Bolan cocked an eyebrow. “The Company asked for help?”

Brognola shrugged. “Their best operatives are running in Pakistan and Iraq these days.”

“So I’m supposed to enter a section of the city of Split that is a law unto itself. A place where everyone is pretending to be something they aren’t. Then I start following up leads to find two people who have disappeared, but whose disappearances may or may not be linked.”

Brognola nodded. “Yeah. That about sums it up. But don’t forget, if anyone suspects you’re an American agent, there are about one hundred intelligence and terrorist cells who’ll try to kill you.”

Bolan leaned back. “When do I leave?”

Interception

Mack Bolan®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Nathan Meyer for his contribution to this work.

It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;…who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

—Theodore Roosevelt,

(1858–1919)

I’m not one to stand idly by while the bullies of the world intimidate the weak. It’s not in my nature—nor will it ever be. I’ll take my last breath defending America.

—Mack Bolan

To the men and women who defend our nation

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

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

PROLOGUE

In Croat the name of the suburb was Trg Brace Radic, which meant Old Town. It was underpopulated, filled with ancient structures and isolated from the more urban areas of modern Split and in the shadow of the venerate Milesi Palace.

At that time of night it was a place where people minded their own business and kept to themselves. Inside an abandoned, rundown house Mack Bolan stood facing two men. One of the men was Andrew Vasili, a Croat intelligence official turned mercenary information broker, and the second was his bodyguard.

Vasili opened the envelope Mack Bolan had just handed him. The man ran a thick thumb over the neatly bundled packets of euros. He grunted to himself and nodded, satisfied with what he saw. He turned to his bodyguard and nodded again in a single, sharp motion.

The bodyguard removed his hand from the pistol grip of his silenced H&K MP-5 and reached into his coat pocket, withdrawing a silver flash drive that he handed to Bolan, who made it disappear like a stage magician.

Suddenly the glass shattered with a sound like ice in a whiskey tumbler. The shards flew through the air, then fell to the floor as the bodyguard stiffened. The man’s back arched and his eyes grew wide as the heavy-caliber round struck the flesh of his back with a wet, thick slap that was impossible to mistake.

A second later the report of the rifle rolled like thunder through the broken window and Bolan was on the move. The bodyguard turned as he fell, twisting with the force of the round and tumbling like a drunk on the deck of a pitching ship. Blood burst from his mouth in a violent cough as Bolan was dropping and going for his weapon.

Vasili, the informant, shouted as his bodyguard died, letting an expensive black attaché case drop like a stone to the filthy floor. Then he reacted with the honed reflexes of a man primarily concerned with his own survival.

The blood splashed Bolan’s face, warm and sticky and smelling of copper. He heard car tires crunch across gravel and the race of a vehicle engine. Crossing quickly to a second window beside the room’s front door, he parted the limp curtains. Outside a dented and grimy Stobart pickup with its lights off pulled to a stop in a short slide, raising a cloud of dust beside a long figure holding an SKS automatic rifle.

Asian men wearing green headbands and street clothes leaped from the back of the truck. Bolan counted four men, plus a driver and passenger in the front seat. That made seven with the first shooter. Time sped by like frames on a film reel. He saw a RPG-7 and a RPK machine gun standing out among the thicket of AKM barrels.

Of course, he thought to himself, turning. The exchange couldn’t have gone smoothly. It hardly ever did.

Bolan realized he and Vasili would never make it to the back door in time to save themselves if the hit squad was allowed to execute its plan unchallenged. He wasn’t sure who the team of assassins answered to, but it was obvious they had come loaded for bear.

Bolan would need to put a monkey wrench in their well-oiled machinery if he wanted to live.

The Executioner drew his Beretta 93-R and shoved the pistol through the cheap glass of the narrow window of the dilapidated and abandoned house the confidential informant had demanded as a rendezvous point. He cut loose, the 9 mm Parabellum slugs ripping out hard one after the other.

The Asian with the RPG-7 went down on one knee as a double tap struck him center mass. The hit squad responded instinctively to the ambush fire and scattered, their singled-minded purpose having been disrupted by Bolan’s aggressive action.

He kept pulling the trigger as he swept the belching muzzle of the machine pistol toward a hooded killer trying to bring the big RPK machine gun to bear. Bolan hit him in the shoulder, then skipped two more rounds past him and into the hood of the Stobart pickup.

An AKM assault rifle opened up from the squad, and 7.62 mm rounds burned through the stamped metal-and-plastic reinforced faux wood of the house’s battered door. Slugs whizzed into the tight living room, and then the RPK opened up. Bolan dived to the floor and scrambled down the short, narrow hallway that ran from the living area-kitchen to the single back bedroom.

Just ahead of him the Croat information broker crawled along the floor, as well, heading for the back door, which Bolan had jimmied to enter when he’d first arrived on the uncertain scene. A fusillade of metal-jacketed bullets tore through the fragile structure. Glass shattered as wood and plastic housing materials were shredded under the onslaught. Vasili’s black attaché case was ripped apart, and papers exploded into the air like ragged confetti. The furniture disintegrated as more heavy-caliber main battle rifles joined the barrage.

The RPK cut loose in long, distinct braps of fire as the machine gunner dragged the weapon along the length of the one-story house. A mildew-stained refrigerator was blown apart as rounds punched through the outside wall and bored into it like lead-jacketed sledgehammers. Bolan’s own carry-all, still resting on the kitchen table, was ravaged in a relentless cross fire, and his expensive electronics were pounded into useless, unrecognizable pieces. The machine gun severed the door from its hinges and the perforated structure blew inward.

A green tracer round struck a cushion, igniting a small fire on the ratty couch. A cheap clay vase, empty of flowers, was shattered and another ComBloc tracer round sliced through the flimsy window curtains and set them on fire.

In the hall Bolan scrambled to his knees as Vasili reached up and opened the back door. The big American’s ears were ringing from the furious din, and he knew it would only be moments before another gunman in the death squad retrieved the fallen RPG-7 antitank weapon and turned it on the single-story home.

Vasili pushed open the back door and jumped out of the house over the short porch steps and onto the ground. Bolan leaped up after the man and followed him out the door. What happened next unfolded too quickly for Bolan to consider; he merely reacted on instincts so finely honed by continuous exposure to violence that they were evolved to nearly preternatural levels of capability.

The leader of the death squad had placed a security gunner on the rear door in a textbook setup. Bolan spotted the muzzle-flash from the weapon of an Asian killer lying in a shallow depression beside an old metal trash barrel. The man’s bare arms were alive with brightly colored tattoos, indicating his affiliation with either the Japanese Yakuza or one of the Hong Kong triads. Bolan had an impression of a burst hitting Vasili and the Croatian criminal shuddering under the impact. As he heard the sound of the gunfire, the Executioner was already twisting in midair. His feet hit the ground, and he sank into a crouch to absorb the impact, his pistol firing a triburst on the fly.

The sniper’s head jerked back and his green head-band lifted off with a Frisbee-like section of skull and went spinning away into the bushes by a low stone wall. The man’s ruined head slumped into the dirt, and Bolan sprang forward out of his crouch. His feet pounded hard against the brown grass of the tiny back lawn as he sprinted the fifteen yards to the downed enemy gunner.

Bolan slid into place beside the corpse and from behind him the house rocked on its ancient foundations as the RPG-7 warhead exploded inside. Jets of flame erupted from shattered windows and the open door. Within seconds, oily smoke poured into the night sky, and a wash of heat rolled into Bolan like a furnace blast. He felt a sting of piercing impact on the big muscles of his shoulder and a distant part of his mind cataloged the shrapnel wound.

Reaching down with his left hand, he grabbed the bloody hit man’s limp arm. He rolled the dead man over as he slid the still smoking Beretta 93-R into the waistband at the small of his back. The barrel was warm on his skin. He snatched the AKM used to gun down Vasili and then pulled a Croatian army grenade from the ammo pouch on the fanny pack belt cinched around the dead man’s waist. The canister-shaped device was an RG-42 antipersonnel hand grenade, 4.6 inches long and it weighed 436 gms. The deadly little bomb had a blast radius of 75 feet and had come from Soviet stocks when Split had still been Yugoslavia. Bolan thought it felt damn good in his hand.

The Executioner rested the AKM assault rifle across his knee and jerked the pin from the hand grenade. He grabbed the Kalashnikov and rose, the fingers on his left hand holding down the safety lever on the grenade. He felt the blood from his shoulder wound roll down his back, sticking his shirt to his skin.

Bolan realized speed and aggression were his only allies now. He jogged toward the corner of the smoldering house. As he reached the front of the structure, he released the lever on the hand grenade and the tightly depressed spring shot the metal strip out into the air away from him. Bolan slowed to a walk and peered around the final corner, the grenade cooking off in his fist.

He saw the death squad approaching the door of the smoke-filled house, arrayed in an inverted V formation like geese flying south for the winter. The driver of the Stobart pickup remained behind the wheel of the running vehicle. Bolan tossed the grenade underarm toward the mysterious Asian death squad. It bounced once and rolled toward the team like a can of soda spinning off a desk and across the floor. One of the gunmen caught the motion and turned, his AKM coming up.

Bolan snapped his hand onto the front stock of his own AKM as he pulled the weapon’s trigger. He scythed the man to the ground, then peeled back around the corner of the little house, feeling the heat from the fire burning inside against his back. He heard men scream in warning then the grenade blast silenced them.

Angry hornets of shrapnel rattled into the ruined building and buzzed through the smoky air. Bolan rolled back around the corner of the house, snuggling the AKM into the crook of his shoulder like a man hugging an old friend.

The hit team lay on the ground. Some men tried to sit up while others reached frantically for weapons knocked clear by the blast. Bolan raced forward and opened up with controlled sweeps of the AKM muzzle, hosing them down. Spent shell casings arced out of his weapon until it ran dry.

Bolan threw aside the hot, smoking assault rifle and reached for the Beretta 93-R secured behind his back. He spun toward the pickup, falling into a modified, two-fisted Weaver stance with the machine pistol.

