Shadow Strike

WATER TORTURE

Eco-Armageddon is the goal of a far-reaching plan with the scope, vision and power to strike oil rigs around the globe. With unprecedented disaster looming, Mack Bolan begins the hunt to identify and stop the terror dealers behind the threat. A trail that starts in Brooklyn’s underworld leads to black market underwater mines, the looting and sinking of a British destroyer carrying gold, and the purchase of Hercules transports in Miami. The long arm of the terrorist operation, brilliantly organized by a vengeance-hungry madman, is soon to be hijacked by the Russian mob. Adding rocket torpedoes to the punishing arsenal, the enemy is all but invincible, possessing the technology, the soldiers and the greed to kill millions and doom the world.

The pilot’s body was held in place by the safety harness

Bolan reached out to help, but stopped when the Black Hawk began to spin out of control. Turning toward the side hatch, he worked the lever. It moved smoothly, but the hatch refused to budge an inch, held in place by the pressure of centrifugal force.

Bracing a boot against the minigun, Bolan grabbed the lever with both hands and exerted all of his strength. It felt as though the universe was rapidly spinning around him. The Black Hawk was a sitting duck, and the next burst of shells would blow him out of the air.

“Come on, you stubborn son of a—” The lever bent slightly, then the hatch moved and he was thrown from the spinning helicopter....

Shadow Strike

Don Pendleton’s

Mack Bolan

By taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing over it, he is superior.

—Author Unknown

Heaping revenge on a wrongdoing solves nothing. Avenging an injustice is something else entirely.

—Mack Bolan

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

PROLOGUE

Northwest Atlantic Ocean

“Remember what happened to the southern United States when that offshore oil rig ruptured?” a man asked, easing an ammunition clip into the receiver of an AK-47 assault rifle. “Now just imagine the same thing happening to every offshore oil ring on the whole planet. It would be…” He fumbled for the correct word.

“Catastrophic,” a woman supplied, working the arming bolt on her own weapon. “But we’re not going to do that to every oil rig in the world, just the ones around the British Isles. Maybe fifty or sixty million will die, not a couple of billion.”

He grinned. “But still, something to think about, eh?”

“Oh, shut up and concentrate on your work,” another man growled, removing the clip from his assault rifle to spray some military lubricant into the receiver.

Flying at maximum speed, three massive C-160 Hercules transport planes maintained a tight formation as they cruised dangerously low over the Atlantic, just below the American coastal radar net.

On the distant horizon a raging squall, a sudden summer storm, churned the ocean in unbridled fury, and choppy waves sprayed the bellies of the huge airplanes with layers of slick moisture that flowed smoothly away from the steady stream of air churned by the powerful Allison engines.

Inside the planes, the low hum of the turboprop engines was a palpable presence among the grim passengers, and conversation was difficult, but not impossible. They were all dressed in loose civilian clothing, totally inappropriate for long-distance air travel, and heavy fur parkas.

“So…was this the first time you ever…you know?” a bald man asked, his voice tight with emotion. There was a bloody bandage on the side of his head where an ear had been, and his fur collar was stained dark red.

“Killed anybody?” a woman replied, her hands busy reloading an AK-47 assault rifle. “Yes, of course.” The curved magazine slid easily into the receiver, and with a jerk of the arming bolt, the deadly weapon was ready for business again.

“First time for me, too,” another man added, disassembling his own weapon to clean the interior.

“Never saw so much blood in my life,” an older man whispered.

“Shut up and concentrate on your work,” the first man growled, irritably touching the bandage. Then he savagely jerked out the clip from his assault rifle and placed it aside.

The entire group had been practicing for the past hour, disassembling an old AK-47, only to put it back together and then take it apart once more in an endless learning ritual. Naturally, all of them were familiar with hunting rifles and such, but nobody had any military training. How could they? Iceland had no army or navy, only a national police force. This bizarre Russian weapon, a combination of a 7.62 mm machine gun and 30 mm grenade launcher, was as foreign to them as the dark side of the moon. As was murder.

Killing for food, they understood. That was part of life. However, taking the life of another human was something horribly new, and most of them looked a little queasy from the recent slaughter. True, it had been necessary, but still extremely disagreeable.

Located at the extreme rear of the lead Hercules, the fifty men and women were jammed uncomfortably between the hydraulic exit ramp and a solid wall of wooden cubes that filled the rest of the huge cargo transport.

Each squat cube was roughly a yard square, and bore no manufacturer logo, designation or shipping label. Nor was there a manifest, customs sticker or duties seal. The identical wooden boxes were completely blank, aside from a few smears of drying blood, an occasional tuft of human hair and the all-pervasive smell of industrial lubricant.

At the front of the plane, only inches away from the colossal mound of crates, was a short flight of metal stairs that led to the flight deck. Underneath the deck was a utilitarian washroom and a small metal room that once had been an ammunition bunker for a twin set of 40 mm Bofors cannons. But for this trip it had been converted into a crude electronics workshop. The noise from the engines was noticeably less at this location, yet the three people clustered in the cramped room hadn’t spoken for hours, ever since hastily leaving the burning warehouse.

