Bolan shifted his aim to the three gunmen who were directing fire his way

Holding the submachine gun at waist level, he sprang from behind the cover of the tree and dashed forward, angling his way toward an outcropping of rocks. While he ran, he fired the Spectre in short bursts, engaging targets of opportunity as they appeared.

Bullets were flying through the air as Bolan launched himself into a dive that would take him to his intended spot behind the rocks. He felt the sudden sting of a round scratch the top of his scalp. He twisted in midair to direct his reply at the shooter, sending a burst of a dozen slugs into him and the man who knelt nearby.

“How’re you doing?” he asked into the mike as he grabbed one of his two remaining box magazines to replace the spent one.

“The M-60 is out,” LaFontaine shouted back.

“Throw the smoke and give me cover. I have plastique for the four corners. Let’s blow this building!” the Executioner shouted.

Black Death Reprise

The Executioner®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Peter Spring for his contribution to this work.

To lead an untrained people to war is to throw them away.

—Confucius, 551–479 BC

Evil men lead blind followers into battle unprepared for what they will face. What they will face is me—their Executioner.

—Mack Bolan

THE MACK BOLAN

LEGEND

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

1

A gentle breeze passing through the vineyard from the Pyrenees turned the leaves on their stems, making them appear to be waving to the man who glided silently through their tethered rows. The soothing rustle as they stirred on warm air currents, exposing undersides that shimmered a silvery-gray in the moonlight, was the only sound reaching Mack Bolan’s ears as he trod silently across the fertile fields that for more than eight hundred years had been producing wine for the St. Rafael Monastery north of Bayonne.

Dressed entirely in black, with green and brown camouflage paint smeared on the high points of his face to flatten his features, Bolan’s large frame was all but invisible against the inky French countryside.

On his hip, the ex-soldier wore a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, while a holster on his left shoulder held a Beretta 93-R loaded with a 20-round clip of 9 mm Parabellum ammunition. A foot-long Fairbairn-Sykes combat knife, honed to a razor’s edge, rested in a weathered black leather sheath strapped to the outside of his right calf.

Bolan was approaching the monastery from the south because slipping into Spain at San Sebastian and traveling by car through the Pyrenees mountains to Bayonne was considerably easier for a heavily armed man than trying to fly into an airport, whether public or private, anywhere in France. The one hundred rounds of ammunition he brought for the Desert Eagle would have been impossible to get through French customs—never mind the concussion grenades and incendiary tape he carried in the pouches on his combat web belt.

As would most battle-tested veterans with whom death has become intimate enough to be a frequent visitor to their dreams, the man some called the Executioner was hoping not to use his weapons this night. But he had been schooled on the hellfire trail in distant jungles long enough to know firsthand that hope and death were frequent bedfellows. Those who came unprepared to kill at a moment’s notice, surrendering their fate to optimism or hope, were the ones who found themselves easy targets when a supposedly cold spot turned unexpectedly hot.

Despite the vineyard’s tranquil appearance, two CIA agents had been murdered there less than a week earlier, the homing device implanted in one’s deltoid muscle leading the Agency to a wooded area ten miles north, where the operatives’ bullet-ridden bodies had been discovered in a shallow grave. They had met their deaths while on the mission now assigned to Bolan—to rescue Dr. Zagorski from the confines of the ancient abbey.

Bolan’s Porsche 911 Turbo was hidden in a stand of trees about a mile south of the monastery where he had left it in order to approach his objective on foot, a tactic yielding the greatest variety of options. When combat veterans gained enough experience under fire, they learned that flexibility on the battlefield was what survival was all about—the soldier who ran out of options first was the one who died.

The choppy sound of helicopter blades cutting the air shattered the vineyard’s stillness with a noise that touched nerve endings buried deep within Bolan’s warrior psyche. He lowered himself to the ground, pressing his body against the single strand of heavy zinc wire. It ran about six inches above the soil the entire length of each row, alternately weaving inside and outside the slender trunks of adjacent vines, connecting an entire row into a supporting network able to withstand the rainstorms that rushed down the rugged slopes of the Pyrenees. The tended vines were leafless for the bottom two feet or so, forming a canopy under which Bolan would be concealed from the passing aircraft. Lying on his back, motionless to prevent an errant move from catching the eye of an alert passenger in the chopper, he waited for it to pass.

Coming straight across the vineyard, the helicopter was apparently not searching for intruders. As it whizzed past on a direct course for the monastery, more than ten rows to the right of where Bolan lay as still as a statue, he was able to see it was the Bell 206B-3 JetRanger that Hal Brognola told him the Order of Raphael had purchased six months earlier to replace their aging Hughes 300C. The new helicopter carried two-and-a-half times more weight, had room for four passengers and was almost twice as fast as the Hughes.

Bolan remained in place as he watched the chopper reach its destination. Abruptly illuminated by the landing pad’s powerful lights, it hovered like an apparition for a few moments before descending slowly out of sight. From satellite reconnaissance photos he had studied back at Stony Man Farm, Bolan knew the landing pad was a mere thirty yards from a guarded entrance to the research laboratory that was his objective.

The helicopter’s engine tapered off into silence, the landing pad’s lights were turned off, and once again, a hush as deep as prayer blanketed the vineyard.

Bolan rose, touch-checking his gear before resuming. As he set off toward the base of the hill on top of which the ancient L’Abbaye de Raphael sat, he recalled the conversation with Hal Brognola two days earlier that had brought him to the South of France for his mission.

“THE CONSEQUENCES ARE too horrific for the President to ignore,” Brognola had said at their meeting on the National Mall in Washington.

The man from the Justice Department was fully aware of the arm’s-length relationship Bolan held with the federal government even when his sense of righteousness was inflamed to the point where he accepted a mission, so he wasn’t about to beg or plead. Bolan would decide on his own whether to sign on, and that would be that.

Brognola swallowed hard, said, “This is much more than a random terrorist group developing something like anthrax, or getting their hands on a batch of nerve agent. At least we can contain those threats. A project like this could jeopardize humankind’s very existence.”

He paused for a moment before adding, “Jesus, Striker, the plague was devastating the first time around. No one wants to see an updated version.”

They were walking west along the Mall’s boundary on Madison Drive, the brilliantly white Capitol Building shimmering at their backs under the unrelenting sun. As he walked, Brognola mopped his face with one of the cotton handkerchiefs he carried during Washington summers.

Outside the Smithsonian Castle, Bolan could see a group of tourists, mostly families with kids out of school for the summer, clustered around an idling tour bus. Their limp hair and sagging postures told him long before he came into earshot of the children’s whining voices that they had been outdoors in the brutal humidity for a while.

Bolan himself showed no sign of the heat. He was dressed in pressed khaki pants and a navy blue golf shirt. The portion of his face visible under his dark glasses gleamed in the sunlight with a vibrant glow akin to that produced by the light film of oil that coated the ex-soldier’s handguns.

“Terrorists won’t fly airplanes into buildings anymore,” Brognola said as Bolan studied the transcript from the Oval Office while they walked. “They’ll escalate their tactics by using science and state-of-the-art technology to develop more exotic weapons of mass destruction. The news is full of the bird flu. What we’re talking about here has the potential to be ten, maybe a hundred, times more dangerous. A designer disease with its genetic roots reaching all the way back to the Black Death? Tell me that’s not a doomsday scenario.”

“How sure are they?” Bolan asked. “The government’s track record for getting good intel is an embarrassment.”

At the junction of Madison with Twelfth Street, a dozen college-aged girls were sunbathing on the heavy concrete slabs outside the National Museum of American History. As Bolan walked past the building’s front lawn, he could smell the pineapple and coconut fragrances from their tanning lotions.

“This time the CIA has French verification,” Brognola answered. “INSERM doctors working with Sentinelles have forensic evidence from animal carcasses. Someone is definitely mucking around with genetically engineered diseases.”

“And why do they think the carcasses came from—” Bolan hesitated until a group of schoolchildren heading toward the Capitol passed them “—the Order of Raphael?”