The driver had already thrown open his door and jumped from behind the wheel. But, like the rest of the hit squad, the man had brought an AKM assault rifle for the attack and the long weapon banged against the steering wheel and the side of the cab as he tried to yank it free and bring it into play.

Bolan put four rounds through the gap of open vehicle door and windshield in less than a second. All four 9 mm Parabellum rounds found their mark and the man staggered back, dropping the rifle so that it clattered off the truck and onto the ground. Blood rushed in a river from the gunner’s ruined throat and jaw as he spun. His feet tangled up in themselves and he went down without a word to bounce hard off the blood-splattered cobblestone.

Senses amped to a peak level by adrenaline, Bolan heard a moan at his feet, turned, dropped his pistol muzzle and put a bullet in the man lying there. Then he started toward the still running Stobart pickup. He dropped the 93-R pistol’s magazine from the butt grip and slammed home one of his two backups. His finger found the catch release and the handgun shuddered in his hand as the bolt slid home and chambered a round.

Bolan climbed into the pickup and slammed the door closed. He stood on the gas and cranked the wheel hard, turning the vehicle in a tight circle and leaving rubber skid marks across the pavement. As he straightened the nose of the European pickup back toward the road, his front tire rolled over the body of the driver he’d killed with the 9 mm pistol.

The steering wheel shuddered in his grip as first his front and then his rear tires rolled over the body. Without a backward glance, Bolan sped away into the night.

JACK GRIMALDI had the sleek Saber jet running flat-out over the Atlantic Ocean.

In the back of the private, executive-class plane Mack Bolan had dressed his wounds, then cleaned up and changed clothes. Immediately upon takeoff he’d dumped the contents of the flash drive he’d purchased from Vasili into an Epsilon Protocol Encryption laptop provided to him by Stony Man Farm’s mission controller, Barbara Price.

The powerful little computer had downloaded, security checked, encrypted and sent the information contents of the flash drive to Stony Man’s mainframes via Keyhole satellite. Now, an hour later, Bolan had just popped the top on a cold beer to wash down a fistful of ibuprofen tablets when the call came in.

“It’s Barb at the Farm,” Grimaldi called through the open cockpit door. “There’s been an update from that Croatian information you passed on.”

Bolan placed his beer on a nearby table after swallowing his antiinflammatory pills, then picked up the secure satellite phone lying next to him.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Striker,” Barbara Price said. “I’ve already given Jack new coordinates. We learned something urgent from that file you gave us. Something new has come up.”

“When doesn’t it?”

He felt the plane shift course as Jack Grimaldi cut the Saber jet onto new coordinates.

And so it began.

CHAPTER ONE

Mack Bolan jumped from the jet at forty-five thousand feet, opened the canopy high and sailed miles in from out over international waters. He wore a thermal suit and used supplemental oxygen to help him withstand the rigors of high altitude.

Over time the Executioner had come to excel in such airborne insertion operations. The nature of the deployment was such that stealth was an even higher priority than the lightning-quick speed of heliborne and fast-boat delivery methods. Often it was by high altitude low opening—HALO—jumps. He’d leave the jump plane at up to thirty thousand feet then free fall down to a height of fifteen hundred to a thousand feet, waiting until the last possible minute to deploy for short exposure over the target.

In the HALO jumps, as in this instance, Bolan’s insertion relied not only on the extreme altitude of the plane, but on great, even vast topographical distance, as well.

THE COUNTRY WAS an armed camp. North Korea contained a civilian population motivated and conditioned to a degree of loyalty not seen since the Spartans. To help ensure Mack Bolan’s probability in remaining uncompromised by a chance encounter, Stony Man Farm, under mission controller Barbara Price’s direction, had picked a landing zone in a remote section of very rugged terrain in the mountains above the objective. After being outfitted at a Joint Special Operations Command forward operating base in Djibouti on the way in, Bolan was now dressed in complete tree/cliff landing gear: padded suit, football-style helmet with full face mask, reinforced ankle guards. The Farm’s planning called on him to make a tree landing in an isolated valley, rappel from the canopy, then make his way down a steep crevice and into the Yellow River tributary.

He carried nearly two hundred pounds of mission-essential equipment, weaponry and survival gear for the operation. The mission plan called for infiltration into the site by means of the river, so he jumped with a Draeger Rebreather scuba system. Such an ops plan was horribly “Hollywood” in execution as such a plethora of skills and independent stages greatly increased the operative’s exposure to the double threats of military SNAFUs, including the omnipresent threat of a mission-ending injury.

Given the choice, Bolan would have preferred walking in, cutting through the DMZ to the south by means of routes already secured and verified by Special Forces teams assigned full-time to covert LRRP/SU ops in the no-man’s land between the north and south of the Asian peninsula.

But as happened so often when Stony Man Farm and the Executioner were called into play, the operation depended on complete invisibility while at the same time remained hamstrung by timing. The train Bolan intended to intercept was going to be on target on time, and only for that time. The Oval Office wanted a surgical strike with no collateral damage.

The land was arrayed below the plummeting commando in an uneven checkerboard of blacks and grays. He flared his canopy hard at the last moment, attempting to curtail his momentum as the ground rushed up. He heard then felt his rucksack crash into the copse of trees, then two heartbeats later his feet, tightly clamped together, broke through the mesh of interwoven branches at the top of the canopy. He kept his legs pressed together as gravity yanked him down through branches and tree trunks. He took several bone-jarring impacts before his parachute caught and his neck whip-lashed hard into the special support collars leaving him sore but unharmed.

Taking stock of his surroundings, he looked down and saw he was about forty feet from the ground, caught halfway up a good-size evergreen. His chute seemed securely trapped above him, but he was too far out from the main trunk for the branches to have enough girth to support him.

Hitting his quick-release clip, Bolan let his rucksack fall, then pulled himself along the branches of the pine tree until he was on a more stable support. He disengaged the jump harness and secured his nylon ribbon of a rappel cord from a pocket in the lower leg of his padded suit.

He slipped the strong, flat cord through a D-ring carabiner positioned at his waist and kicked away from the tree, dropping to the ground in a smooth arc. On the forest floor he quickly removed his jumpsuit, helmet and supplemental oxygen along with the rest of his rappel harness. He made no effort to retrieve his chute and paid only cursory attention to camouflaging the gear he was leaving behind. If there was anyone close enough to stumble onto it in the dark, then the mission was probably blown in any case.

From his pack Bolan secured first his primary weapon, a Chinese model AKM with folding paratrooper stock, and a night-vision-goggle headset. Like a modern-day version of the childhood boogeyman, he hunted at night, could see in the dark and was armed with fearsome claws. Straining against the weight, Bolan slipped into the shoulder straps of his rucksack then took first a GPS reading before double-checking his position with a compass to verify his start point. Satisfied, he set off down the steep, narrow valley toward the dull gleam of the wide river below.

In many ways his cross-country navigation was almost more dangerous than the HAHO jump, or even than the potential difficulties he faced in his coming swim. Every model of night-vision device available offered depth perception difficulties. The scree-covered terrain was rocky and steep, making his footing uncertain, and he was cutting down not an actual path but rather a rain wash gully. With two hundred pounds on his back each step downhill sent a biting jar through his knees and lower back, threatening to turn his ankles constantly as his heels came down on loose gravel and powdered dirt. The topography was so steep and uncertain Bolan spent half the two-kilometer descent sliding on his backside as opposed to on his feet.

By the time Bolan reached the floor of the wash he was drenched in sweat and breathing hard. He squatted among the cover of some weeds and cheat grass behind a row of dense shrubs well back from the two-lane blacktop that ran parallel to the river, resting long enough for his heart rate to recover and his breathing to even out. He washed down a couple of the “Go” pills the military gave their pilots on long flights with a full canteen of water. He then opened his rucksack and broke out the dive gear. By his watch he noted he was seven and a half minutes ahead of his pre-op planned time schedule.

With such a strenuous overland hike and steep descent he had been unable to don his wet suit until just prior to submersion or risk heat fatigue and dangerous dehydration. He quickly stripped and donned the neoprene wet suit. Once he was dressed, he pulled on North Korean army fatigues over the insulated swim gear and retied his combat boots.

He was stripped down to the essentials for his swim, and other than his primary weapon everything he needed was tightly fitted inside an oversize butt pack or secured across his body in the numerous pockets of his fatigues or pouches on his H-harness web gear.

Working quickly he fit the poncho-style vest of the rebreather system over his head and shrugged it across his shoulders before pulling the neoprene hood of his wetsuit into place. He fit the mouthpiece and tested the oxygen circuit. Designed for short, shallow dives, the rebreather offered scuba capabilities while eliminating the telltale trail of bubbles of other commercial diving rigs.

Holding his facemask and swim fins in one hand, Bolan cradled his primary weapon in the crook of his arms and crawled out from his place of concealment and into the mouth of the metal culvert running under the North Korean highway.

Coming out the other side, he slid into the cold, sluggish water of the Yellow River with all the deadly, fluid agility of motion as a hunting crocodile. Once in the water he spit into his mask and rinsed the faceplate before putting it on and then tucked his swim fins into place around his boots.

Submerging into the frigid and inky black he began kicking steadily into the middle of the deep river where the current was strongest. Staying about two yards below the surface, he used the luminous dials of his dive watch to judge the approximate distance of travel.

Bolan surfaced after fifteen minutes and stopped kicking, letting the current carry him in among the heavy beams of the crossed pillars supporting a railroad bridge across the river. Working quickly, he stripped his dive gear and let it float down into the cold gray appetite of the water. Reaching up, he grabbed hold of a wide crossbeam and began to climb.

He pulled himself up, hand over hand, twisting around the cross beams and climbing higher and higher. Above him the horizontal beams housing the tracks grew closer and closer and the wind picked up the nearer he drew to the lip of the canyon. He climbed with his Kalashnikov hung muzzle down across his back, and by the time he reached the top the water had stopped dripping behind him. He double-checked his watch and crawled into position, fitting himself tight into the trestle joist.

