its river crossing. There were no uniformed police officers in view, nor any gunmen obviously waiting for a chance to shoot them down before they landed on the river’s eastern shore.

Could slipping out of Yakutsk be that easy?

Bolan guessed that it couldn’t.

“They may be watching us from hiding,” Anuchin said, speaking his thoughts aloud.

He nodded. “It’s definitely possible.”

Bolan knew next to nothing about law enforcement in the Sakha Republic or Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District, but he assumed there had to be some cops assigned to Nizhny Bestyakh. Even if they were bought and paid for by the Mafiya, the FSB, whoever, they would still be placed in an embarrassing position by an open firefight on the waterfront. His enemies, if they were halfway smart, might choose to spot Bolan and Anuchin, trail them into town and choose a spot where they could close the trap without dozens of witnesses.

Or maybe they had dropped the ball again.

In which case, Bolan and the woman had an edge. They couldn’t count on any great head start, but if they had even a little time to spare, using it wisely was a must.

“Be ready when we disembark,” Bolan advised her. “If someone makes a move—”

“Hit back,” she finished for him.

“Right. And otherwise—”

“Head for the motorcycle shop.”

Their skipper had informed them of the shop’s location, with a hand-drawn map to clarify, noting that cycles could be bought or rented from the owner, who—no great surprise—was one of Glushko’s oldest friends.

“Be sure you talk to Ilya,” he insisted. “Tell him that I send you. He give you good price.”

Bolan had thanked him for the tip and watched the skipper closely to make sure he didn’t phone ahead. Their pose as lovers on a hasty getaway was thin, at best, and if the Zarya’s captain caught a whiff of bounty money he might sell them out.

Why not? A pair of strangers—one of them a foreigner, at that—meant nothing to him when his bills came due. Glushko was local, had to live in Yakutsk after they were gone. Why borrow trouble from the Mob or the authorities if he could bag a double payday from a single river crossing?

But the skipper didn’t make a call.

Which, naturally, didn’t mean he wouldn’t, once they cleared his deck. A quick heads-up to someone, maybe old friend Ilya at the motorcycle shop, and any soldiers waiting for them in the general vicinity could gather for the kill.

And it would have to be a kill. That much had been agreed. Anuchin was dead set against enduring more interrogation, and surrender ran against the grain for Bolan, going back to schoolyard brawls in childhood. Anyone who tried to stop them now would pay a price in blood.

Bolan could feel the Zarya slowing, hear its engines winding down as Glushko began his docking maneuvers. Nothing fancy for the old tub, just a gentle sidling in against a pier with old tires hanging off the side to serve as bumpers. When the hull and rubber kissed, a teenage boy came running up to help Glushko secure the mooring lines.

The soldier checked out the wharf rats who surrounded them. A motley gang of fishermen, dock hands and sailors, people looking for a bargain at the nearby fish stalls. Any one of them could have a weapon tucked away beneath a coat, a shawl or sweater. Any pair of eyes that swept the Zarya’s deck could be comparing Anuchin’s face to photographs they’d seen.

Bolan shook hands with Captain Glushko on the pier, knowing they’d never meet again, then followed Anuchin into town.

Aboard the Lena Ferry: 9:19 a.m.

“THIS JOB IS SHIT,” Viktor Gramotkin muttered.

“Just be thankful that you have a job,” Nikolay Milescu said. “That your tiny brain is still inside your head.”

“It’s not my fault Stolypin missed his damned shot at the airport,” Gramotkin said. “If I’d had the rifle—”

“Yes. You talk a good fight,” Milescu said. “Tell Levshin about it, why don’t you?”

“That bastard? I’m not scared of him.”

“Of course not,” Milescu said. “We all saw the way you put him in his place.”

“You wait. The next time he—”

“Yes, yes. Shut up and take another turn around the deck downstairs.”

“You think we missed them?” Gramotkin asked him. “Nikolay, they missed the goddamn boat!”

“Check, anyway, and stop your bitching.”

Gramotkin left him, grumbling as he moved off toward the nearest stairwell.

Thankful for the respite from complaints, Milescu scanned the upper deck once more, confirming what he knew without a second look.

A wasted effort.

They’d been first aboard the ferry when it left Yakutsk, and studied every face that boarded after them. The female sergeant from the FSB wasn’t among them, and it therefore made no sense to think her bodyguard was on the boat, either.