They had reached the Washington Monument, the 555-foot marble obelisk pointing ramrod straight into the sky. Brognola steered them to the right, onto Constitution Avenue, waiting until they had distanced themselves a few yards from the closest tourist before saying, “The Order is centuries old, dating all the way back to before the Crusades. Today, they’re a fully modern paramilitary organization with a few hundred members in France, the United States and Australia. Their American office is in Boston. Almost a year ago, they caught Homeland Security’s attention. They—”

Bolan interrupted by asking, “What triggered the initial alert?”

“Cell phone patterns. The NSA’s eavesdropping programs recognized words spoken during the Order’s calls to and from Boston and the monastery at Bayonne. That led directly to Internet surveillance and an on-site CIA probe. The more we pulled the string, the more the Order of Raphael looked like a terrorist organization.”

“But the CIA didn’t find anything in Boston or France?” Bolan asked.

“No. There’s a lab at Bayonne—no law against independent research—and the Agency mined the databases of medical supply houses and uncovered sales documents relating to scientific equipment and supplies. But when Dr. Zagorski was kidnapped from her home outside Paris three months ago, the French authorities suddenly became as interested in the Order as we were.”

“Hold on,” Bolan said while flipping through the five-page report to find and reread the section mentioning the scientist. “Okay. What’s her story?”

At the far west end of the park, Brognola could see the sloping walls of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, crowded as always with loved ones seeking healing from a generation-old wound.

Brognola kept his eyes on the monument in the distance as he answered Bolan’s question. “Sonia Zagorski is one of the world’s leading virologists. Shortly after her disappearance, L’Abbaye de Raphael ordered some very specific equipment. Right down to model numbers, it was the same stuff Dr. Zagorski had in her Paris lab.”

“If the French and the CIA both believed that Zagorski had been kidnapped by the Order of Raphael, why didn’t they raid the place?” Bolan asked.

“Interpol did. Two months ago. They didn’t find any trace of her or the new equipment we know the Order bought. Since then, our satellite flyovers have recorded increased security around the monastery with roving guards and limited access to outside suppliers like the electric company and water providers. Homeland Security says the Order is definitely lowering its profile, but we’re still monitoring a ton of coded phone calls, encrypted Internet traffic and scientific purchases. Agents McCabe and Gardner were sent in the night before last for what should have been a soft probe. Langley thinks they were ambushed—neither of their weapons had been fired.”

Bolan continued reading the report, his mouth drawn into a thin line as he turned back to review an earlier portion.

Brognola said, “With the war in Iraq, we aren’t on the best of terms with France right now. The President wants someone independent to get in there and rescue Zagorski.”

Independent, Bolan thought. How many times had he accepted missions knowing that if he was caught, his government would deny knowing him? Granted it was the path he had chosen when life had nothing left to offer, but sometimes he questioned his very existence. He knew he’d eventually find himself in a hot zone out of control, and that’s where it would all end. Was hoping that he went out honorably, a warrior in the heat of battle, the best his future could offer?

“If she doesn’t want to be rescued, I won’t know until it’s too late. Too late for her to be anything more than an obstacle blocking my escape,” Bolan stated.

Brognola looked away, wiping his handkerchief across his brow. “Nothing indicates she’s connected to the Order in any way,” he said.

“Okay,” Bolan said abruptly, handing the file back to Brognola.

They parted without another word, the man from Justice setting off to inform the President that his request had been accepted. Bolan quickly melted into the swells of Washington tourists the way a tiger melted into the jungle.

AT THE EDGE OF A VINEYARD four thousand miles from the spot where he had first learned of a place called L’Abbaye de Raphael, Mack Bolan dropped to one knee and reached into the pouch on his web belt containing his night-vision goggles.

Manufactured by American Technologies Network Corporation, the Gen IV vision system employed XR-5 technology and infrared illumination, which meant the ultra-lightweight gallium arsenide tubes could render a completely dark night into an eerie green landscape as bright as noontime. With the moon peeking every now and then from behind sporadic clouds in a sky filled with stars, night vision was not Bolan’s primary need.

He switched the goggles into infrared mode, and the scene before him shimmered slightly for a few moments while the photocathode sensors adjusted to the new data stream. At the base of the hill, laser-crisp infrared beams became visible, crisscrossing the approach to stone steps leading up to the monastery. To the left, a two-lane road wound up and around the side of the hill.

Bolan scanned the landscape before him, searching for additional infrared security nets. Agents McCabe and Gardner, he thought, had to have broken one of the beams, announcing their presence without even knowing it. There were three other hot spots at various points on the hill, but none in the vicinity of the road.

As Bolan removed his goggles, he recalled the reconnaissance photos he had studied at Stony Man Farm. The lab’s entrance was shielded from the road by a thin stand of trees running almost to the top, which meant he could approach on the asphalt until he got close.

His gaze moved to the field’s northwest corner, where six all-terrain vehicles hitched to open carts containing gardening tools were parked in a straight line pointing south into the vineyard. When he reached the first, Bolan stopped to inspect its controls. Using his foot-long combat knife to pry open the instrument panel, he bent close to examine the three-wheeler’s ignition wiring. A bird cried out in the distance, and the warrior paused while listening hard. Crickets close by chirped a summer symphony in tune with their reproductive cycles. From all other directions, the buzzing and humming of night insects reaching his ears reassured him that he was the only human in the immediate vicinity.

Over the years, on battlefields spanning the globe, Bolan had hot-wired vehicles ranging from dune buggies to M-60 tanks. ATVs were at the low end of the technology continuum. Even in the dark, it took him less than a minute to cut, strip and splice the on-off toggle switch into a hot connection bypassing the ignition key. After dipping his finger into the fuel tank to check the vehicle’s gas level, he unhooked the tool cart from the ATV, pushing it a few feet to the rear.

As he passed each of the remaining five on his way to the access road, he paused for a moment to pierce their wide front tires with his scalpel-sharp combat knife, rendering all but the one he had hot-wired inoperable. Bolan didn’t know if he’d need an ATV on his way out, but disabling all except one created an option.

With a final glance over his shoulder, he stepped onto the asphalt, leaning slightly into the incline.

The road’s rise was steep, curling like a corkscrew up the side of the hill to a plateau on which the ancient L’Abbaye de Raphael stood. Shortly before the road leveled out, Bolan entered the sparse woods surrounding the compound. Moving through the underbrush as silently as a shadow, he reached a concealed spot thirty yards from the helipad.

In accordance with its construction period, the stone monastery was built like a medieval fortress, occupying an area roughly half that of a city block. Rounded parapets protected each corner from assault, and it wasn’t hard to imagine defenders on top of the turrets dumping scalding liquids onto invaders attempting to scale the walls. Bolan already knew there were no windows on the first floor, leaving the front and rear porticos, with buttressed stone archways too narrow to accommodate greater than three men abreast, as the only means of entry from ground level.

Two guards armed with Fabrique Nationale Herstal P-90 submachine guns stood at the entrance beyond the helipad, their presence negating any possibility of unauthorized access. Bolan hadn’t expected to waltz through the laboratory’s front door, but he wanted to view it nevertheless. He took the opportunity to examine his opponents’ hardware.

In addition to their submachine guns, the sentries wore shoulder holsters carrying FN Five-seveNs. Weighing a mere 1.6 pounds, the Belgium-made pistol used the same 5.7 mm ammunition as the P-90, fed from a clip holding twenty rounds. Although the lightweight handguns lacked the punch that a 9 mm Glock or a Smith & Wesson .45 might deliver, its bullets were available in a version with steel-hardened tips that penetrated Kevlar, making them the ideal choice when anticipating an assault by law-enforcement personnel.

Pulling his goggles over his eyes in order to see the pockets of infrared security placed randomly around the monastery’s perimeter, Bolan inched away from the helipad. The natural foliage was plenty thick to provide good concealment, but it was also short, forcing him to circle the building by alternating between a low crawl and half-crouched sprints until he came to the side he had selected ahead of time from the satellite photos.

In person, the side wall was exactly what he expected. It was close enough to the woods to enable a swift approach, and angled in a way that placed it out of sight from the driveways leading to the front and rear entrances. Most importantly, a window approximately sixty feet off the ground, which Bolan believed was the lab’s only escape route, gleamed brightly against the cold stone walls under the enhanced ambient moonlight created by the goggles. Dropping to one knee, he scanned the wall and area directly beneath, ensuring there were no infrared sensors.