Intelligence stated that the protocol for all military rail transports leaving the Yellow River Restricted Military Zone stopped on the other side of the bridge to allow for routine security inspections of transport documents. There were schedules to be kept, protocols to be followed, routines to be adhered to. He would have the three-minute window it took for the brakeman to change the tracks to get out from under the bridge and onboard the train without being seen by the armed sentries of the Army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the DPRK.

The time frame itself was ludicrous enough, as any delay along the way could have thrown the whole operation into jeopardy, but such a tight schedule hadn’t dissuaded Bolan, and Stony Man hadn’t apologized during his initial briefing.

The Executioner focused wholly on the task ahead of him and with the patience of a trapdoor spider as he lay in wait as the North Korean freight train approached then skidded to a stop in a shower of sparks and the harsh squeal of steel-on-steel. Spotlights glared down the length of the track as the military checkpoint on the far side of the bridge followed their established practice. This night the institutionalized paranoia of the DPRK would prove well founded.

Bolan scrambled up through the girders and pulled himself onto the train track. He looked down the serpentine length of the transport train toward the lead engine and saw two men in heavy military overcoats climbing into the engineer’s compartment. The searchlight mounted at the top of the checkpoint shack began to rotate and play along the length of the train.

Bolan began to move fast.

He scrambled up next to the coupling housing between two railroad boxcars and out of the path of the advancing searchlight. The powerful beam of illumination ran down the train, and Bolan shrank back into the protective enclosure of the railcar’s shadow. Once it was past, he scrambled upward, climbing smoothly until he reached the apex of the boxcar.

At the summit he slid over the end of the train and quickly scanned in both directions. Five cars down there was a gap between the roofs of the olive-green boxcars, indicating a flatbed railcar. Beneath him the train began to sway as the brakes were kicked off and the engineer let go with a whistle blast to signal the imminent movement of the long train.

The industrial locomotive lurched to a start and began to gather speed, slowly at first but then with greater and greater momentum as the train began to push forward. Bolan hugged the roof as the train moved past the checkpoint and plunged into the sharply mountainous countryside beyond the river. He clung precariously for several minutes as the train finished gathering speed and began placing more and more distance behind it from the access station out of the restricted area.

Finally ready, Bolan lifted up off the roof of the boxcar and began to navigate his way down the line of cars.

THE MISSILE COMPONENTS were housed in wooden crates, but there was no disguising them if a person knew what to look for. The main crates were thirty-two feet long, holding the medium-range intercontinental rockets while additional storage boxes housed the powerful engines and the advanced computer guidance systems inside the conical tips. Stony Man intelligence had them en route to Pyongyang and from there to Iran by freighter.

The Executioner had been deployed to send a message about the traffic of such advanced and powerful weapon systems, and he carried enough Semtex explosives in his kit to guarantee there would be no misunderstanding.

From his position on the boxcar overlooking the flatbed where the pyramid stack of rockets had been secured, Bolan was able to count four guards. The train was traveling at full speed now and the mountain winds were bitter and harsh, driving the sentries into sheltered alcoves. Bolan felt confident he could place his demolition charges unobserved.

He moved quickly, sliding down the iron ladder built into the boxcar. He landed on the access platform just as a fifth soldier, with NCO markings on his uniform, came around the edge of the car on the signalman’s catwalk.

The man was shorter than Bolan by half a foot, stockily built with high, flat cheekbones and dark brown eyes that widened almost comically in surprise at the sudden apparition of a dark-clothed Occidental. The man clawed for a 9 mm Tokarev TT30 pistol as Bolan, hands empty, leaped forward.

The man managed a short bark of surprise before Bolan struck. Lunging forward, the Executioner lifted his left knee to his chest and kicked explosively, driving the heel of his combat boot in the man’s chest and driving him backward over the railing of the catwalk.

The North Korean soldier flipped and struck the basalt-and-gravel dike running next to the tracks in a spinning tumble before bouncing away. Then the racing train was gone and sparks flew as a burst of AKM fire slammed into the railcar next to Bolan’s head.

Spinning, the big American dropped to one knee even as he cleared his silenced pistol from its shoulder holster. From the walkway next to the rockets on the flatbed a North Korean soldier leveled a Chinese AKM at him, aiming for a second burst.

Bolan’s pistol chugged softly and spent brass tumbled out of its breech and off over the edge of the train, as lost in the night as the noncommissioned officer had been. The Korean sentry jerked under the impact of the 3-round burst, his head snapping and blood splashing off to the side. As he tumbled to the floor of the railcar, his partner suddenly appeared directly behind him.

For a heartbeat the two men looked at each other, then Bolan’s rounds found the other man’s chest and he pitched forward, victim of a lead coronary. The man struck the floor of the flatbed, then rolled and was sucked away in a flash.

Bolan leaped forward, grasped the cold metal railing in one hand and vaulted the barrier onto the railcar. The wind cutting across the exposed carriage was hard and cold. He had to move quickly. The burst of weapons fire had to have alerted the other pair of armed guards, but Bolan could only hope that the noise of the train had deafened the reports for any reinforcements positioned inside the railcars.

The Executioner landed hard on his rubber-soled boots, which absorbed some of the shock of his impact. He went down to one knee, then came back up. His right hand tucked his pistol away as his left reached around and swung the silenced Kalashnikov from behind his back on its sling. He took up the assault rifle just as a third North Korean soldier rounded the corner at the far end of the platform, his weapon up and hunting for a target.

Bolan squeezed the Kalashnikov’s trigger and felt the recoil of the long rifle thump into his shoulder. The heavy-caliber rounds burned across the space between the two combatants and ripped the other man apart, then Bolan caught a flash of motion out of the corner of his eye and instinctively pivoted to face the new threat.

CHAPTER TWO

The final guard had circled and climbed over the secured crates housing the disconnected rockets. The muzzle of the man’s weapon blazed a star pattern, but green tracer fire buzzed harmlessly past Bolan as he drew down and punched the man from his perch with a short burst.

Bolan did not hesitate. He sprinted forward, hurtled across the body of the second man he’d killed, and charged down the length of the flatbed. As he ran, he let the silenced AKM drop to his side and pulled his ready-prepped satchel charges from their web belt carriers and rushed to put them into position.

He moved back and forth in a huddled crouch around the ends of the rockets, working with feverish efficiency. The Semtex was such a powerful compound and he had packed so much into his satchels that the procedure wasn’t difficult. Proximity with the engines was enough, and he slapped down the charges and primed their radio receivers for his signal.

He wasn’t interrupted though he knew that with so many of the sentries missing it was only a matter of moments before he was discovered; the law of averages demanded it. He worked coolly, planting the satchel charges as efficiently as he could, then standing and sprinting for the next boxcar. Only one more flatbed to go and he would have ensured the destruction of the rocket housing, guidance systems and engines.

He turned and scrambled to the edge of the flatbed. The train swayed and rolled beneath his feet as he circumnavigated the heavy chain tie-downs and sharp-edged corners of the crates housing the rocket components. Looking back the way he had come, Bolan turned and jumped lightly across the distance between the two railcars, letting his primary weapon dangle off its sling against his torso. He caught hold of the hard steel rungs of the ladder set into the freight car and quickly climbed upward.

As soon as his head cleared the edge of the carriage, wind tore into him. He scuttled over the side, got to his feet, caught his balance and began to move forward. He ran steadily, scanning ahead and hunting for the second flatbed containing the unmarked crates and their deadly payloads. The second hand on his watch continued cutting off segments of time with irrevocable consistency.

Finally he saw the break in the row of boxcars that indicated the second flatbed. On one side of the train the mountainside, thick with evergreens and heavy bushes, rose like a retaining wall while on the other side the drop into the valley was sheer and unforgiving. Bolan’s luck had held mainly due to the relaxed posture of an army long used to a subjugated population and one too technologically and financially challenged to provide its ground units with radio communications.

Bolan stopped running and dropped to one knee, the AKM up and ready. He cursed under his breath. A curve in the track allowed him to see the boxcar directly in front of the second flatbed from more than just one angle, and the news was not good.

The final railcar was a club carriage designed to carry passengers, and on a military train that could only mean more soldiers. To reach the second rocket storage area he was going to have to cross a railroad car filled with armed men. Just that quickly the factors working against his success had multiplied exponentially. Bolan worked the pistol grip of his assault rifle as he shrugged against the weight of the modified rucksack on his back. He rose and approached the sleeper car.

THE CURVE OF THE RAILROAD track continued along an inward spiral against the side of the mountain, exposing the inside surface of the train to Bolan from his position on the boxcar roof. He saw the dark face of the passenger car suddenly split open and a rectangle of yellow light spill out. Bolan dropped flat on his belly as a dark figure stepped out onto the train platform.

Immediately, Bolan noticed that the figure was dressed in civilian clothes, a leather overcoat draped across his fireplug frame. The man was talking animatedly into a cell phone. From less than twenty yards away Bolan was immediately struck by how compact, and thus how new, the communication device was. Cutting-edge cellular phones were not available to the average Korean, or even the average military officer. By default Bolan realized he was seeing someone very important. In his other hand the man carried a black leather briefcase Bolan recognized as a laptop carrier.

Moving surreptitiously Bolan raised his night-vision goggles. He had taken off the apparatus before his swim and kept it secured while he moved along the train to avoid the depth perception problems inherent to their use. Now he moved carefully to bring it up over his eyes and then zero in with the zoom function.

The North Korean on the cell phone jumped into abrupt focus. There was plenty of ambient light coming from the passenger car for the advanced-technology glasses to bring every stark line of detail into view. Bolan played the image-enhancement lens across the man’s face and knew from accessing his mental mug shots that he was looking at a major player in the North Korean government. He dredged the name from the recesses of his memory—he was looking at Kim Su-Kweon, department chief of the Research Department for External Intelligence—RDEI. The RDEI was a nefarious and sinister organization linked to activities as diverse as creating infiltration tunnels under the DMZ and selling methamphetamines to Yakuza interests in Japan.

