Interception

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.