From one of the pouches on his web belt, he withdrew a folding titanium grappling hook tied to a coiled length of thin cord resembling braided dental floss. Developed at NASA by the same team responsible for giving the world Velcro, a three-hundred-foot length was fine enough to fold entirely into the palm of his hand while possessing all the strength of mountaineering rope.

After locking the grappling tines into their open position so they formed a claw resembling an eagle’s talons, Bolan stepped from the woods. While walking toward the building, he began swinging the hook in an increasing arc above his head, playing out the line until he felt the proper tug. When the twine started vibrating slightly in response to the pull exerted by the hook’s momentum, he twirled and snapped his wrist with the finesse of an accomplished fly fisherman, releasing the grappling hook onto a trajectory that sent it sailing over the two-hundred-foot-high wall more than thirty feet to the left of the lab window. Using a hand-over-hand motion to pull in the slack, he found that the hook had caught purchase on his first try.

Before scaling the building, Bolan pushed the goggles onto his forehead where he’d be able to pull them quickly into place if needed. He checked his watch. Two patrolling guards were due to make their rounds within ten minutes, but if they stayed true to the schedule Homeland Security had recorded throughout the previous three weeks of satellite flyovers, Bolan had plenty of time to make his ascent.

Drawing the Beretta from his shoulder holster, he checked the sound suppressor while making sure the safety was off. With one hand, he placed the pistol under the strap holding his knife sheath in place on his outer calf where it would be readily accessible. With the other, he grabbed the thin cord and pulled with all his weight. The line remained taut, and after taking a moment to secure the rest of his gear, he began walking up the side of the fortress like a human fly.

The wall was rough, with thick mortar seams and uneven joints making it easy to climb. As Bolan moved higher, he looped the line around his left hand and elbow, taking in the slack his ascent created.

The assault occurred at approximately seventy feet above ground, when a colony of between ten and fifteen short-nosed fruit bats, apparently attracted by the supersonic whine emanating from Bolan’s infrared goggles, attacked as if they were a school of airborne piranha. With a frantic fluttering of papery wings accompanied by barely audible squeaks, the furry mammals zeroed in on the soldier’s face and neck, biting and scratching with tiny claws as they sought the source of the offending noise.

Wrapping the scaling cord tightly around his left hand in order to free his right, Bolan planted his feet onto the wall and leaned away until he was parallel to the ground. The extended position shifted his entire weight onto his left forearm, causing the tendons to stand out like steel cables stretched to the point of snapping. While reaching up with his freed right hand to switch the goggles’ power switch to the off position, he swatted the bats away from his face and head. Once the goggles were turned off, the colony departed as abruptly as they had arrived, leaving Bolan hanging straight out at a right angle from the rock wall.

An image flashed through his mind of a previous mission conducted years earlier in the tropical jungles of Guatemala when his five-man task force had been attacked by a similar colony of short-nosed bats. Assuming that most wild bats were rabid, the men who had been bitten were afraid they were destined to die a horrible death until one of them who had studied the animals ensured the group that the species’ reputation was undeserved.

Bolan knew bats had a relatively low probability of carrying rabies, much less than for other mammals such as raccoons or skunks. And when the disease did strike, it would wipe out an entire colony within weeks, limiting the communicable danger to a very narrow time period.

As he pulled on the scaling cord to bring himself into a more upright posture, Bolan knew that the guards he suddenly heard coming around the corner of the north parapet posed a much greater threat to his life than the bites and scratches that stung his face and neck in a dozen places.

Upon hearing the sentries, Bolan immediately stopped reeling himself into the wall, halting when he was still at a forty-five-degree angle to the rough surface. Moving in ultra-slow motion, he drew his Beretta 93-R from the strap holding his knife sheath in place and waited for the men below to pass by.

Since he was unable to use his goggles, Bolan couldn’t get a good look at the guards, but from the sounds reaching his ears, he thought they were walking with rifles slung behind their shoulders. The play in the metal clasp where a sling attached to a weapon’s stock created a distinctive click he had heard thousands of times coming from soldiers with their weapons carried at sling arms.

As they approached his position, he tracked them with his 93-R, hoping they would pass without incident. Not that the combat veteran was adverse to killing them both if they so much as looked up—countless corpses littering hellfire trails across the globe were testament to his willingness to survive at all costs—but Bolan found no pleasure in taking life. He was a quintessential soldier, willing to answer the call of duty as defined by his personal values, but he would not kill cavalierly. Despite a career testifying to the contrary, he held a deep respect for the sanctity of life.

The guards were progressing at a steady pace that would bring them directly below his spot in less than a minute. They were speaking softly in French, their tone and cadence causing Bolan to think they were reciting scripture. Beneath his feet, he could suddenly feel a section of the ancient mortar begin to shift under the burden of his angled weight, sending tiny pieces of centuries-old limestone trickling noisily down the wall.

The men looked up, and appearing as if they were performing a synchronized move they had rehearsed a thousand times, grabbed to pull the rifles off their shoulders.

Bolan’s Beretta coughed twice within the span of a second.

The first round caught a guard square in his upturned face, delivering 9 mm Parabellum lead that jerked his head back while lifting him entirely off his feet. He landed two or three yards away, dead before his body impacted the ground.

His partner was hit in the neck, the force of the steel-jacketed slug spinning him in a graceful pirouette while his severed carotid artery sprayed a crimson geyser, making him resemble for a few moments a pulsating lawn sprinkler. As he crumpled to the ground, his heart pumped four or five progressively smaller spurts, which, under the moonlight, took on a rich black hue.

Bolan slid swiftly down the line, intent on hiding the bodies. He knew his entry would eventually be discovered and he’d be forced to fight his way out, but the longer his presence and his point of access remained unknown, the better his chances for getting away with Dr. Zagorski. When he reached the ground, he dragged the corpses into the woods where he arranged them out of sight behind a clump of elms.

A passing cloud cleared the face of the moon, and in the improved light, an oddity caught Bolan’s eye. Both guards possessed what appeared to be identical diamond-shaped scars about the size of a dime on the back of their left hands, the rough tissue standing out in the silvery moonlight against the smoother neighboring skin. As he turned away from the bodies to resume his entry, the soldier filed the detail into a corner of his mind.

Without the encumbrance of the bats, Bolan’s second attempt to scale the wall went quickly. There was no barrier at the top, and he easily pulled himself over the turret’s lip with one arm. Although none of the satellite photos he had studied contained evidence of a roof patrol, Bolan held his Beretta 93-R in his free hand as he came over the parapet, landing softly on the roof’s pebbly surface. When he was sure he was alone, he retrieved the grappling hook and pushed it into its pouch, laying the bunched cord on top.

Occupying the same footprint as the building it capped, the roof’s area was large. Air pumps and condensers for heating systems were arranged in groups interspaced among communication antennas across the top of the ancient building, indicating various heating and communication zones within. Moving in a crouch to reduce his silhouette, Bolan walked straight to the northwest corner, where a series of unique vents and ductwork characteristic of research laboratories sprouted in the shadow of huge air conditioning units like wild orchards on the floor of a redwood forest. Although the air intake tunnel was large enough for a man to enter, a heavy metal grate had been spot-welded across the opening.

From a pouch on his web belt next to where he carried two M-18 smoke canisters, Bolan withdrew a roll of incendiary tape and a small plastic tube containing a substance like petroleum jelly. Using his combat knife, he cut short sections from the half-inch roll and wound them around each of the dozen crossbeams where the grate was welded to the tunnel’s frame. The tape’s active ingredient was a waxy allotrope of white phosphorous that CIA scientists had altered to prevent its reaction to atmospheric oxygen, thus making it a portable product. They had also developed a reagent designed to eliminate the dense white smoke white phosphorous usually produced while burning, which in addition to being undesirably visible, also contained toxic amounts of both phosphorous pentoxide and phosphoric acid.

Once the tape was in place, Bolan used his combat knife to slice open one end of the tube and quickly smear a dollop of the reagent onto each piece. The goop was a sodium-based oxidant that would react in about a minute with the white phosphorous in the tape, bringing it to its flash point.