But they had orders. They would ride the ferry, watch and wait, until a message came from Yakutsk or from Nizhny Bestyakh to tell them the targets were spotted. Then, depending on the ferry’s position, they would either proceed at a snail’s pace to join in the hunt, or waste more time while the boat unloaded, then reloaded and retraced its path.

Milescu recognized the need for consequences when they had bungled the job at the airport in Yakutsk. Another boss might have killed them on the spot—or at least killed Stolypin, for missing his shots—but Levshin had given them a second chance of sorts. Milescu only hoped they wouldn’t be stuck midriver on the ferry when the targets showed themselves again.

There was, of course, no question that the runners would be caught. Even if they somehow evaded capture in Nizhny Bestyakh, where could they go? One miserable road was their only escape route, and how would they travel? In some junker bought or stolen off the streets? Where did they hope to go, with soldiers behind them and more waiting ahead in Magadan?

Milescu almost felt sorry for the stupid traitor and the stranger who had volunteered to help her. What a lousy bargain he had made, at any price.

Like Grigory Rybakov, Milescu thought, loaning out his soldiers to the FSB. What did the godfather hope to gain by meddling in the cloak-and-dagger world of secret agents? Wasn’t running Moscow’s underground economy sufficient challenge?

Still, it was not Milescu’s place to question orders. He had come this far from Kapotnya’s filthy streets, in the southeastern quarter of Moscow, by following directives from older, vastly richer men. Why would he break the pattern now, when it would only leave him destitute at best—or, far more likely, get him killed?

If he was told to ride the ferry day and night until the river froze, then he would ride the ferry, waiting for the targets to reveal themselves. And he would keep any objections to himself. Let Viktor Gramotkin be the lightning rod, if any word of disaffection found its way to Stephan Levshin or the boss of the Izmaylovskaya clan.

Let the blow fall on him, while Milescu smiled all the way to the bank.

* * *

YEVGENY GLUSHKO’S MAP was accurate. It led Bolan and Anuchin to the motorcycle shop, located eight blocks from the waterfront, sandwiched between a restaurant and tannery. The warring smells of spicy food and curing hides combined for an assault on the soldier’s nostrils as he watched the cycle shop from half a block away.

Once again, he found no obvious ambush waiting there.

“Ready?” he asked Anuchin.

“Ready,” she said, slipping a hand inside the pocket of her long coat where a pistol was concealed. She might have trouble getting to the submachine gun hidden in her heavy shoulder bag, but if it went to hell within the next few seconds, Bolan thought he could take up the slack with his Kalashnikov.

He stepped out of the alley first, with Anuchin covering his back, then felt her take a place beside him as they crossed the street. Pedestrians passed by, ignoring them. Bolan relaxed a little as they reached the shop and stepped across its threshold, but he still remained on full alert.

A scruffy guy in greasy coveralls, his gray hair tied back into a ponytail, approached them. Anuchin mentioned Glushko’s name and asked for Ilya, whereupon the man nodded and answered her in what appeared to be a Russian dialect.

Bolan knew he had a choice to make: reveal himself as a foreigner, or let Anuchin make the deal and hope it went all right. Without impugning her ability to rent a motorcycle, Bolan was the one who had to drive it, so the choice was made.

“English?” he asked the shop’s proprietor.

“Yes. I speak.”

“We’re heading east on the Kolyma Highway,” Bolan told him. “We need a bike that can handle the road with two people and some gear aboard.”

“The Road of Bones, eh?” Ilya answered, looking at the two of them as if they’d lost their minds. “Maybe a helicopter you should rent and fly to Magadan.”

“We want to try the scenic route,” Bolan replied. “Do you have something suitable in stock?”

“Best bike in shop for what you say is BMW,” Ilya advised. “The R1200GS dual-sport model. Come this way, I show.”

They followed Ilya to the rear of his shop, past various bikes, until he stopped before a black-and-silver machine with the familiar BMW logo on its fuel tank. Like most dual-sport bikes—also known as “on-off road” models—the R1200GS had heavy-duty suspension front and back, with fenders elevated well above the knobby tires. It had an oversize eight-gallon tank, feeding an 1170 cc two-cylinder engine. The touring package included dual stainless-steel panniers—the equivalent of saddlebags—and a rack for a pillion bag or other gear in back. The whole package measured roughly six feet long, with its swooped seat for two, three feet off the ground.