If the RDEI was a web, then Kim Su-Kweon was the fat spider at its center. The man turned his back to the wind, his leather satchel swinging in his other hand. Bolan knew instantly he had to acquire that laptop. If he could secure it and then blow the train, there would be every reason for the North Korean command and control to believe the device had been lost in the explosion. It would be an intelligence coup of significant proportions.

Bolan pulled his NVDs clear of his face as Kim Su-Kweon shut his cell phone and turned toward the door leading into the passenger railcar. Bolan pushed up off his stomach and raised his silenced AKM up to cover the man.

Catching the motion out of the corner of his eye, Kim turned in surprise. He gaped in shock as he saw the black-clad apparition of the Executioner above him. He barked out a warning and dropped his cell phone, which clattered to the platform and skittered away to be pulled under the thundering wheels of the train. His hand clawed inside his overcoat as Bolan moved lightly to the edge of the boxcar roof. The North Korean intelligence agent pulled his pistol free and tried to bring it to bear.

Bolan loosed a 3-round burst into the man’s face from under six yards and splashed his brains across the steel bulkhead of the railcar behind him. The intelligence agent was thrown backward by the inertia of the heavy-caliber rounds, and his laptop case fell from slack hands as he pitched forward, then crumpled to his knees on the steel mesh of the platform. Bolan rushed forward and leaped across the distance between the two cars.

He landed hard and folded up but fought to keep his feet in the sticky pool of Kim’s spilling blood. The door opened and a uniformed soldier with an AKM in his hands appeared in the entranceway. Bolan didn’t hesitate to knock him back into the passenger car with a quick burst that clawed out his throat and blasted the back of his head off.

The man fell backward, and Bolan caught a glimpse of more soldiers rushing forward as the dead man tumbled into the car. The Executioner threw his weapon to his shoulder and poured a long, ragged burst into the tight kill zone of the passenger car hallway, chewing men apart with his bluntly scything rounds. Still firing one-handed he scooped up the fallen laptop case and raced for the metal access ladder set into the side of the railcar superstructure.

He shoved the case through a suspender on his H-harness web gear and let the silenced AKM hang from its cross body sling. He pushed himself hard, felt the laptop start to slip and stopped to shove it back into place.

Below him a burst of gunfire tore through the open train door and bullets rattled and ricocheted off the boxcar behind him. Bolan heard a man screaming in anger and more than one in pain as he lunged over the top of the car and onto the roof. Below him a North Korean soldier rushed onto the grille of the landing and swung around, bringing his weapon to bear. Bolan flipped over onto his back in a smooth shoulder roll and snatched up the pistol grip of his weapon. He thrust the weapon forward against the brace of the sling and angled it downward.

He pulled the trigger and held it back, letting the assault rifle rock and roll through half a magazine before easing up and rolling to his feet. He took two steps and the laptop case fell. He dropped with it and caught it before it bounced away. He used his left hand to unsnap the carabiner hook between his web gear belt and suspender. Quickly he hooked that through the handle of the black leather case and reconnected it to his belt.

He was almost too late.

He saw the muzzle of the Chinese AKM thrust over the edge of the railcar roof and he dived forward. He tumbled haphazardly across the roof as the soldier on the ladder let loose with his weapon. Bolan’s chin struck the metal of the carriage structure and he bit his tongue, filling his mouth with the copper tang of his own blood.

Green ComBloc tracers and 7.62 mm slugs tore past him as he slid toward the edge of the roof and the long, steep drop below. He reached out with his left hand and grabbed hold of the metal lip running along the top of the railcar, spreading his legs wide to slow his momentum. From just a few feet away he thrust the muzzle of his AKM forward and triggered a burst.

His rounds roared into the exposed weapon firing at him and ripped it from the soldier’s hands as the hardball slugs tore through the stock and receiver, shattering it beyond use. The soldier’s hand disappeared in an explosion of red mist, and his scream was ripped away by the rushing wind.

Bolan spun on the slick metal of the roof and gained his feet. He pushed himself up, fired a second burst of harassing fire, then turned and sprinted in the opposite direction. As he neared the edge of the car and the flatbed containing the second shipment of missile components came into view, he saw a North Korean soldier scramble into position while trying to bring his assault rifle to bear.

Bolan fired and knocked him spinning off the railcar. The man screamed horrifically as he tumbled over the edge like a pinwheel, bounced off the basalt lip of the track and plunged down the mountainside below like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake. Bolan leaped into the air and landed on top of the flatbed car. He ducked and slid over the side of the pile just as a North Korean soldier sidled around the end of the flatbed freight car. The soldier fired as Bolan was freeing the last of his satchel charges. The Executioner thrust his own assault rifle forward by the pistol grip, using the sling like a second hand and pulled the trigger.

The shots were hasty and he was off balance as he fired, but he hosed the area in a spray-and-pray maneuver designed to force the man backward. He rolled over, feeling the hard edge of the wooden crate bite into his hip, and squeezed the trigger again, then broke off, recentered and fired once again.

The bullets caught the North Korean soldier center mass and he staggered under their impact, his weapon tumbling from useless hands as Bolan let the muzzle recoil climb so that bullets chewed the man apart, drilling him from sternum to skull in a staccato hail of slugs.

Bolan turned and slid the last satchel into place, keying up the transponder for his electronic signal. Soldiers rushed to the edge of the roof of the boxcar next to him and started firing down at him. Wood splinters flew in the air as a fire team of North Korean soldiers shot at him. He ducked behind the end of the crates and threw his rifle to one side. Green tracer fire burned past his position as he recentered the shoulder straps of his specially outfitted rucksack.

He pulled the transmitter out of its pocket as more and more rifle fire drew down on his position. Grabbing hold of the electronic device, he turned toward the edge of the train overlooking the open valley. He sucked in two quick breaths and sprinted out from cover. Three hard steps and he was on the edge, then he kicked off and threw himself out into space. Behind him the withering fire petered off as the uniformed men on the train watched him fall, hypnotized into stunned amazement.

Bolan felt the air rushing up into his face with surprising force. He saw the snakelike twisting of the Yellow River five hundred feet below him, then turned and hit the button on his detonator. There was a pause half a heartbeat long, then the train was blown off the mountain at the two flatbed points containing the rocket bodies and engines. A yellow ball of fire rolled out from the mountain and a wave of heat descended on Bolan as he fell.

His fist came up to his left breast just beside the suspender of his H-harness web gear and jerked the D-ring handle. There was a pause that lasted for entirely too long in his racing thoughts as he plunged below three hundred feet and the dark water of the river came into sharper focus.

The minichute, also called a stunt chute—of the kind used by BASE jumpers—rushed out and caught. Bolan was jerked to a stop for a moment, then gravity reclaimed him and he began to fall toward the river again, his descent slowing modestly. At fifteen feet above the surface, when the dark water of the river filled his vision beyond his dangling feet, Bolan hit the cut-away and dropped out of his harness to fall like a stone.

He struck the cold water for the second time that night and felt it rush in over his head. Letting the current take him, his hand went to his waist where he shrugged out of his web gear and let it float away, keeping only the laptop carry case. He kicked for the surface and deployed his final piece of gear, a life vest designed to keep him buoyant in the water.

Above his head the side of the mountain burned. Working quickly, he swam to the shore and pushed the black leather case out of the water. Putting one knee down on the gravel against the current, Bolan opened the case to make sure it had kept the water out and then resealed it. Moving quickly, he used the air-tight pouches that he had used to transport his satchel charges to insulate the carry case then, after securing it to himself, he swam back out into the fast-moving current.

Forty minutes later he activated his emergency beacon and let the river carry him out toward the Sea of Japan.

When Jack Grimaldi got the signal, he flew the seaplane in low under the radar and put the pods down on the choppy water beyond the breakers fronting the rocky shoreline. He knew North Korean naval units were responding as he pulled Bolan out of the situation, but aggressive electronic jamming by units of the U.S. Air Force based out of the Japanese mainland easily outclassed their counterparts in the DPRK.

SIX HOURS LATER the Stony Man cybercrew cracked the encryption security on the laptop and things really began to roll.

The first of the hijacked information was the most important.

Under Kim Su-Kweon’s control, his intelligence agency had forged an alliance with the Hong Kong triad known as the Mountain and Snake Society. Mostly the deal had involved the laundering of forged American money and as a secondary outlet for North Korea’s prodigious methamphetamine production operation. But Stony Man had discovered that the use of the triad cutouts extended far beyond that.

The Mountain and Snake Society had aggressively expanded its influence, most commonly by brute force, into any area on the global stage where there was a Chinese population presence or criminal activity already in existence on an international scale. The waterfront areas of Split, Croatia, had certainly qualified on the latter if not always on the former, and North Korean intelligence had entered into an arms trafficking enterprise with Russian oligarch Victor Bout through intermediaries of the Mountain and Snake Society triad.

The triad subsidiary had then taken it upon itself to expand its own business interests and began performing mercenary criminal functions for Chechen, Russian and Azerbaijani mafia-style organizations. Most significantly to Stony Man had been the triad’s agreement to provide a safehouse for and act as intermediaries to, the kidnapping of the daughter of an American official in Split.

The disappearance of Karen Rasmussen had baffled American security services who had focused their resources on known terror organizations in the area, leading them up one blind alley after another. Kim had known exactly where the young woman was being held and what was to become of her.

Now the Executioner did, as well.

CHAPTER THREE

The long-range helicopter dropped out of the Eastern European night and hugged the ocean surf. Bolan looked out through his door on the copilot side and eyed the waters of the Adriatic Sea. It was even darker than the night, its water black and disturbingly deep. On the horizon in front of them a mile or so out, the brilliant lights of Split flared with near blinding intensity.

Bolan looked over at the helicopter pilot, his old friend Jack Grimaldi. The man, dressed in aviator flight-suit and helmet offered him a thumbs-up and pointed at the GPS display on the helicopter dashboard.

“One mile out,” Grimaldi said.

The pilot’s face was cast in the greenish reflection of his dome lights, making his features stark and slightly surreal. Bolan reached down between them, then secured his dive bag across his body, which was sheathed in a black dry suit of quarter-inch neoprene against the chilly water below them.