Once the tape was coated, Bolan averted his eyes and stood close to the grate in an attempt to shield the flashes. The tape buzzed briefly before bursting into a white-hot exothermic flame, each section of tape igniting in the order Bolan had applied the reactant. The burn-through was quick, less than five seconds, but it had taken slightly longer than fifteen to touch every section, which meant the light intensity peaked at seven seconds for a three-second period before dimming. When the tape wrapping the final crossbeam winked out, Bolan dropped to one knee, drawing his handguns. After remaining motionless for slightly longer than a minute, he concluded that the light from the burning white phosphorous had not been seen.

Holstering both his Desert Eagle and Beretta, he grasped the grate in the middle of its grid and pulled it away from the air vent. Before he climbed into the metal tunnel, he adjusted the night goggles over his eyes and switched the unit into IR mode. Seeing no infrared beams blocking his way, he moved headfirst into the vent.

As he progressed through the air tunnel, Bolan recalled the schematic Akira Tokaido had created on the bank of Cray SV2 supercomputers housed at Stony Man Farm. Using sonar data downloaded from satellite flyovers, the talented hacker had been able to produce a three-dimensional map charting air tunnels from the roof leading into the research lab.

“IT’S KIND OF LIKE AN echocardiogram,” Akira Tokaido had told Bolan while nodding slightly to the rhythm of rock music blasting through his ever present earbuds, “just not as accurate.”

“But you’re sure these vents lead into the lab?”

“Not exactly, Striker,” Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman, head of the cybernetics team at Stony Man Farm had answered for his subordinate. “We have good photos of the roof. There’s no question these are not general air conditioning or heating inlets. We’re assuming they must be laboratory exhaust and intake. For the type of research Dr. Zagorski does, you’d want a dedicated air system. These fit the bill. We believe those vents lead into the lab.”

Using advanced computer modeling to enhance the sonar data stream echoed back to satellite transducers, Tokaido had also drawn a rough floor plan of the second story.

“There’s a stand-alone suite next to where I think the lab is,” he said, tracing with his finger the path Bolan would follow through the air tunnel from the roof to the second floor. He snapped his bubble gum a few times in quick succession before adding, “Private bathroom. Porcelain has a great sonar signature.”

On missions too numerous to count, Bolan had bet his life on the accuracy of information provided by Stony Man Farm. There was no reason for him to start doubting Aaron Kurtzman’s team now.

2

On hands and knees, Bolan moved swiftly through the pitch-black vent, reaching the first intersection at roughly the spot where Tokaido’s diagram had indicated it would be. The air system’s intersecting branches came together between floors, meaning Bolan was already past the third, and directly above the second story where the lab was located. When he came to the T in the tunnel he remembered was close to the end, he removed the goggles and put them away, confident there were no IR sensors in the vent. Although he had engaged enemies on many occasions while wearing night-vision gear, the view in IR mode occasionally shimmered and stalled for a split second when the gallium arsenide photocathode tubes refreshed. For that reason, Bolan avoided using them when he thought gunfire was imminent.

From his shirt pocket, he pulled a powerful penlight, switched it on, and, holding it between his front teeth, turned into the vent’s left branch. Ahead he could see the outline of an access door Tokaido had told him he thought opened onto a stairwell directly next to the lab. It was the spot where Bolan planned to enter the building proper.

Upon reaching the door, he found it was neither secured nor grated, enabling him to turn the latch from the inside and swing the hatch open. Dropping silently onto the landing, he switched off and put away the penlight, and while walking to the stairwell entrance, drew his Beretta 93-R. Taking a deep breath, he turned the knob with his free hand and opened the door on silent hinges.

A wide hallway with a shiny white linoleum floor stretched the entire length of the second floor, dimly illuminated by track lighting running along the ceiling. On both sides of the corridor, two or three doors were located at various points on otherwise blank windowless walls. One was guarded.

Approximately ten yards away, two men dressed in gray jumpsuits were sitting outside a door on which a security slot similar to those used for hotel rooms was mounted above the latch. As he stepped into the hallway, Bolan’s mind registered two critical facts—each man was wearing a lanyard with a magnetic key card clipped to the end and, within easy reach, two Herstal P-90 submachine guns with thirty-round banana clips extending from their ammo ports leaned against the wall. Before Bolan had progressed three steps, one of the men lunged for his weapon.

The Beretta 93-R whispered instant death, delivering a 9 mm Parabellum round that slammed into the side of the man’s face before exiting through the back of his skull in a rush of brain tissue and blood that sprayed a fan-shaped pattern of pink droplets onto the white linoleum. The other guard, apparently realizing that the intruder held a lethal advantage, raised his hands over his head and gazed at Bolan with calm eyes.

He was young, perhaps in his late twenties, with pale blue eyes and a pockmark in the middle of his forehead. Across his right cheek, a deep maroon port-wine stain ran from his temple to the line of his jaw.

“Do you speak English?” Bolan asked.

“Oui. Yes.”

“Where’s Dr. Zagorski?” Bolan asked.

The man’s eyes shifted for a split second in answer to the question before he replied, “I don’t know.”

“Are you ready to die?”

“Yes,” the young man said.

Bolan motioned with his pistol, said, “Open the door, or I’ll kill you and do it myself with your key card.”

Without hesitation, the man obeyed, using the magnetic card at the end of his lanyard to gain access.

The door opened into a cavernous modern facility approximately fifty feet square with vented work stations in every corner, large pieces of scientific equipment along the side walls, and an array of laboratory glassware that filled a series of shelves constructed from floor-to-ceiling against the back wall. Numerous beakers, flasks and spiral pipettes of various sizes were arranged on black slate-topped tables throughout the lab, creating the impression that an entire team of scientists was in the midst of conducting research.

A doorless frame leading into a free-standing room in the far corner of the lab was in the general area where Tokaido had told him there might be a stand-alone apartment, presumably for Dr. Zagorski.

As soon as Bolan heard the door close behind him, he rapped the guard at the base of his neck with the Beretta’s hand grip. The man exhaled heavily and went down like a sack of grain.

“Dr. Zagorski!” Bolan called out as he slipped a nylon tie wrap around the guard’s wrists, securing them behind his back.

A woman dressed in a dark blue night robe appeared in the open door frame, her disheveled reddish-brown hair testifying to the fact that she had been roused from sleep. Despite her rumpled appearance, Bolan recognized her immediately from the photos Hal Brognola had shown him at their initial meeting.

“Get me a weapon,” she said before dashing back into the room.

Bolan opened the door and grabbed one of the guards’ P-90 submachine guns leaning against the wall. As he was pulling back into the lab, the stairwell door he had used flew open, and four or five men dressed in identical gray jumpsuits charged forward, their automatic rifles spitting lead. Tossing the P-90 behind him into the lab, Bolan returned fire with his Beretta, catching the lead man in the chest with a 3-round burst. The steel-jacketed 9 mm rounds hammered him backward into the path of his oncoming comrades, who threw themselves to the floor in order to get out of the intruder’s line of fire.

Sonia Zagorski, fully dressed in jeans, running shoes and a forest green windbreaker with large flapped pockets in the front, ran to Bolan’s side as he slammed the door.

“Push this up against it,” she said, motioning to one of the heavy slate-topped work stations.

The ten-foot, four hundred pound unit was on casters, enabling them to position it against the door before locking the wheels in place.

“That won’t hold them for long,” she said while grabbing the P-90 from where it lay on the lab floor. Leaning over the fallen guard, who remained unconscious and breathing heavily, she relieved him of three full banana clips, shoving them into one of her windbreaker’s front pockets.

“Help me drag him over to the wall,” she said, grabbing the guard by a handful of fabric at the top of his shoulder. “He doesn’t have to die.”

Bolan nodded and they quickly shoved the limp man against the wall next to the door where he’d be away from the hail of bullets that was sure to commence momentarily.

“Do you have rope?” Zagorski asked, as if she was leading Bolan.

“Can you use that?” he replied, motioning to the submachine gun while pulling the grappling hook and cord from its pouch.

The attractive doctor, in whose hands a P-90 submachine gun looked out of place, deftly slid the bolt to the rear and released it, chambering the magazine’s first round.

“Let’s go,” she said, flipping the safety to its off position as the door began to disintegrate under a barrage of automatic fire from the guards on the other side.