“It looks good,” Bolan told him, “but I’ll need to take it for a test drive.”

“Sure, sure,” Ilya said. “Your lady is collateral, okay?”

It had been a while since Bolan went two-wheeling, but it came back to him in a rush once he was mounted on the BMW. He rolled out of the shop in first gear, checked both ways before he nosed into traffic, then opened up the engine as he circled a couple of blocks and returned. It shifted smoothly and he had no difficulty with the brakes or throttle. Bolan estimated that the bike weighed something like 450 pounds with nothing packed in the panniers, and tried to guess how it would handle once it had been loaded, with a second passenger riding behind him.

There was literally no time like the present to find out.

Returning to the shop, he told Ilya, “I like it. So, how much?”

Ilya considered Bolan’s question, as if it had never crossed his mind before. At last, he said, “Five hundred thousand rubles. You call it sixteen grand, U.S.”

“I call it sold,” Bolan said with a smile.

Washington, D.C.: 7:35 p.m.

HAl BROGNOLA double-checked his time zones from the World Clock website on his laptop, and confirmed that it was 3:35 a.m. in Moscow. He felt a certain sense of satisfaction as he dialed the number that had been relayed to him through Stony Man.

If I don’t sleep, Brognola thought with pleasure, no one sleeps.

The distant telephone rang three times before someone picked it up. A groggy male voice muttered in French, “Who is this?”

“Harold Brognola, calling from the DOJ in Washington.”

“You’re working late,” the other man replied. “Or is it early there?”

“One or the other,” Brognola said. “I’m looking for Gerard Delorme.”

“And you have found him, monsieur.”

“With Interpol?”

“The very same, but out of uniform just now,” Delorme said.

“We need to talk on a secure line,” the big Fed advised him.

“I can scramble here,” the Frenchman said, now sounding wide-awake. “Give me a moment, s’il vous plaît.”

“Sounds fair.”

Brognola heard a buzz and humming on the line, resolved a second later as Delorme returned.

“That’s better,” Delorme advised. “You must be calling about my disaster in Yakutsk, oui?”

“Sorry to hear you lost one of your assets,” Brognola replied. “We’ve managed to redeem the other for you, but it’s touch and go right now.”

“The danger is continuing. Je comprends. I understand, of course.”

Brognola wasn’t comfortable giving details of the planned escape route to a total stranger, but he said, “My agent has an exit strategy in mind. It would be helpful if we knew the other players. Who’ll be hunting them? What kind of resources will they commit?”

“The who, I am afraid to say, is everyone,” Delorme said. “My asset, as you call her, has sufficient evidence to topple—and perhaps imprison—leaders of the FSB, the Russian Mafia and certain persons highly placed in government, together with their friends abroad.”

“That big, is it?” the big Fed asked.

“Indeed,” Delorme said. “As to resources for the hunt, who knows? I can’t predict how brazen they may be. The FSB alone has more than three hundred thousand employees. Most of them clerks, I grant you, but there is the Counterintelligence Service and Border Guard Service. Add the Militsiya and MVD Internal Troops, perhaps the Federal Protective Service…”

“Okay,” Brognola said. “I get the picture.”

“I regret to say, their chances are not good.”

“I don’t suppose there’s anything that you can do to help, from where you are?”

“The Russian Federation is a member state of Interpol,” Delorme said, “which means I have a two-room office at the Lubyanka, with a secretary who makes coffee that tastes like dishwater. My function is advisory. The janitors have more authority.”

“But you know things,” Brognola said.

“Indeed. I was surprised—and gratified, I must say—when these assets trusted me enough to make contact. I served as their liaison to the FBI’s legal attaché here, in Moscow. I’m aware that contact was established with the CIA, as well, but details were withheld from me.”

“So, you’ve had no contact with either of the assets since that time?” Brognola asked.

“The woman called me when they planned to leave,” Delorme said. “Then I heard about her partner from an officer in the Militsiya. I was afraid that she would simply disappear.”

“I’m sure that was the plan,” Brognola said. “We’ve put a crimp in it, but information’s hard to come by. If you pick up anything—”

“I’ll call immediately,” Delorme said.