“So, is it done yet?” a portly man finally demanded, grabbing the hexagonal barrel of an old-fashioned Webley .445 revolver and breaking open the cylinder to remove the spent shells. He dumped them into a metal waste receptacle, and the brass tinkled musically as it rolled about on the bottom. Though he was a large man, the three-piece silk suit he wore hung loosely from his wide shoulders, and a series of holes cut into his leather belt accommodated a recent dramatic weight loss. On his right wrist was a solid-platinum Rolex watch that shone mirror-bright, while a cheap gold-plated wedding ring gleamed dully on his left hand. Although only middle-aged, he seemed much older, with deep lines around his mouth and eyes, and his curly dark hair was highlighted with wings of gray at the temples.

“Only glaciers can move mountains, Thor,” muttered the slim woman bent over the workbench clamped to the metal wall. Her pale hands moved among the complex circuitry of an electronic device, soldering loose wires into place and attaching computer chips with the innate skill and speed of a surgeon.

“What does that mean?” growled a skinny man attaching a large drum of 12-gauge cartridges to the bottom of a Vepr assault shotgun. The deadly weapon mirrored its new owner, bare-bones and deadly, possessing nothing that wasn’t absolutely necessary to the single goal of eradicating life.

His hair was so pale that he almost appeared bald, and he was painfully clean-shaved, with a small bandage covering a recent nick on his shallow cheek. He was wearing a camouflage-colored military jumpsuit, and one of his boots bulged slightly from a folded straight-razor tucked in the top for dire emergencies.

“It means, Gunnar, that we shouldn’t bother the professor when she’s busy,” Hrafen Thorodensen answered, thumbing a fifth round into the cylinder. With a snap of his wrist, he swung up the barrel and closed the British-made weapon.

Gunnar Eldjarm scowled, resting the Vepr on a shoulder. “You shouldn’t snap a revolver shut like that, Thor. It damages the catch.”

“Only if I do it a lot,” Thorodensen replied. “But with any luck, two days from now I can throw it away and never touch another damn weapon.”

“And if we fail?” Professor Lilja Vilhjalms asked, expertly inserting another circuit board into the rapidly growing maze of electronics.

Midnight-black hair trailed down her back in a thick ponytail that almost reached her trim waist. A pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses dominated her otherwise lovely face.

“If we fail, my dear Lily, then we’ll all be dead, which will achieve the same result,” Thorodensen said, pulling a folding jump seat from the curved wall. “Now, please finish up quickly. We will reach our next target soon.”

“Target?” Vilhjalms asked in a whisper, her hands stopping cold. “But I thought—”

“Yes, yes, we will try to legally purchase the equipment, of course,” Thorodensen interrupted with a curt gesture. “But if there are any complications, then we shall take what we need.”

“At any cost?”

“Yes, at any cost.”

Putting aside the soldering gun, the woman made one last plea for sanity. “Please, Thor, the Americas aren’t our enemy.”

“Wrong,” Eldjarm stated coldly, brushing back his hair. “The friend of my enemy is my enemy.”

Removing a cigar from inside his suit, Thorodensen grunted in somber agreement. He didn’t really care for this new blood-thirsty aspect of his childhood friend, even if it did help in this dirty little war. However, as the old saying went, needs drive as the devil must. Which he always took to mean that, sometimes, in extreme cases, the end actually did justify the means.

Withholding a sigh, Lilja Vilhjalms tactfully said nothing and returned to the arduous task of assembling the sonar scrambler. She didn’t care for the name of their little group, Penumbra, and had no idea if they were on the path of righteousness or damnation. Sadly, there was no other course available. Win or lose, right or wrong, this was their destiny, and revenge was as inevitable as death itself.

Outside the windows, the sky began to darken as the three Hercules raced away from the thunderous storm and slipped into twilight, heading directly into the coming night.

CHAPTER ONE

Brooklyn, New York

Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled in the stormy sky. A cold rain fell unrelenting on the dark city. Rivers of car headlights flowed in an endless stream along the regimented streets of south Brooklyn, while traffic lights blinked their silent multicolored commands.

The ragged shoreline of Sheepshead Bay was brightly illuminated by the bright neon lights of countless bars, restaurants and nightclubs skirting the choppy Atlantic, where oily waves broke hard against ancient rocks and modern concrete pylons. Tugboats churned across the bay, guiding huge cruise liners out to sea, and even more massive oil tankers to the industrial dockyard.

As silent as the grave, a black Hummer rolled to a stop near the mouth of an alley, and the driver turned off the headlights, but kept the engine running. For several minutes, Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, did nothing, closely studying every detail of the area, from the flow of the dirty water in the gutters, to the shadows on the window curtains of nearby apartment houses.

The rain pelted hard across the neighborhood, visibly dancing on the sidewalks and hitting the patched pavement of the streets with a sound oddly similar to a steak sizzling on a griddle. There were few pedestrians about at this late hour, only a couple drunks staggering home, and a lone prostitute huddled under the tattered awning of a cheap hotel.