The smell of cordite seeped into the lab to mix with the rising stink of combat and death, while the air filled with the chilling chatter of automatic weapons. The laboratory door started shattering in the center panel above the workbench, the hole growing wider under a steady torrent of bullets.

A gap appeared in the section above the slate-topped table, through which Bolan could see two men firing P-90s on full-auto. He responded with his Desert Eagle, the oversize handgun roaring in the lab’s enclosed space with ear-popping concussions as he hit the first gunman squarely in the chest. The heavy slug lifted him clean off his feet before slamming him into the wall on the other side of the corridor. He hung in place for a moment as if he had been tacked there by a giant entomologist, then slid slowly to the floor, leaving a messy red streak in his wake.

In the microsecond before the other guard had a chance to dive for cover, Bolan again squeezed the trigger. The round struck the guard in his chest inches below where he cradled the FNH submachine into his shoulder, exiting through a shattered shoulder blade. A spewing jet that included a handful of shredded tissue that moments earlier had been a section of the man’s beating heart splattered the distant wall. The force twirled him erratically out of control, his finger frozen in a death grip on the P-90’s trigger as he spun to the floor. For a few instants until his clip was exhausted and the firing pin clicked onto an open chamber, steel-tipped bullets flew randomly in all directions, the ones entering the lab ricocheting wildly off slate panels and scientific equipment before embedding themselves in the walls or ceiling.

Hot lead continued slicing the air, the altering trajectories of rounds whizzing through the opening in the door reflective of the shifting positions assumed by the gunmen outside as they scrambled to stay away from Bolan’s deadly line of fire.

Although their enemies’ efforts had so far been largely ineffective, the rounds flying through the laboratory like angry wasps were life-threatening to both Bolan and Zagorski. The situation was not progressing in their favor, and from all indications, it would get worse if they stayed where they were.

As if in response to Bolan’s thoughts, Zagorski leveled her submachine gun at the window and let loose with a 30-round clip while tracing the frame’s outline where it connected to the castle’s rock walls. The window was clearly a recent addition to the laboratory space, a wooden prefab unit that crumbled outward as neatly and cleanly as if it had been demolished by a team of licensed masons. The resultant wreckage sprayed a cascade of wood splinters and glass shards onto the narrow space between the monastery and the woods where Bolan had hidden the roving guards’ bodies, littering the tight area with deadly debris.

The window opening began receiving fire from down below, lethal lead adding to an increasing stream of bullets flying into the lab through the damaged door. Zagorski shoved the barrel of her weapon out the window, and without aiming fired her ammo in a steady burst that swept the area, forcing the guards to seek cover. When her first magazine was empty, she released the spent clip and in one fluid motion, grabbed a 30-rounder from her jacket pocket and shoved it into place while stealing a glance at Bolan. With one hand, he was securing the grappling hook to a heating pipe he was sure would support their weight, while with the other, he fired occasional rounds from the Desert Eagle to keep the guards on the other side of the door from mounting a charge.

Zagorski pressed herself as tightly as possible into the lower corner of where the window had been. Taking advantage of firing from a higher position than her enemies, she began practicing the very same elements of combat discipline Bolan had taught to hundreds of infantry soldiers around the world.

With the patience of a cat waiting for a chipmunk to emerge from under a log where it had disappeared five minutes earlier, Zagorski kept the edge of the barrel barely inside the room, out of sight from those on the ground while she peeked over the edge of the sill. One of the men below let his panic get the better of him and made a dash for what he perceived to be a more advantageous position. Zagorski engaged him with a well-aimed 3-round burst.

The gun’s sights had not been battle zeroed for her specific aim, causing the rounds she fired to fly almost a foot to the front and left of where she thought they would hit. The guard froze for a millisecond as he realized he was under attack, giving Zagorski the time she needed to realize the differential in the rifle’s sights. She immediately took corrective action by aiming slightly behind her target before letting fly with another quick burst of lead.

In the exact instant the stutter-stepping soldier dived for cover behind a gnarled clump of exposed maple tree roots, Zagorski’s rounds entered his lower back at a downward trajectory. The relatively flimsy 5.7 mm bullets traveled through his body in much the same way 5.56 mm NATO rounds could enter a man’s shoulder and exit through his thigh by tumbling along the skeletal frame while ripping through soft tissue. Zagorski’s rounds struck her victim at the base of his spine and moved upward, with at least one of them exiting through his neck as the combined force of the bullets shoved him violently to the ground.

Zagorski quickly pulled back behind the cover of the wall and scooted below the window to the other side of the opening while checking to make sure the ammo remaining in her magazine was adequate. Taking a deep breath and a few seconds to calm her nerves, she visualized where the other men had been in the split second when almost all her concentration had been on her target.

With the force of a coiled spring, she leaped upright, firing into the spot she had visualized. The tactic worked perfectly. A man standing behind a thin tree with a sawed-off shotgun held to his shoulder was staring at the opposite side of the window opening where Zagorski had been moments earlier. Unfortunately for him, the stubby barrels glinting a shiny blue in the moonlight never got a chance to deliver their payload. Before the gunman realized he was a split second behind his adversary, Zagorski’s finger had already squeezed off two 3-round bursts while tracking slightly to the right.

In addition to stitching a straight line through the sapling causing its trunk to crack and split, her steel-jacketed triplets sliced through the gunman’s neck, all but decapitating him as he dropped the shotgun and fell three feet into the bushes, arms windmilling in a final release of nervous energy.

Outside, all was suddenly silent.

Dr. Zagorski slung the FNH P-90 submachine gun the way her female colleagues might carry a handbag. By securing the stock under her right arm, she could direct the gun’s barrel across a space with the sweep of her forearm as if the rifle was an extension of her hand. This one-armed technique freed her other hand to enable a descent while ensuring she’d retain the ability to fire her weapon on the way down.

As Zagorski stepped to the opening where the window had been and grabbed on to the thin cord with her free hand while wrapping her legs around the line, Bolan pulled two M-18 smoke canisters from his web belt, released their safety latches and tossed the canisters out the window. Within seconds, the area was immersed in thick clouds of billowing smoke as dense and concealing as the worst ocean fogs that occasionally drove ships off course in the North Atlantic.

“Northwest corner of the vineyard!” Bolan shouted into Zagorski’s ear a second before she disappeared into the thick smoke that clung in an impervious cloud along the side of the building.

Bolan stood with one foot on the windowsill, about to follow the doctor to the ground forty feet below. With the smoke from the M-18s providing adequate cover, and Zagorski’s demonstrated ability with the submachine gun, the soldier was confident that the odds for survival had shifted in their favor.

The damaged workbench, weakened by the riddling absorbed from hundreds of rounds that had shredded the door, suddenly burst ten feet into the laboratory with the force of a runaway locomotive. Guards with automatic weapons spitting death were close behind, using the workbench and door they were forcing forward into the room in much the same way infantry troops use an armored tank to lead the way into an area entrenched by the enemy.

In the back of his mind, Bolan could hear the intermittent staccato bursts of Zagorski’s P-90 and realized she was capitalizing on her downward movement through the smoke. Having been in that situation many times himself, he knew Zagorski could use the ground troops’ muzzle-flashes, made visible by the thick smoke, as targets. As long as she engaged them with short bursts and continued her downward rappel, her own position would not be betrayed. Bolan also knew that inches above her head, rounds would be sparking and ricocheting against the stone wall where moments earlier, she had been.

Straddling the windowsill with the arm holding his Beretta wrapped around the thin grappling cord, Bolan directed his Desert Eagle at the imploding door and workbench and began pulling the trigger. The combat inexperience of the three guards who were pushing forward behind the workbench was evidenced by the way they aimed their fire directly to their front rather than in wide-sweeping arcs, as if their task was to clear a walking path through dense foliage. Their guns chattered without pause, spraying a steady stream of 5.7 mm rounds, demolishing glassware and work stations, filling the space inside the lab with flying debris.

From his position slightly to the left of the attackers, Bolan fired a rapid quartet from his Desert Eagle, the throaty retort of the .44 Magnum pistol roaring like an angry beast, its heavy bass voice overpowering the lighter pops of the P-90s with tympanic explosions that pulsed against Bolan’s eardrums.