“I’d appreciated it,” the big Fed replied, and rattled off his numbers—office, home and cell. “Time doesn’t matter.”

“As I see, from looking at my clock,” Delorme said. “I wish your agent luck.”

He’ll need it, Brognola thought as he cut the link.

Yakutsk: 9:58 a.m.

STEPHAN LEVSHIN CHECKED the LED screen on his cell phone, failed to recognize the caller’s number, but decided to answer.

“Yes?”

On the other end, an unfamiliar voice said, “I am told you are the man to call about a certain woman and her friend?”

“Who told you that?” Levshin said, not denying it.

“I don’t remember,” the caller said. “It is either true, or not.”

“In that case, it depends upon which woman we’re discussing, and which friend.”

“I don’t have names,” the caller said, “but someone had a photograph. The woman hasn’t changed since it was taken. And a man was with her. If the person who advised me was mistaken, and there’s no reward…”

“You have me at a disadvantage,” Levshin said. “A stranger calls, anonymous, and asks for money? You must understand my skepticism, eh?”

“I understand you only pay for goods collected, yes?” the stranger said. “If I direct you to the ones you seek, it cannot be an act of charity.”

“Say this, then,” Levshin countered. “If I follow your directions and collect the proper goods, you will be compensated. If you are deceiving me, it would be most unwise.”

“No threats, or it is goodbye, eh? We understand each other, without that.”

“I hope so,” Levshin said.

“All right. You need to look in Nizhny Bestyakh, at a motorcycle shop. The owner’s name is Ilya Vitruk. You’ve already missed them there, but he can tell you where they’re going.”

“What’s the address?”

Levshin’s caller rattled off a number and a street name, which he dutifully repeated.

“If your information is correct—”

“I’ll call you back,” the stranger said. “We can arrange the payment when you’re satisfied.”

The line went dead, leaving a void of doubt in Levshin’s mind. He knew his people had been circulating photographs of Tatyana Anuchin throughout Yakutsk and, more recently, in Nizhny Bestyakh. The photos had his temporary cell phone number printed on the back, for easy contact. Since he had no fear of the police, and would discard the phone as soon as he had found the runners, Levshin saw no risk to the procedure.

And, perhaps, it had paid off.

A motorcycle shop meant they were running. Eastward, since it was the only compass point available. The Lena River blocked them westward, and striking off to north or south meant running overland to nowhere, without highways. Northward lay the Arctic Circle, with perhaps a scattering of villages where they could never hope to hide. Southward lay Mongolia, but only if they crossed the Stanovoy and Yablonovy mountain ranges, with peaks above eight thousand feet and no passable roads.

So, it was Magadan or nothing for the fugitives.

Over the Road of Bones.

Levshin had calls to make, and quickly—to his people on the Lena River, and to others already scouring the streets of Nizhny Bestyakh, in case his targets had managed to cross the river unseen.

Which it seemed that they had.

The call might be a ruse, of course, even someone’s idea of a joke. If it was, the prankster would live to regret it, but not very long. Meanwhile, Levshin would treat it as a serious lead and hope for the best.

He’d scramble troops to the target and see what they found. If it paid off, then another call was necessary, to Moscow next time, for a status report to Colonel Marshak. He’d be relieved to know the net was tightening around the peasants who presumed to threaten him and those above him.

Levshin’s task was to eliminate that threat, to see that order was preserved. Success was paramount.

And the alternative, he knew, was death.

CHAPTER SIX

With space for packing at a premium, Bolan and Anuchin shopped wisely in Nizhny Bestyakh. They started with new outfits for the road, judging that it was better to perspire a bit by day than freeze at night. Their choices—thermal underwear and socks, insulated gloves, flannel shirts under sweaters, with hunting pants and jackets over all—were chosen with respect for what Anuchin knew about the Road of Bones.

As for the rest, they bought two compact sleeping bags; a two-person tent that folded into a twenty-inch square and weighed under seven pounds; a case of bottled water, half the bottles emptied and refilled with gasoline; and enough MREs—as in “meals, ready to eat”—for a week on the road, if they ate twice a day. Bolan passed on the idea of buying a camp stove, preferring to leave space in the BMW’s panniers for extra ammo magazines. Last-minute accessories included a first-aid kit, a small tactical flashlight, an NV-01 survival knife from the Kalashnikov factory and an entrenching tool useful for digging or chopping.