Grimaldi banked the helicopter and lowered into a hover above the rough sea. A sudden gust of wind hammered into the side of the aircraft and threatened to send it spinning into the waves. Reacting smoothly, the Stony Man pilot fought the struggling helicopter back into a level hover. The wind gust carved a sudden trough in the ocean beneath them, turning a three-yard drop to nearly ten in the blink of an eye. If Bolan had leaped when that gust had hit, his amphibious insertion would have shattered bones and left him crippled and helpless in rough seas.

“I don’t like this, Sarge!” Grimaldi yelled.

Looking up from the increasingly violent water, Bolan nodded his agreement. “We’ve been over this before,” he shouted back, pulling the hood of his dry suit into place. “It’s the most expedient manner to infiltrate Azerbaijani custom controls on such short notice.”

“Ten to one Karen is already dead and buried so deep in a hidden grave we’ll never see her again!” Grimaldi argued. “There’s too much about this we don’t know. We should pull back now before we lose track of two Americans,” he said pointedly. But he also said it like a man who didn’t quite believe the story he was pushing.

Bolan tugged his snorkel and facemask into place. “If there’s even one chance of getting her out, I’ve got to try.” He snapped his swim fins onto his belt and reached for the handle of the copilot door. He grinned at the frowning Grimaldi. “Try not to splatter me all over the Adriatic.”

“No promises, Sarge,” Grimaldi answered. But he nodded and worked his controls, fighting the helicopter into position.

Bolan opened the door and stepped onto the landing skid. Instantly sharp wind and needles of sea spray slapped into him. His dry suit kept him warm, but the exposed flesh of his face felt raw and brutalized. Though technically Mediterranean, the water still held a bite this time of year. He squinted hard against the spray and slammed the door of the helicopter shut.

Despite his joke about splattering on the water, Bolan knew he had to move as efficiently as possible to minimize the hovering helicopter’s exposure to the variables of the weather and sea. He looked down, saw a swell rise up to greet him and pushed away from the aircraft. He stepped off with one foot to clear the helicopter.

His grip in his clumsy dry suit mitten slipped on the rain-slick handle of the door as an erratic blast of air slammed into him like a subway car. His feet were knocked clear of the landing skid as Grimaldi frantically fought the helicopter back under control and Bolan tumbled out into space.

Cursing to himself, he tried to twist as he dropped as below him the path of the wind cupped out a depression in the churning sea and ten feet became fifteen and then twenty. He got one hand up in time to secure his mask and snorkel, then hit the water hard along one side with enough force to drive the wind from his lungs like a gut punch.

He plunged through the waves and into the deep, cold embrace of the water. The ocean closed like a black hole around him, sucking him into chilly brine and foam. He turned in the water, briefly disorientated by the fall, and he could no longer discern the surface.

His hands went to his chest and he fumbled for a moment, slapping himself, searching for the release. Just as his lungs felt as if they were going to burn to a cinder with the pain of his asphyxiation, he found and jerked the activation handle.

The compartments in his life vest popped open and jerked him chest-first toward the surface. He rose through the cold black like a buoy and broke the surface, gasping for breath, and began to kick. Above him he heard the sound of the helicopter hovering overhead. He kicked hard and waved a hand to show that he was fine.

Grimaldi pulled up and away, taking the helicopter out of danger. A wave broke over Bolan’s head, pushing him down, and when he got to the surface again he was alone.

ESCHEWING THE MASK and snorkel, Bolan cut through the water using the sidestroke, the preferred movement for combat swimmers on endurance insertions. He kept himself oriented toward the brilliant beacon of Split, and after some time the rolling of the surf began to push him in that direction.

The swimming was hard work. He found a rhythm, pulling down with his arm while drawing back his leg and scissor-kicking. The taste of the ocean was in his mouth, the water stinging his eyes.

He kicked to the top of one rolling wave and slid down the trough on the other side. The sea and the sky were black, but the easy landmark of the glowing city light of Split drew him on. His working body was warm inside his suit and he began to perspire lightly. Gradually the lights grew closer.

IN DARKNESS there was death.

The Executioner watched from the shadows, his eyes tracking every movement of the rooftop sentry like the targeting system of a surface-to-air missile. As the guard strolled along the edge of the warehouse, Mack Bolan slid in closer, step by step, with murderous intent.

The Asian gunslinger was a triggerman for the Mountain and Snake Society triad. Compared to more common criminals, the sentry moved around his area of operations with purpose and discipline, hands on the pistol grip of his submachine gun.

The Croat-based triad had carved out a niche serving as underworld enforcers for hire, providing security to drug and weapons shipments as well as occasionally providing shooters for criminal acts throughout the region. Its primary income came from the kidnapping and trafficking of underage girls to fill the prison brothels of India. They were child-rapists and slavers, and the Executioner had come for them.

Bolan crept out of a deep shadow. The guard stood with his back unprotected, facing the lights of the city across the bay. His hands were filled and busy as he worked a lighter to light a cigarette, leaving the submachine gun dangling loose.

The Executioner moved smoothly in a choreographed ballet of violence. His hands were parallel to each other, the knuckles of his middle fingers almost touching as he gripped the wooden dowels of the garrote. The length of piano wire between them formed an oblong loop, and he slipped it like a noose over the man’s head. He jerked his hands back and apart, snapping the loop closed, and the wire bit into his quarry’s neck with merciless efficiency.

The man gagged as his larynx was crushed. Blood rushed out as the thin wire bit deep. The blunt hammer of Bolan’s knee connected hard with the man’s kidney and he folded like a lawn chair, dropping to his knees. As the man went down, Bolan’s jerked back on the garrote like a tourist hauling in a Marlin into a fishing boat off Mazatlán. Blood spilled out like water from a cracked-open fire hydrant and the man blacked out.

His arms fell limply, and Bolan put the knobby tread of his boot against the sentry’s back and pushed against the tension of the wire, finishing the job. He dropped the handles and let the body slump over. The blood was obsidian in the faint moonlight, and it stained the man’s cigarette then snuffed it out with a slight hiss.

Pulling a sturdy diver knife from his combat harness, Bolan crossed the roof to where a skylight broke the surface in a Plexiglas bubble. He knelt and began working, as expertly as any cat burglar.

TWO MEN were in the room. One was almost naked, and both looked at Karen Rasmussen with a vulture’s bleak appetite. She was tied to a straight-backed chair by a white hemp rope in intricate and stylized knotting and patterns of bonding, clothed in only her underwear. She was unaware of it, but Rasmussen had been bound according to ancient Hojojutsu techniques. The binding was considered an erotic S&M art form in Japan, and when this episode was done that was where Philippine national Abdullah Sungkar hoped to unload at least a hundred thousand U.S. dollars’ worth of the DVD.

The teenage girl stared at him with terror in her eyes, and Sungkar looked to his camcorder to make sure it was on. The look was worth cash when the pedophile online network began their critiques and reviews. His tongue, pink and small, quickly darted out to moisten his lips.

Behind him the actor named Sulu was zipping his leather mask into place. Karen Rasmussen was the daughter of the American embassy official in charge of development of agriculture and commerce projects. Sungkar, a field captain in the Mountain and Snake Society, had been paid by a representative of Russian syndicates to kidnap the young woman then rape and torture her. And to film it, so copies could be sent out to the press as an example of America’s powerlessness. It was not a request that made sense to Sungkar, as it didn’t seem to advance the business interests of the Russian.

Indeed such brutal tactics had already been tried and rejected by the umbrella terror organization al-Qaeda, but the money spent the same as far as Sungkar was concerned. Whatever plan Victor Bout had, that was up to him. Sungkar took pay for his play, and that was all that mattered to him.

Sulu stepped into the camcorder’s picture, already aroused. The sight of the man caused the girl to try to scream around her ball-gag. Spittle flew. Sungkar felt a tightening in his own crotch.

Karen Rasmussen threw herself against her restraints, but the triad captain had learned his knots from a master, and escape was hopeless. Giggling like a little girl from behind a black leather mask, Sulu stalked toward the teenager.

MACK BOLAN UNFOLDED from the skylight like a great malignant spider. He hung for a moment, poised as the twisted scene below him played out. He was dressed head to toe in black from his customary combat blacksuit to his balaclava hood. He held the diver knife in his left hand and rappelled easily with his right.

The distance was ten feet, maybe eleven. He laid the blade flat against his leg and let go. He dropped, as silent as a stone falling down a well. He hit the floorboards of the warehouse’s second story and rolled along his right side like a paratrooper on an airborne drop. He came smoothly to his feet out of the shadow cast by the harsh commercial production filming lights used to illuminate the scene.

The mask-wearing rapist with the swirling, full-body tattoos screamed out loud and tried to swing a clumsy overhand blow at the intruding shadow. Bolan came up out of his roll inside the man’s reach and the diver knife flashed in the wattage of the film lamps. Three times it plunged into the rapist’s body, and blood thudded like rain drops on the dusty wooden slats of the floor.

The first stab punched through Sulu’s solar plexus and pierced his diaphragm, stealing the porn star’s air before he could draw breath for another scream. The second thrust took him under the rib cage and sliced up to bury an inch of stainless steel into the thudding drum of the man’s pounding heart. The third strike punched through the cartilage of his throat and cracked his C-3 vertebrae.

Bolan yanked his knife free as Sulu’s corpse tumbled backward like an animal in a slaughterhouse kill-chute. He sprang forward after Sungkar, who had managed to raise a half shout as he scrambled for a silver .40-caliber pistol lying under his folded jacket on an extra chair.

The Executioner slapped at his chest with his right hand, his palm finding the custom handle of his silenced machine pistol. Sungkar threw back his jacket to dig for his weapon, not bothering to scream because he knew his bodyguards would never reach him in time anyway. His fingers found the cold, comforting weight of the handgun and wrapped around the handle.

The big American’s sound suppressor hacked out a triple pneumatic cough.

Sungkar straightened like a man electrocuted as the 9 mm Parabellum rounds slammed into his body just under his right shoulder blade. His body shuddered with the impact, and he arched backward at an unnatural angle not unlike a reverse comma. Bolan’s second triburst lifted the top of the hired killer’s skull up off his face and splashed his brains across the warehouse. The man stumbled forward and struck the floor.