The Desert Eagle’s steel-jacketed slugs stopped the initial guards cold, tossing the leading two backward as violently as if they had been stuntmen with hydraulic ropes attached to their backs. Bolan’s third shot hit a charging gunman square in the chin, the bullet shattering his jawbones like cheap crystal before smashing into the man’s chest. The slug exited through his lower back, leaving a fist-size hole that spurted a crimson stream of blood as he fell to the floor.

Bolan leaned out the window, continuing to engage his enemies as they charged into the lab. Bullets snapped the air a finger’s width from his face as he prepared to drop to the ground. A guard with his gun on full-auto appeared beyond the shattered door, swinging his weapon’s muzzle toward Bolan. The soldier shot him in the upper torso a split second before the FNH rounds hit home. As the dead guard fell backward, he continued firing, sewing a parabolic pattern of 5.7 mm stitches up the wall and across half the ceiling.

Bolan had stemmed the initial attack, but he fully expected another assault to come as soon as the door fortifications completely collapsed. While continuing to fire his Desert Eagle into the laboratory until the bolt clicked open onto an empty chamber, he swung himself outside into the smoky cloud. Without reloading, the combat veteran shoved the oversize handgun into his hip holster while plucking one of the concussion grenades from the suspenders on his web belt.

Aware that the lab was about to fill when his enemies mounted their next counterattack, he set the fuse on the grenade to a 6-second delay before tossing the explosive into the glass-filled room. As he watched the apple-size orb bounce across the white linoleum tiles toward the back wall with its floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with laboratory glassware, his peripheral vision registered five or six men pushing through the clutter surrounding the door opening. Their muzzle-flashes were visible through the smoke that had drifted from the window opening into the lab to mix with the already copious supply of gun smoke that choked the air. Moments before releasing himself into the night for his slide to earth, Bolan grabbed his Beretta 93-R and sent a delaying burst into the fray, adding a final contribution to the overpowering stench of burning cordite and flesh.

During the entire two and a half seconds he free fell, with hot lead whizzing by his face making the time seem like an eternity, Bolan instinctively knew at every moment exactly how far above the ground he was. At the last possible instant, he snapped the hand holding the grappling cord, causing his descent to come to an immediate halt. As he released the thin line and stepped onto the ground, he drew his Desert Eagle and rammed a fresh magazine into its ammo port.

Fifty feet above, the concussion grenade detonated with an air-expanding blast followed a nanosecond later by a deadly blizzard of shredded glass that spewed out the window with the force of a Gulf Coast hurricane. A horrific medley of angry cries and painful shrieks erupted as a black cloud of toxic smoke poured from the building.

With handguns drawn, Bolan struck off on a course through the woods that would get him to the road in two or three minutes. From there, he’d have a short run to the corner of the vineyard where he hoped Dr. Zagorski would be waiting by the all-terrain vehicles. The foliage was sparse, with none of the clinging vines or heavy vegetation he had encountered on so many other hellfire trails around the world, and he reached the edge of the woods without incident.

When he came to the road, Bolan paused for a second to gauge the degree of his enemies’ resistance. Occasional bursts of sporadic automatic fire could be heard coming from below, but the pattern of gunshots was not indicative of an organized assault or defense. Hal Brognola had thought there were fewer than two dozen armed guards at the monastery. A quick calculation told Bolan that he and Zagorski had already dispatched approximately half that number.

Most of the smoke from the M-18 canisters had dissipated, but the residual tendrils, in combination with the inky black night, severely limited visibility as the soldier ran down the curvy road. Pulling his goggles over his eyes and switching into IR mode, he was able to quickly pick out Dr. Zagorski as she zigzagged like a running back sprinting toward the goal line.

Approximately twenty yards behind her, two guards were firing their submachine guns in her direction, their hot barrels glowing incandescently through Bolan’s IR-enriched lenses. With the hand holding his Beretta, he thumbed the selector switch, aligning the arrow with the three white dots. Without breaking stride, he sent a triburst of 9 mm rounds into the head and neck of one guard while simultaneously firing his Desert Eagle at the other. His action drew reciprocal gunfire from a guard ten yards or so farther down the road, causing Bolan to immediately adopt a zigzagging pattern similar to Zagorski while he engaged the gunners.

With both hands dispatching death, Bolan sprinted through an IR-illuminated shooting gallery, the deep-voiced roar of his hefty Desert Eagle drowning out the lighter patter of the Order of Raphael’s weapons.

By the time Bolan caught up to Zagorski, they were close to the bottom of the hill. The only concealment available was from the flimsy cloak of darkness.

Holstering his weapons, the Executioner jumped onto the wired all-terrain vehicle, yelling for Zagorski to get on behind him. While she was climbing onto the wide seat, they came under fire from a position close to the stairs leading up the hill to the monastery. When Bolan flipped the ignition switch and the ATV leaped to life, Zagorski returned fire, hosing the area at the base of the hill with a steady stream of rounds until her magazine ran dry.

Her rounds found their mark, causing the guard to dance and jerk. She released the spent clip, replacing it with the final one she had taken from the fallen guard in the lab. Bolan plied the throttle, propelling them at breakneck speed through the vineyard between two rows of vines, leaving the noise of battle behind.

Bolan gunned the ATV’s engine while keeping his eyes on the skyline where the darker density of the woods bordering the vineyard converged with the night sky. He was searching for a specific spot along the top of the trees where the peaks of four centuries-old maples came together, pointing inward to form an easily recognizable pyramid pattern. They were drawing close, and he eased up on the throttle.

“What?” Zagorski yelled, her eyes probing the darkness for enemies.

“We’re close to the car.”

His eyes scanned the intersection of sky and trees as they proceeded forward.

“Here!”

He braked to an abrupt stop, flipped the power toggle switch to its off position and dismounted.

“Come on,” he shouted over his shoulder as he began crossing through the rows of vines. “Watch the wire,” he added, referring to the zinc cable running the entire length of each row.

When they passed through the final set of vines and reached a paved road between the vineyard and woods, Bolan ran directly across to a small stand of scrub pines where a silver Porsche 911 Turbo gleamed dully in the night. Zagorski was steps behind, carrying her submachine gun at port arms as she ran to the passenger door.

The instant Bolan’s fingers wrapped around the driver’s door handle, the car’s rear-mounted engine came to life, purring powerfully under the curved frame. He increased his pressure on the handle, and Zagorski’s door unlocked and swung open. She jumped in, holding her gun at an angle between her legs, with the hot barrel inches from the window.

“Who are you?” she asked as her door closed and Bolan pressed the accelerator to the floor.

The Porsche fishtailed out of the woods onto the paved highway, leaping forward like a pouncing panther when its tires met the tar surface. Bolan upshifted quickly through the powerful automobile’s second and third gears, swiftly accelerating to a speed in excess of 120 miles an hour as they zipped on a path as straight as an arrow down the highway, leaving the ancient L’Abbaye de Raphael in the rearview mirror.

“We’ll be at the tunnel in less than five minutes,” was all Bolan said.

Zagorski nodded, knowing he was referring to a mile-long tunnel under a section of foothills that rose to become the Pyrenees Mountains separating France from Spain. The customs checkpoint, where according to Brognola, Bolan’s vehicle would already be cleared for a direct nonstop drive through, was another five miles down the road.

“Thank you, whoever you are. They were going to kill me.” Zagorski paused, swallowed hard and added in a voice more appropriate for a confessional than the interior of a sports car, “The work they made me do is evil. I tried to go as slowly as I could.”

“You did okay,” Bolan replied, keeping his eyes glued to the front. “There’s a plane waiting for us in San Sebastian.”

The road was wide and smooth, with two lanes in each direction separated by a center median in which a row of red maples had been planted at intervals of approximately twenty feet. At the speed they were traveling, the small trees whizzing past in Bolan’s peripheral vision took on the appearance of a continuous hedge.

When they reached an area in the foothills where the road turned curvy, Bolan downshifted into the first S-curve while checking the rearview mirror.

“You think they’re coming after us?” Zagorski asked. “You keep looking into the mirror.”