For weapons, they each carried pistols—the MR-444 for Bolan, an MP-443 for Anuchin—but most of the hardware captured when Bolan had rescued Anuchin was left in a garbage bin without firing pins. The soldier kept his short AKS-74U, while Anuchin chose a little PP-2000 SMG.

Thus prepared, they rolled out of Nizhny Bestyakh on a two-lane blacktop, eastbound. The bike ran smoothly on asphalt, was easy to handle, but Bolan knew they’d have some rough riding ahead of them, between rural villages. How well the motorcycle would handle rough country in practice was anyone’s guess.

Likewise, Bolan could only guess how much free time they had before Anuchin’s trackers picked up their trail and returned to the chase. In another life, he had eluded and defeated mafiosi by the hundreds, in urban jungles spanning the world from Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City to London, Paris and Rome. Always outnumbered and outgunned, he’d learned to play the odds, turn them around and use the overconfidence of his opponents to destroy them.

But a hunt in wide-open country, where the quarry had to move and couldn’t go to ground, was an entirely different game. In this case, Bolan’s enemies held all the high cards—numbers and weapons, familiarity with the killing ground and the ability to plug both ends of a restricted pipeline. Bolan couldn’t veer off-course, reverse directions or duck down a rabbit hole into Wonderland.

Still, he and Anuchin had surprised their adversaries twice, with her escape from custody and—Bolan hoped—with their passage from Yakutsk through Nizhny Bestyakh. They had a lead, however slim it might turn out to be, and the Executioner had worked with less.

The men who’d underestimated him were legion. Those who had survived that grave mistake were few and far between, remnants of an endangered species driven to the point of near-extinction.

In the bad old days, the men who’d hunted Bolan knew who they were looking for, what he had done, what he could do. They came for him despite all that, driven by greed or rage, a hunger for revenge or fear of their employers’ wrath, a few propelled by simple arrogance.

The hunters who would follow him along the Road of Bones were at a disadvantage, then, in that respect. They’d only caught a glimpse of Bolan’s style, with five men down. It could have been dumb luck. The home team would be confident.

And they would pay for it in blood.

But whether he’d be able to complete the job remained an open question. Bolan wouldn’t know until they got as far as Magadan and found out what was waiting for them there.

How many enemies?

What kind of help from Hal?

One thing was certain, though: it would be one hell of a road trip.

Nizhny Bestyakh: 11:03 a.m.

IT WAS GOOD to be off the damned ferry at last. Nikolay Milescu had begun to get seasick—or would it be river-sick?—riding the old tub back and forth across the Lena, scanning faces as they boarded, knowing the return trips to Yakutsk were a mind-numbing waste of his time.

At last they had a lead. His team was back together, five men strong, and closing on the target Stephan Levshin had identified. Milescu hadn’t asked the FSB man where he got his information. He didn’t care as long as it was accurate and placed them closer to their targets.

They were still running behind, Milescu understood, but if they managed to acquire fresh information here, the traitor and her bodyguard would be on borrowed time.

The target was a motorcycle shop, not much to look at, with no customers in view as they arrived. The five men had packed into a Lada Samara sedan, with Naum Izvolsky at the wheel. Milescu had him park in front of the shop, blocking off pedestrian access, and told the driver to stay with the car while he led the others inside.

Levshin had given them an address, but no names. A long-haired grease monkey approached them at the shop’s open threshold, half smiling, and asked how he could help them.

“You sold a motorcycle this morning,” Milescu informed him, not asking.

“I sell them all day, every day,” the man replied.

“Only one interests me,” Milescu said. “A man and a woman came shopping. This woman,” he added, producing the photo. “You recognize her.”

“This is just a face,” the shop’s proprietor complained. “With women, you know, it can be distracting. I look more at other things.”

Milescu laughed at that, the others joining him, then asked, “What is your name?”

“Ilya,” the older man replied. “Ilya Vitruk.”

“Ilya,” Milescu said, “I don’t care if this one walked in naked and you spent the whole time staring at her tits, understand me? You saw money, too. You sold a motorcycle to this woman and a man.”

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