The Executioner rose from his crouch.

KAREN RASMUSSEN looked over at the long table next to the camcorder. There was a power drill, dental instruments and some bloodstained carpenter tools. In the middle of the implements a black candle burned next to a bottle of Ouzo. Abdullah Sungkar had told her in loving detail exactly what he was going to do with each and every single item, speaking slowly so that each word was captured in perfect clarity by the continuously running camera.

The killing shadow moved toward her, gun in one hand and bloody knife in the other. She recoiled in terror from the gore-stained apparition. Seeing her reaction, Bolan stopped and returned his silenced pistol to its shoulder holster before pulling down the balaclava and revealing his face.

“Easy,” he whispered. “I’m here to get you out.”

He cut her hands free just as he heard the first thundering of footsteps on the stairs outside the room door. He pulled the blade toward him in one smooth motion and sliced the bonds binding her hands, then pressed the knife hilt into her shaking grip.

“Cut yourself free,” he ordered.

She took the knife automatically but when she looked up, the night fighter was gone, swallowed by shadows. The door to the room was kicked inward, the frame splintering along one hinge, and a handful of men armed with utilitarian machine pistols burst into the room. They wore dirty jeans and expensive shirts with gold gleaming in the form of watches and bracelets on their wrists, in their teeth, at their ears and across their knuckles. They looked every bit the part of modern-age pirates.

The leader’s eyes had grown wide in surprise at the bloody corpses, his jaw dropping to his chest in a reaction so exaggerated it was nearly comical. His head jerked left then right as he tried to peer into the thick shadows filling the edges of the long room. He saw the bloody knife in the American girl’s hands but saw also that she was still bound to the chair at the neck, waist, knees and ankles. She looked at him, her expression blank in her fear. Behind him the rest of the crew tried to press forward.

The man, a lieutenant named Kis, barked something in his own language and waved the stubby barrel of his machine pistol. Karen Rasmussen just looked at him. He switched to a broken, almost pidgin English.

“What happened!” he demanded. “You kill boss?”

The girl tried to shake her head, her mouth locked into an “O” shape by the red rubber ball of her gag. She could barely turn her head against the stylized wrappings of the knots. But she held a dripping knife in her hand.

Cursing, Kis charged forward.

Growling, the crew of triad hitters surged after him. There was a heavy thud on the old floorboards as something metal struck the camcorder and knocked it over. Every head turned in that direction. Kis blinked as it looked as if a pale green can of soda pop was rolling across the floor toward them.

A white light like a sun going nova flashed, followed by a sharp, overwhelming bang that filled his ears with disorienting pain. From behind the milling, confused gang of rapists and kidnappers a black figure detached itself from the shadows and moved among them.

The silenced pistol fired from near point-blank range, putting 3-round bursts into the skulls of confused men. Hot blood and chunks of brain splashed terrified, uncomprehending faces, and bodies started to hit the floor.

CHAPTER FOUR

In her chair Karen Rasmussen watched the Executioner at work.

He moved like a supranatural force coldly dispatching the slavers from the very middle of their milling cluster. He spun and twisted, and his gun hand pointed, lifted and pressed and his trigger finger worked repeatedly. The weapon’s slide kicked back, spilling gleaming, smoking brass cartridges out of the oversize ejection port.

Her head whirled and spun from the flash-bang grenade concussion, and her vision was obstructed by blurred spots. She blinked, catching disjointed images like still pictures clipped from a movie reel. She blinked again, seeing those shells tumbling with surrealistic clarity but still seeing the faces of the falling men as blurs. She blinked again, and her vision snapped into focus. There was only the night fighter, his gun still raised, in the middle of a pile of leaking corpses.

The man turned toward her, and she could see smoke curling out the end of the weapon in dark gray ribbons. The stench of cordite cut through her nostrils, burning like smelling salts, and snapping her back into the sharp reality of the moment.

“There’s more downstairs,” Bolan said. “I’ve got to take them out if we’re going to get out of here. Hurry! Cut yourself free and get a weapon.” He indicated the black metal machine pistols scattered around the floor at his feet. Rasmussen looked down. It seemed like the weapons were floating in a lake of blood.

“Get under the table and watch the door,” Bolan continued. “Do not shoot me when I come back in. Hurry!”

Then he turned and made for the door to the triad snuff film studio. Karen Rasmussen began to free herself.

CHIN HO MEDINA stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up, a Kalashnikov assault in his sweating hands. He called again, confused by the commotion and then the lack of commotion as the first team of bodyguards had rushed up the stairs that ran like scaffolding to the second-story office space. How much trouble could a teenage girl be? Then a black apparition appeared quickly in the doorway and he barked out a single word before opening fire.

He saw a black-clad, balaclava-wearing man and screamed, “BSD!” referring to the Croatian commando group, part hostage rescue team, part death squad that served as a special operations force.

The triad gunmen’s assault rifle blazed in his hands as behind him the rest of the criminal cell, already poised and on edge, exploded into action. Bolan pulled back from the edge of the doorway as he saw him level his weapon and the child pornographer began to blast away, the muzzle-flash obscuring the gunmen’s own vision as he poured lead into the shadows above him.

He didn’t see the deadly black sphere as it dropped toward him.

It arched in a gentle lob over his head and struck the hard, oil-stained concrete floor. The impact detonation grenade immediately exploded. Shrapnel fanned out, riding the edge of the concussive blast, and tore into Chin’s flesh seconds before the explosion sent him spinning like a rag doll over the safety railing of the stairs, his weapon spinning away.

Behind the mutilated corpse, razor-sharp shards of metal buzzed into unprotected flesh and a ball of billowing fire mushroomed out behind it. Men were screaming as they were thrown or swept aside. Clothes burst into flame and blood ran in rivers across the filthy floor.

Bolan stepped out of the doorway and rushed down the stairs, his pistol up and ready. He caught a flash of motion and pivoted smoothly at the waist, putting a 3-round burst into one stumbling kidnapper, then a second into another man fighting to stand.

A screaming man staggered about, clutching at a torn and bleeding stump where his arm had been: no threat. Bolan turned away, racing down four more steps, and saw a child-rapist crawling along the ground, his guts strung out behind him, and screaming in agonizing pain. The man was reaching for the blood-smeared grip of a machine pistol: threat. The Executioner used a Parabellum burst to hollow the man’s skull.

He thundered down another half flight of stairs and saw movement beyond the edge of the blast radius. He vaulted the smoking railing as heavy-caliber slugs chewed into the wood steps where he’d been standing. He landed in the middle of his grenade kills. He tried to spin and drop but his foot came down in a puddled smear of intestines and he slipped.

The gunner who had fired on him rushed out from behind a stack of fifty-five-gallon industrial barrels, weapon blazing. Bolan shot him with a burst low in the stomach and the man doubled over, firing a second burst into the ground, causing ricochets to whistle and whine madly around the room.

Riding out the recoil of the last burst, Bolan pushed himself up. His blacksuit was soaked with blood along the right side and his ribs felt bruised from the tumble but his adrenaline was running through him in currents of electricity.

He sensed movement and turned his head, the muzzle of his pistol shifting in tandem and steel-steady in his grip. His finger lay welded on the smooth metal curve of the trigger taking up the slack. He saw a shape crouched under an old metal office desk and his arm straightened, his finger tightening on the trigger.

The girl’s lips quivered with fear, and her thin cheeks were smeared with dirt. Her lower lip was split and swollen so that a trickle of blood had run down her chin and dried like a string of chocolate syrup.

Narrowing his eyes, Bolan lowered the pistol. He got to his feet and looked around. Off to his left on the edge of a pile of corpses strung out like toys by the grenade blast, a triad hardman climbed to his feet and staggered away. Bolan shifted, seeing only the motion at first. Then his eyes went to the hands. In hostage rescue situations the shoot teams always looked to the hands in their split-second decisions. Empty hands: no shoot. Full hands: shoot.

The shuffling figure grasped one of the utilitarian machine pistols. The handgun in Bolan’s fist spit a triburst, the soft-nosed bullets burrowing into the gunman, cracking his wing-shaped shoulder blade like hammers on a plate.

The man spasmed, his back arching and the machine pistol clattered and bounced off the concrete. The gunner staggered toward a line of fifty-five-gallon oil barrels. He screamed once in pain and staggered, close to going down. His arm came out, and Bolan figured it was a last desperate attempt to stop his fall before he died. The hand came down. Too late Bolan saw the apparatus attached to the industrial barrels by twisted lines of thick coaxial cable.

There was a sharp, dry metallic click and suddenly glowing red LED numerals blinked on in the swatch of gloom as Bolan put a second burst into the man and dropped him dead. The numbers glowed dark red and stood out starkly against the gloom: 00:00:30.

Bolan leaped forward. The demolitions a group like this seemed capable of couldn’t be that complex. He wasn’t a Gary Manning or a Hermann Schwarz, but he could defuse most simple trigger explosives.

He had almost reached the charges—the number display read, 00:00:28. His eyes fairly danced across the apparatus, taking in the details of the construction, hunting for connection points, trailing wires.

Then the girl shot him in the back.

He grunted hard at the impact and spun even as the echo of the shot was still bouncing through the cavernous warehouse. He felt a sting like a razor slice along his left arm, and the middle of his back felt as if he’d been blindsided by a sledgehammer.

He didn’t have time to question why it had happened. He was a man with a gun and men with guns didn’t often solve problems in Croatia. The only men with guns the girl had seen, he understood intuitively, had been the ones intent on using her up and throwing her away.

He spun and dropped and fired quickly. His bullets found the floor in front of her and there was a risk of ricochets but he was an expert with his weapons and had no choice but to take the risk. Concrete chips sprang up and slapped the girl with granite shards. She screamed but stubbornly held on to the machine pistol.

Bolan shifted the muzzle and punched a burst through the frame of the desk beside her head, already starting to surge forward. The rounds flattened as they punched through the cheap metal, and the girl screamed again.