“We don’t want to be surprised,” he answered as he accelerated into the curve, then quickly downshifted as they raced into the next bend. Displaying the timing and reflexes of a race car driver, Bolan alternated between downshifting and accelerating, negotiating one hairpin turn after another at speeds that caused the vehicles’s high-performance tires to smoke and squeal in protest. When he entered the last S-turn ending in a straightaway that covered the final half mile leading into the tunnel, two lights characteristic in size and shape of those designed on the front fuselage of a Bell 206 helicopter jumped into his rearview mirror.

The chopper was incoming fast, at close to twice Bolan’s speed, closing the gap between them at a rate that would place the aircraft on top of the Porsche before it reached the tunnel.

Bolan slammed his foot onto the brake and jerked the steering wheel to the left, causing the sports car to slide into a tire-smoking sideways skid that painted wide rubber stripes down the center of the highway.

The helicopter pilot was not anticipating Bolan’s maneuver, and he whizzed straight past, strafing the road inches in front of the Porsche’s reinforced bumper. The .20-caliber machine-gun rounds blazing from the helicopter’s underside left deep pockmarks in the highway’s smooth surface.

As Bolan straightened his car and accelerated toward the tunnel’s entrance, the pilot pulled the nose of his aircraft upward, attempting to perform a complete reverse turn before his prey was able to reach the safety of the passageway. The pilot’s desire to align his chopper with the highway told Bolan that the machine gun was on a fixed mount. The configuration required the pilot to work with his gunner in order to get the barrel pointed generally in the right direction, a fact Bolan used to his advantage. He stomped the accelerator, and the silver sports car took off like a rocket, pressing both passengers into the plush leather seats as it sped into the safety of the mile-long tunnel.

Coming in from the dark, the brightness of the tungsten lights mounted into the ceiling made Bolan squint. There were no other vehicles in sight, and he eased off the gas pedal to give himself a few extra seconds of safety to consider his next move.

“They’ll send someone in to chase us out,” Zagorski said in a low quavering voice that made Bolan wonder if she had reached her point of exhaustion. After her performance at the monastery, he wouldn’t fault her if she had. “And the helicopter will be waiting.”

Unbeknown to her, an M-72 66 mm Light Antitank Weapon was sitting ready for use in the vehicle’s front trunk. The problem Bolan pondered was how to deploy the weapon in this particular situation. The tube in which the LAW’s missile was assembled was open at both ends, which meant the user had to account for a backblast. When the missile ignited, it sent a dangerous tongue of flame and hot gases six feet to the rear.

“We can open the roof, and I’ll fire at them as soon as we come out of the tunnel,” Zagorski said, shifting the P-90 she held at an angle between her knees.

“Not good odds,” Bolan replied. “Not with a Bell. There’s too much plate on the belly for your rounds.”

Spotting a pair of taillights ahead, he accelerated to catch up. As he got close, he saw it was a pickup truck at least ten years old, the faded paint dented and scratched in numerous places.

“We just got lucky,” Bolan said as he steered into the passing lane and tapped his gas pedal to pull even with the pickup. One of the hubcaps on the driver’s side was missing, and the metal sides around the open cargo area were pocked with large sections of maroon rust. The rocker panels had rusted completely through in so many places they appeared to be made of red lace.

“Get him to stop,” Bolan said, pressing the switch to lower Zagorski’s window.

She shouted in French to the driver, a man who looked to be in his midsixties, who first stared at her, shook his head, then stared straight forward, his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly enough to turn his gnarled knuckles white.

Bolan moved forward until the Porsche was halfway beyond the truck before he inched the steering wheel to the right, easing the car’s back fender panel into the pickup’s front bumper.

The old man started shouting and gesturing with universally understood hand signals, but with sparks flying from where the two vehicles were rubbing together, and with the vast superiority the Porsche held over the old pickup, he was forced out of the lane onto a narrow breakdown shoulder barely wide enough for a car to sit beyond the traffic’s flow.

When they had come to a complete halt with the Porsche blocking the pickup’s path, Bolan said, “Come with me,” threw his door open and jumped out. Upon reaching the truck, he reached up and pulled the driver’s door open.

The old man continued shouting and gesturing wildly until his eyes glanced at the Desert Eagle in Bolan’s left hand. Under the bright tungsten lighting, the huge handgun gleamed with evil purpose.

Zagorski stared at the gun with eyes as large as saucers, apparently as apprehensive as the truck driver that Bolan was about to shoot him.

“Tell him not to be afraid.”

Zagorski translated quickly, but her voice as well as the old man’s face belied their belief in Bolan’s words. It was obvious they were both terrified.

“Buy his truck. Fifty thousand euros,” Bolan stated in a voice that held no room for negotiation. “The cash is in the glove compartment.”

Zagorski related the message, which, because it amounted to approximately one hundred thousand U.S. dollars, was not believed. The man’s bottom lip was trembling, and his hands shook as if he was afflicted with palsy. His eyes remained glued to the Desert Eagle.

“Get the money. Hurry,” Bolan said.

Zagorski ran the few steps back to the car, reached in through her open window and came back with a wad of high-denomination bills.

“Tell him again. Fifty thousand euros.”

The sight of the money brought a smile to the old man’s face. In this part of the world, populated along an international border with a culture bred of an interesting combination including ancient Christianity, Islam and Basque, men did not pass judgment on the business of others. Within the local value system, a smuggler or drug dealer could conduct legitimate transactions as subsets of an overall illicit plan without necessarily involving a third party in anything illegal or immoral. Regardless of Bolan’s business, he was offering a transaction the old man found very easy to view as legitimate.

The old man asked for the Porsche as well.

Zagorski couldn’t help but smile as she translated the request.

“No,” Bolan answered. “It’s not mine. Someone will come by to pick it up.”

A slight smile touched at the corners of his mouth for a second as he imagined Hal Brognola explaining to the President that one of the CIA’s high-technology special mission models complete with armor plating, bulletproof glass, and a 5.56 mm machine gun concealed above the tailpipe, was being used to run errands into town by an old hay farmer in Southern France.

“No,” he said again.

The man nodded, and, with his smile exposing a mouthful of crowded, crooked teeth, took the stack of bills from Zagorski and shoved them into his pocket. Despite the fact he was bareheaded, he made a motion of tipping his cap to both Zagorski and Bolan, and set off walking back the way they had come in.

“You drive,” Bolan said, pointing to the truck as he returned to the Porsche.

Zagorski climbed into the pickup and backed it away, allowing Bolan to ease the Porsche against the wall of the tunnel to keep it as far as possible out of the traffic lane until someone could retrieve it.

After shutting down the engine, Bolan released the latch to open the car’s front trunk compartment revealing the LAW.

“Who are you?” Zagorski asked again as Bolan grabbed the LAW and pulled on both ends to expand the weapon. The inner tube telescoped outward to the rear, guided by a channel assembly that housed the firing pin and detent lever. Once the detent was aligned under the trigger bar locking the inner tube in its extended position, the LAW was cocked and ready.

“A man with options,” Bolan answered while wrapping his free hand around the driver’s door handle to activate the car’s sophisticated antitampering system. The Porsche’s passenger window slid closed as Bolan hopped into the back of the pickup and settled himself into a kneeling position.

There were half a dozen holes in the cargo bed’s floor through which he could see the pavement moving by as Zagorski pulled out of the breakdown shoulder into the travel lane. As he visualized the helicopter awaiting their exit from the tunnel, Bolan shifted his position so he would be facing the rear, making sure he left adequate space between himself and the back of the cab for the missile’s backblast.

Bolan reasoned that the chopper would be hovering on top of the tunnel’s opening, its position placing it behind and above an exiting vehicle. The gunsights would be properly aligned with the highway, waiting for the target to appear. To his advantage, Bolan didn’t think his enemies would be expecting his getaway vehicle to be a dilapidated old truck. He figured he’d have two or three seconds to position the LAW’s front reticle sight onto the aircraft and press the rubber-enclosed trigger bar on top of the outer tube to fire the missile. Three seconds after exit was the best he could hope for—by then, the pilot and gunman would realize a man was kneeling in the back of a pickup with the business end of a shoulder-fired rocket launcher pointed their way. They would have but one response for that.

Zagorski pressed the truck’s gas pedal to the floor. The vehicle gained speed, gradually reaching its top velocity of slightly less than forty miles per hour. Ahead, the mouth of the tunnel appeared as a pitch black circle leading into the night.

As they drew close, Bolan flipped the reticle sight into its upright position, positioned the LAW on his right shoulder and lightly placed his fingers over the rubber-encased bar.

The LAW’s reticle sight was a piece of Plexiglas with an image resembling a V etched into the heavy plastic. The weapon was designed to assign the correct distance and elevation to the missile if the operator was able to place his target exactly within the lines of the V. If parts of the target extended outside the V reticle, which was graduated in twenty-five meter range increments, the missile would launch long and usually strike above the intended impact point. Too much space between the target and the walls of the V would result in a short shot.

With the LAW’s maximum effective range of 660 feet, Bolan hoped the helicopter would be hovering low over the highway. The lower the chopper, the better his chances to hit it with a less-than-perfect aim.

The steady sound of the Bell’s blades could be heard when the truck was ten yards or so from the exit. Bolan’s assessments of his enemy’s positioning and intended tactics had apparently both been correct, and he took a deep breath, letting it out slowly to steady himself.

As the pickup moved through the exit into the dark night, he noticed an area on the highway roughly fifty yards outside the tunnel that was illuminated by a powerful spotlight mounted on the chopper’s underside. Before they reached that spot, Bolan realized, he’d have to fire the LAW’s missile.

The instant his line of vision cleared the edge of the tunnel, allowing him to see the sky, Bolan placed the hovering Bell 206 into the center of the reticle’s V sight. The helicopter was low, perhaps no more than two hundred feet off the ground, when he depressed the trigger bar and felt the missile on his shoulder come to life. With an eardrum-aching whoosh and a backblast of fire and hot gases, the high-explosive armor-piercing warhead zipped out the front of the LAW, crashing straight into the belly of the hovering aircraft.

Before the gunner had time to squeeze even one round from his gun, the helicopter exploded in a fireball that illuminated the countryside in orange light. Resembling an outer-space creature in a poorly produced science-fiction movie, the mangled mass of burning machinery tumbled onto the top of the tunnel exit, where it balanced for a moment before crashing onto the highway.

The thunderous sounds of two secondary explosions that scattered pieces of sizzling helicopter metal across both travel lanes echoed across the rolling terrain. With the echo of the blast ringing in his ears, Bolan reached into a pouch on his web belt, withdrew a cell phone, and speed-dialed a secure number.

“Yes?” Hal Brognola answered an ocean away, the sleep in his voice reminding Bolan that in the nation’s capital, people had been in bed for only a few hours.

“Customs,” Bolan said. “Three minutes. Not the Turbo. Blue pickup truck, two passengers.”

“Good job, Striker,” Brognola replied.

He hung up without another word. There would be plenty of time for talk when they got to Stony Man Farm.

3

Less than twenty-four hours after returning from his mission to L’Abbaye de Raphael in Bayonne, Mack Bolan sat with Hal Brognola at a conference table in the War Room at Stony Man Farm. Also with them was Aaron Kurtzman’s cybernetics team, consisting of the methodical, common sense Carmen Delahunt, Huntington Wethers, a distinguished former college professor who brought an academic, facts-based approach to research, and Akira Tokaido, a natural hacker whose innate skills could have enabled him to be one of the best professional gamers in the world had he not chosen instead to serve his country as a member of the Stony Man team. Together, they were a case study for synergy, often arriving at solutions via insights far greater than the sum of the supporting data.

“Nice job on the schematics,” Bolan said across the table to Tokaido.

Tokaido acknowledged the compliment by snapping his bubble gum three times in rapid succession before replying derisively, “They were just 3-D.”

From more than six feet away, Bolan could hear a tinny percussive sound coming from the young man’s high-fidelity earbuds, and wondered for more than the hundredth time how he could hear and respond to normal conversation amid the racket accosting his eardrums from the MP3 player he carried in his shirt pocket.

“Zagorski has been debriefed?” Bolan asked Brognola, who was dressed in a navy blue suit with a button-down white shirt starched so heavily it looked as if it could be made of cardboard.

“Yes. But let’s wait until Kurtzman gets here.”

As if on cue, the doors to the elevator built into the corner of the room slid open, and Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, appeared, followed by Aaron Kurtzman, who wheeled himself to his place at the head of the conference table. As Price slid into a vacant seat next to Tokaido, Kurtzman took his oversize mug of steaming coffee and placed it on the table in front of him.

“Hal, Zagorski’s debrief,” he said without wasting any words on greetings.

“It’s not good,” the big Fed replied. “As we suspected, the Order of Raphael is definitely working to develop a bioweapon. In the three years between 1345 and 1348, the Black Death wiped out somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of Europe’s population. Zagorski thinks the Order actually stored blood taken from plague victims during the fourteenth century in wine bottles in one of their cellars. They began those experiments that caught the attention of Sentinelles hoping to resurrect the disease, but the blood was too old. They decided instead to create a modern pandemic from scratch.”

“Motivation?” Bolan asked.

“I can answer that,” Price spoke up. In addition to the skills she brought to her management responsibilities, the former model with honey-blond hair was an adept researcher. She was knowledgeable and incisive, but even she admitted that her mind lacked that special ability to make the type of quantum leaps the cybernetics team often achieved when they pooled their mental resources.

“The Order dates all the way back to before the Crusades,” Price said. “When Pope Clement moved the papal seat to Avignon and it looked like there would be a schism with Rome, L’Abbaye de Raphael, along with all the other French monasteries, became more prominent in Church affairs. They’re mentioned in many medieval documents, but it’s hard to tell where truth leaves off and a rather incredible legend begins. Some believe that the Order’s calling was to help enforce God’s punishments on man.”

When Price paused for a moment, Wethers said, “Vigilante monks killing sinners?” His voice held a note of skepticism.

He placed the ivory stem of a briar pipe between his teeth and leaned back in his chair, taking on a pose multitudes of students had observed whenever the African-American professor assumed what he called his Socratic mode of teaching.

“Not exactly,” Price answered. “More like facilitators. The Old Testament is very explicit concerning God’s quid pro quo relationship with his Chosen People. Sinning gets out of control, and He sends a flood, choosing Noah to work with Him to punish mankind. Avenging angels are sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorra. Moses is tasked to impose a forty-year cleansing march onto the doubting children of Israel. The legend is that the Order of Raphael was chosen to help spread the plague throughout Europe. Supposedly, a task force called the Forty Martyrs infected themselves and went on their way, spreading the disease along with God’s gospel. In those times, monks and priests were one of few groups allowed free travel across international borders.”

“Why forty?” Delahunt, ever the addict for attention to detail, asked.

“One for each lash Jesus received. But they weren’t all dispatched at once. The story goes that the Order sent them out in pairs and trios over a three-year period when the plague devastated European populations the Order’s abbot constantly watched for a sign telling him when to deploy the final couriers of death, steadfastly believing God would let him know. The plague ended up manifesting itself in three variants—bubonic, with black tumors and death within two weeks, pneumatic, zeroing in on the respiratory system, spread merely by breathing on someone and fatal in days, and finally, the septicemic version, of which the initial symptom was a violent vomiting of blood with death occurring within hours. The appearance of the third mutation, interpreted by the Order’s abbot to symbolize the Trinity, was his signal to deploy the last group. The plague died out shortly thereafter.”

“Are you saying that the explanation we learned in school, that the Black Death was spread by fleas carried on rats, is false?” Bolan asked.

“I’m just telling you what the legend is, Striker,” Price said.

“Why did the plague stop spreading? Rats didn’t change their travel patterns,” Tokaido asked.

“Darwinian natural selection,” Wethers answered in his authoritarian voice. “People possessing a natural resistance survived, and as those contracting the disease died, potential victims became fewer and fewer. Almost half the population in some places was wiped out.”

“In Europe,” Tokaido countered. “Rats didn’t migrate off the continent?” He snapped his gum and added, “Probability of the legend being fact is not zero.”

“Akira’s right,” Delahunt said. “Assume the Order was the breakout epicenter, targeting only the Christian world for God’s punishment. They stop sending couriers and the disease dies out. Coincidence? There must have been susceptible people in places like the Ottoman Empire, which bordered the continent. Why was the disease confined almost exclusively to Europe?”

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