From the top of the stairs Karen Rasmussen answered that scream with one of her own.

Bolan felt relief like a punch in the gut when the girl finally panicked enough to drop the machine pistol. He leaped forward and kicked the weapon across the room and snatched her up by the arm.

“American!” he growled.

The girl looked at him and more tears came, but he could feel her tense in his grip as her fear and confusion overtook her. Then she clung to him for a moment and he felt hope. She let out a sudden, sharp piercing scream and her fists began to windmill as she fought him with desperate energy. He looked to the digital timer.

00:00:22.

He wanted to yank the girl free as the clock slid to 00:00:21, but she was glued to him like a wildcat, scratching and clawing and trying to bite. He forced himself to hold on despite the hurt in his back where the Second Chance ballistic vest had stopped the slug. He yelled for Karen Rasmussen to run, and turned away, scanning the big room for the way out he had seen on his initial reconnaissance.

He saw the door and the padlock hanging off the chain from the inside in the same instant. He’d shot the man charged with manning the entry post on his own way down the stairs and saw that body sprawled on the floor, outflung hand inches from an assault rifle.

00:00:21.

“Karen!” Bolan barked for a second time.

“I’m coming!” The teenager answered, and he could hear her running down the stairs.

He tucked the wildly flailing girl under his arm and moved toward the door. He brought up his handgun as he did so, approaching the lock at an angle. He was stunned by the ferocity with which the triad clique had been prepared to defend its base of operations. With the death penalty so frequently employed, maybe they felt they had nothing left to lose.

He saw more clusters of fifty-five-gallon drums connected by television cables designed to carry electronic impulses and digital signals. The triad team had cobbled together a devastating mixture of low-and high-tech. What it lacked in complexity Bolan felt sure it would make up for in raw, explosive power.

00:00:20.

Squeezing the girl tightly, Bolan lifted the pistol and fired into the big padlock holding the thick links of chain together. The metal padlock jumped at the impact like a fish on the end of a line and split apart. Bolan stepped forward and struck out with the tread of his boot, catching the mechanism and ripping it down.

Karen Rasmussen joined him as the thick chain dropped to the floor. The girl was almost epileptic in her spasm now as she kept shrieking a word over and over again, the same liquid syllables in screaming repetition, but Bolan didn’t know the word, didn’t think he even recognized the language. He stuffed his pistol into its shoulder holster to better control the twisting girl and reached out to pull the warehouse door open.

00:00:19.

Karen Rasmussen threw herself against the handle and heaved her weight against the sliding structure. It came open easily and she stumbled through, Bolan rushed out after, running hard. The little girl bucked in his arms.

He heard a car door open and saw the flash of a dome light out of his left eye even as he was turning. He saw an Asian man in a leather coat with a long ponytail hopping out of a sleek black Lexus, one of the team’s ubiquitous machine pistols filling his hands.

Bolan dropped the twisting girl as he brought up his handgun. Rasmussen was screaming, her voice raw now, hands up around her face and standing directly in his way. He struck her with a heel-of-the-palm blow to her shoulder blade as the gunman lifted his machine pistol, and she spun away from him.

The Executioner leveled his silenced weapon, just catching a sense of the girl darting away from him. His finger found the trigger a split second before the other man’s and a 3-round burst struck the Asian in the chest. The man staggered under the triple impact and came up against the edge of the car. Bolan pulled down and stroked his trigger again. The man’s face was ripped off his skull, and he hit the broken pavement of the parking lot.

Bolan turned, reaching out for the girl, but he just missed her as she darted back into the building. His fingertips grazed her, coming close enough to feel the feather brush of her hair as he grasped nothing and she slipped past him.

“Sister!” Rasmussen suddenly shouted. “I just remembered the word, I was too scared to translate before!” the daughter of the American diplomat said. “Her sister’s in there.”

But Bolan was already running.

HE HIT THE DOORS of the warehouse three steps behind the frantic girl. His eyes were drawn to the LED display and what he saw flooded his system with fresh jolts of adrenaline.

00:00:09.

He sprang forward, growling with the exertion and caught the girl as he dived toward the hiding spot he had first pulled her out from. She turned like a ferret and sank her teeth into his palm.

00:00:08.

He swore and let go instinctively as blood pooled up out of the cuts. The girl was under the desk and with incredulity he saw that her “sister” was a little rag doll as filthy as its owner with bright black eyes. He reached out with his unwounded hand and caught the girl by her shirt. Doll firmly in her grip, she came away easy now and he pulled her tightly to him.

00:00:05.

He saw the readout and knew he couldn’t make it. His feet hit the ground as he drove with his legs against the concrete like a running back breaking for open field after a hand off. He cut around an overturned barrel and cursed the half second it caused him.

The girl was babbling now at him in some dialect he was too keyed up to catch, but she was also hugging him tightly. He saw the door standing open and put on the last burst of speed left in his body. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, banging against his ribs with the exertion and his breath was coming fast and hard.

00:00:02.

He hit the door at a dead sprint just as he felt the air around him suddenly draw backward in a vacuum rush that stung his eyeballs. He drew the girl closer against him as he felt the flash of sudden heat come rolling up behind him like a fast-running locomotive.

Cowering on the pavement, Karen Rasmussen watched him dive through the doorway. He seemed to hang for a moment in the air and she could see the ball of fire rushing up behind like a film image on fast forward.

Bolan was hurtling through the air, twisting as he flew to catch the angle out of the doorway and the orange freight train of a fireball rushed past him. The concussive force sent the doors flying like tumbling dice.

She couldn’t stop screaming as she watched, and Bolan twisted as he fell to protect the girl, landing hard along one arm and shoulder. He grunted with the impact and recoiled slightly off the pavement before sprawling wide to cover as much of the girl’s flesh with his own body as he could.

Behind them jets of flame shot out windows and air vents and punched holes through the roof. Black smoke appeared instantly, and debris began to rain down. The teenager felt her throat choke up with sudden, sharp pain and she realized she had been screaming but that the blast had deafened her.

She stopped, coughing, and then looked up at the savage bonfire lighting up the dockside neighborhood. She felt tears filling her eyes as she realized the bastards were dead.

Just like that, it was over.

CHAPTER FIVE

Bolan eased himself into a chair in the war room at Stony Man Farm. “What’s up, Bear?” he said to Aaron Kurtzman.

Kurtzman, head of the Stony Man cybernetics team, turned his wheelchair toward Bolan. “What’s up, Mack? Got you some coffee. Barb and Hal will be here in just a second.”

Bolan took a seat at the long hardwood table. In front of him was a steaming mug of black coffee and a plain manila folder marked with a single red stripe over a bar code and the word “Classified.”

He had always preferred this place in the old farmhouse to the newer Annex. He had taken a lot of mission briefings here, formed innumerable strategies, argued tactics and made life and death decisions. He shrugged the thought away and reached for his cup of coffee as Barbara Price and Hal Brognola entered the room. Bolan nodded in greeting and took a drink.

He frowned at the bitter taste. “That’s a nice batch you brewed there, Bear,” he said wryly. The thickset man grinned like a Viking from behind his black beard and hit a button on his console panel. “Good for what ails ya,” he agreed. A section of the wall slid down, revealing a huge screen.

“Nice work in Split,” Brognola said. He sat in a chair and dropped a thick attaché case on the table in front of him. “The State Department is very grateful.” He paused and smiled. “If they knew who exactly to be grateful to, that is.”

“The girl?” Bolan asked.

“She’s fine,” Price said. The honey-blond mission controller took her own seat. “We channeled her into an American relief organization. She’ll be safe until she can be returned to her family in Jakarta.”

Bolan nodded. His face was impassive, but he felt pleased. “What’s that leave us with now?” he asked.

Price snorted and Bolan turned to her in surprise. “A ghost hunt,” she answered.

Brognola turned to Kurtzman and nodded. “Show him,” he said.

The cyberwizard typed briefly on his keyboard and hit his roller mouse with a thumb. Instantly the big screen recessed into the wall came alive. Bolan turned in his seat and regarded the digital image.

First what was obviously an official military portrait appeared in HD quality. Bolan narrowed his eyes and scrutinized the picture. The uniform was Russian, Soviet era, and the rank general or colonel-general, the equivalent of a three-star general in the U.S. Army. The man himself had brutal, peasant stock features.

“That’s Victor Bout,” Brognola said. “The man himself.” Bolan saw a square-faced Caucasian with short, almost bristling salt-and-pepper hair, and narrow-set eyes over a thick nose. The man had a lantern jaw, and he wasn’t smiling. “He used to command his own internal security division in the GRU, the Soviet Military Intelligence.”

Bolan grunted. He had tangled with more than one GRU and former GRU agent in his day. They tended to be even more brutal and direct-action prone than their KGB counterparts. “Let me guess,” Bolan offered. “He turned to criminal enterprise when the Communists lost power?”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Kurtzman stated.

“He’s more than that, though,” Price interrupted. It was her turn to nod at Kurtzman. Instantly the picture on the screen was replaced by four. Victor Bout was in a slick dark blue power suit instead of an olive-drab uniform, his military haircut and regulation mustache replaced by a modest ponytail and a full but well-groomed beard. In another picture the barrel-chested man was standing in swimming trunks on the bridge of a private yacht. Two beautiful women with perfect bodies and eyes so vapid they came out clear as diamonds in the pixilated image, lounged behind him, drinks in hand. In the third, Bout was sitting at the table of some obviously expensive restaurant talking to a mahogany-skinned man in his twenties.

“Who’s Bout talking to?” Bolan asked.

“That is the son of the head of the financial projects committee of the United Nations,” Kurtzman answered.

“Oil-for-food?”

“Oil-for-food,” Brognola acknowledged.

The second man in the fourth picture needed no identification. It was the president of Venezuela.

“Well, that’s no problem,” Bolan said dryly. “I just saw on the international news how the guy isn’t a rogue leader at all. He’s just someone who disagrees with the U.S. on oil policy.”

“Sure,” Price said. “Suspend the constitution, muffle the press, jail dissidents, start a war with Colombia…whatever.”

“I do get the point,” Bolan stated, turning away from the screen. “Our good Mr. Bout is a very powerful, very well-connected gentleman.”

“And he’s only third in command of his syndicate,” Brognola said, leaning forward. “He is the principal adviser to one of the premier oligarchs in Russia today, a man in control of Siberian oil fields, Moscow central banking and Black Sea shipping. Colonel-General Bout’s last-known location, Split, Croatia. Status, currently missing.”

“Okay, he’s missing. But he didn’t just pop up because he’s next on some hit list,” Bolan pointed out.

“Bear,” Price said.

Kurtzman hit the space bar then the Ctrl and Tab buttons on his keypad with a practiced motion. The screen changed. Now there was an image of a lanky, disheveled man of some obvious height.

In the picture he stood next to a red Mini-Cooper on a European or Mediterranean city cobblestone street. He had to have been close to seven feet tall.

“Akhilesh Pandey,” Brognola announced.

“Mr. Pandey,” Price continued, “is the premier researcher of cloning technology in India today.”

“Current status, also missing. Last-known location, Split, Croatia,” Kurtzman stated.

“Ah,” Bolan said. “I’m sensing a perfect storm.”

“Sort of. Well,” Price allowed, “if you factor in the location, then you’re exactly right. This a perfect storm. Bear, let’s talk Prisni Prijatelji.”

The cyberwizard again worked his keyboard. First a map of the world appeared in greens and blues on the screen, overlaid with lines of latitude and longitude. Then the perspective of the screen shifted smoothly. Bolan watched as it zeroed in on the Mediterranean, then slid past the boot of Italy to tighten focus on the Adriatic Sea. It shifted to the Croatian coastline, played south and settled on the city of Split.

Once in place, the screen’s software put a white box around the city and began cycling its resolution, pulling it into focus. A street map from satellite imagery stamped with the discreet logo of the National Reconnaissance Office appeared. From an overview of the entire city Kurtzman quickly clicked down the area of observation into tighter and tighter resolution until an area of five square urban blocks filled the screen.

“I was less than three blocks away when I hit the triad in that warehouse,” Bolan commented.

Frowning as the others murmured their agreement, Bolan leaned forward. The western edge of the built-up area consisted of wharfs and industrial piers as well as several large, squared-off jetties. Beyond that, to the north, south and west the area bordered the other streets of the city of Split. Inside the designated area there was a mixture of buildings from commercial to hospitality to warehouses.

Bolan turned and cocked an eyebrow in question to the leadership cadre of Stony Man Farm. “Prisni Prijatelji?” he asked.

“Prisni Prijatelji,” Price confirmed.

Settling back in his chair Bolan took another drink of his coffee. “Explain.”

“Split has taken over from Berlin as ground zero where east means west. Hell, what East means now is something a lot different from what it meant in the bad old days of the Soviet Empire,” Brognola began. “But, for purposes of the War on Terror to our intelligence services, Split is a very important place. As important as Islamabad and more important than Damascus, Beirut or Amman. European and Middle Eastern businessmen mix there in prolific numbers, forming a smoke screen of legitimacy for the thriving black markets beneath the surface.”

“Oil money meets former Soviet stockpiles of weapons?” Bolan offered.

“Sure,” Price broke in. “Plenty of that going on. But Asian and South American drug pipelines into Europe intersect there. Terrorist cells and fugitives purchase papers and forged documents. Mercenaries cavort. International banking uses Croatian cutout companies to laundry money. As you discovered, there are thriving white slavery rings running girls from Asia into Eastern Europe and girls the other way back out again. It’s a flipping strip mall of international criminal activity from the pettiest to the largest.”

“Which is why Bout was there,” Bolan observed. “He was serving as an intermediary for his banker boss?”

“That’s what we think,” Brognola agreed. “But as bad as Split is, in general that area along the waterfront—” he indicated the neighborhood with a blunt fingertip “—is the epicenter. Ground zero, part criminal-free fire zone and part intelligence DMZ.”

“What do you mean?” Bolan asked.

“That neighborhood is one massive front. Fronts for criminals, fronts for intelligence operatives keeping an eye on the international syndicates…and each other. Success begets success. Once the big players realized how much information there was to be gleaned from this little neighborhood in Split, the services of half a dozen countries began to lean on their governments to look the other way. Let the snakes play in a nest all together so that we could get them in other places.”

Price spoke up. “Once word of the hand-off approach leaked out of the tier one agencies to their second tier allies, on both sides, it really began to heat up as every two-bit station chief from any third world country saw opportunities to get their own cut with the geopolitical immunity. Bribes and payoffs began pouring out of the sector. Enough to ensure the local and Croatian federal police keep their noses clear.”

“UN peacekeepers?” Bolan asked.

“Some,” Price admitted. Then she shrugged. “They’re positioned closer to the main industrial docks and the rail lines. They’re mostly just symbolic now in Split anyway. Besides all it would take is a word from the intelligence community to the OIC of whatever detachment has Prisni Prijatelji as their district to get them to stand down.”

“I’ve seen cities where the local police have been paid enough to steer clear of certain neighborhoods,” Bolan said. “Usually it’s a mess of a free-fire zone between pushers and street gangs.”

“They had some of that,” Brognola stated. “But the organized syndicates leaned on the thugs. Can’t sell to the eurotrash touristas if bullets are flying everywhere and bodies are in the street. The territories are pretty well defined now. You get street violence occasionally and there are so many free-lancers hunting you can’t guarantee anything when the sun goes down and night comes. But it’s not like Compton in the late 1980s or something.”

“Lovely.”

“Make no mistake, Mack,” Price said. “Nobody but nobody in that section of the city is legitimate, or who they say they are. Your friends, the Mountain and Snake Society, have really solidified their control and the influence of both Chinese and North Korean intelligence with them. Everyone who’s not running a scam is a confidential informant. If they’re not a CI, then they’re an operative. Failing that, they’re a petty criminal.”

“Well, there are tourists,” Kurtzman broke in. “The libertine controls on the local nightclubs make it popular for twenty-something kids from the more prosperous regions of the EU to hang out there. It’s replaced Amsterdam as the ‘it’ city for the disaffected and chic bored.”

“Sheep for the wolves,” Bolan muttered.

“Exactly,” Price said.

“What’s Pandey doing there?” Bolan asked. “I get that you can score anything in this place, but doesn’t cloning tech seem just a little upscale even for this modern-day version of Casablanca?”

Kurtzman spoke up again. “The international law on bioweapons is very clear. Certain technologies used to regulate such weapons in mass quantities are as tightly controlled and monitored as their nuclear counterparts. Not so the cloning tech. You take a strain of weaponized Anthrax, or Influenza and you replicate them, or modify their DNA helixes to be sturdier then replicate them, and you can work in peace from international monitoring agencies until the bureaucrats writing the laws can play catch-up.”

“Seems almost too simple.” Bolan grunted.

“We’re always playing catch-up,” Price said.

“Unless we can be proactive,” Brognola observed.

“That’s where I come in.”

“As always, Striker,” the big Fed acknowledged. “As always.”

“Right now we know both men entered Prisni Prijatelji,” Price continued. “Then they disappeared. We want to know why and we want to know where. Two of Bout’s bodyguards, ex-GRU naval infantry Spetsnaz, turned up yesterday floating facedown in the ocean outside the neighborhood. Two days before that a call girl named Marlina Dubrovnik disappeared in Prisni Prijatelji’s only hotel.”

“A hotel where Pandey had a room where she was going to meet him?” Bolan supplied.

Brognola held up a loosely clasped hand and blew on it, spreading his fingers wide as he did so and showing it to be empty. “Just like that. She goes to his room. He lets her in. Then they’re gone.”

“We have people on them?”

“We did. Team of military spooks out of the Pentagon. The unit Rumsfeld created.”

Bolan nodded. “The Strategic Support Branch.”

“Right, a SSB team with some electronic and signal intelligence special reconnaissance units, Special Forces commo guys, a DIA electronic intelligence analyst. Solid operators. Code parole is ‘Center Spike.’ They had a military attaché operations in Zagreb. When the Agency caught Pandey’s movement out of New Delhi, they asked for assistance.”

“The Company asked for help?” Bolan asked.

Brognola shrugged. “Their best operatives are running Pakistan and Iraq these days. They had a lone tail on Pandey, and Prisni Prijatelji is no place for a single operator.”

Bolan lifted a single eyebrow. Brognola laughed. “Unless it’s you, Striker.”

Bolan turned serious. “The SSB unit know I’m going in?”

“They know something is going on and that they’re to provide imagery and surveillance assistance to an American intelligence operator,” Price said. “But I’ve had them replaced in position.”

“Replaced?”

“With Jack and Charlie Mott,” Price answered. “We’re going to keep this in the family.”

“Akira and I set up a line of communications to ensure Farm security,” Kurtzman broke in. “They constructed boosted relay stations for our Computer Room right here on the Farm. What Jack and Charlie have is real easy ‘point and click’ stuff, less sophisticated than the controls on the planes they fly. But, by them being live we’ll have the electronic equivalent of a field office right in your back pocket.”

Bolan turned toward Price. “So I still do my commo through the Farm?”

Price nodded. “You’ll have an enhanced cell phone-PDA for urgent visual updates. And direct audio with them. Otherwise the Jack and Charlie team will do its thing completely separate from you and feed us updates every eight hours. They’ll go trolling to see what they pick up until you point them in a direction.”

“So I’m supposed to enter a section of the city of Split that is a law unto itself. A place where everyone is pretending to be something they aren’t. Then I start following up leads to find two people who’ve disappeared, but whose disappearances may or may not be linked.”

Brognola nodded. “Yeah. That about sums it up. But don’t forget, if anyone suspects you of being an American agent, there are half a hundred intelligence and criminal cells who’ll try to kill you.”

Kurtzman leaned in. “And there’s so much going on that the potential that you could stumble onto something nefarious is high. Almost guaranteed. It just won’t be guaranteed that it’ll be the exact nefarious activity we want.”

Bolan leaned back. “When do I leave?”

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