The rest of the wet street was lined with parked cars. Every store window was protected by a heavy steel gate, every wall adorned with garish graffiti, and the few bus kiosks were made of military-grade bulletproof plastic, the resilient material still scored deeply in spots by knives and car keys. No messages had been etched into the plastic, just random scars to signify that nothing was allowed into Sheepshead Bay without the permission of the locals.

There were no security cameras in evidence anywhere, but Bolan did a careful sweep of the vicinity with a handheld EM scanner just to double-check. When the electromagnetic device read clean, Bolan tucked it away under his waterproof poncho, turned off the engine and stepped from the vehicle.

Bolan was a big man, well over six feet tall, and while he carried 220 pounds, he moved with the grace of a jungle cat. For the mission this night, he was wearing black clothing and shoes, and a black leather duster that hung to his knees.

Walking to the next corner, Bolan glanced around the dead-end street, and almost smiled at the glowing oasis of light in the Stygian gloom, the Golden Grotto. Electric signs flashed digital photos of various dancers whose clothing melted away to reveal their many delights, but always stopped at the exact limit that the law allowed. Most of the dancers were blonde, even the Latinas and Asians.

Music thumped from inside the building, and the parking lot was filled with a wide assortment of cars. A uniformed doorman stood under a wide canvas awning, and kept close attention on the rows of vehicles. Even from this distance Bolan could tell the man was armed.

The rest of the street was deserted, which wasn’t surprising, since Bolan knew Michael Tiffany owned all the buildings in the area, and deliberately kept them empty of tenants so that there would be no nobody to complain about the noise and blazing lights of the Golden Grotto Gentleman’s Club. Even the warehouse situated on an old jetty was dark. The squat brick structure was shiny from the thundering downpour, and was Bolan’s real goal for this night. Getting there would be far trickier than it appeared.

However, Bolan found it odd that the warehouse didn’t look as if a dozen people had died the previous day. There was no sign of any gunfire or explosions. Interesting.

Heading for the club, he straightened his leather collar and used a thumb to break another ampoule of whiskey taped to the underside. The reek of potent liquor briefly flooded the air, then was washed away by the unrelenting rain.

Pretending to stagger along the sidewalk, Bolan got to the door just as the burly doorman opened it and waved him on inside.

“Good evening, sir,” the man declared.

Mumbling something unintelligible, Bolan shuffled past, noticing that the fellow was wearing a bulletproof vest under his raincoat, along with an Uzi submachine gun.

As the glass doors closed, Bolan was hit by a tidal wave of noise, smoke, light and steaming hot air that reeked of hard liquor, stale sweat and cheap perfume. Every wall was covered with mirrors, and a disco ball hung from the ceiling, radiating a galaxy of moving star points.

The club was spacious, filling the entire ground floor of the converted warehouse, but it was still packed to the walls, with cheering customers at every table, waving and leering at the naked dancers gyrating on three different stages. The signs outside displayed only as much flesh as the law allowed. Inside was another matter entirely.

A completely nude woman was walking off the first stage, her hands stuffed with dollar bills, while two Asian women were just starting to remove their schoolgirl outfits on the middle stage, and a young black woman wearing tooled boots, chaps and a cowboy hat strode out onto the third, to be greeted by a crescendo of loud country music and wild hoots from the drunken crowd.

Smoothing back his soaked hair, Bolan grunted in wry amusement. Nonstop entertainment meant it was harder for a paying customer to realize it was time to leave and go home. There were no wall clocks in sight, and the front door was partially hidden behind a barricade of plastic plants. Las Vegas had been using these tricks for decades, and apparently Tiffany had decided to copy the big boys. Smart. But then, nobody had ever said that Mad Mike Tiffany was a fool, just ruthless.

The cushioned leather stools along the curved hardwood counter were mostly empty, as the management wanted the drunks sitting in chairs and not falling onto the floor. A dozen waitresses rushed back and forth from the bar to the patrons, steadily relaying overpriced drinks. They wore matching outfits of fishnet body stockings, leather boots and white satin bowies.

“Table, sir?” a pretty redhead asked, coming out of the smoky darkness. The name on her plastic ID badge read Shelly.

Her smile could have illuminated Broadway, but her eyes were dead, telling an age-old story that Bolan had encountered far too many times in his travels.

“No, thanks,” he replied. “I’m here to see Tiffany.”

Inhaling sharply, Shelly stiffened at the open use of the name, then forced a friendly smile back on her face.

“Part of the new security team?” she asked with a tilt of her head. Then, stabbing out a finger, she poked his duster and found the holstered Beretta underneath. “Yeah, I can see that you are.”

Bolan was impressed, but said nothing. New security team? Maybe something had recently happened here that had scared Mad Mike. Had somebody tried to ice the man, or had it been something even worse?

Looking about, Shelly leaned in closer. “You know, we’re all still kind of upset about that. So many of his people dead…” Suddenly, she looked frightened and took a step backward.

“Hmm, what did you say?” Bolan asked with a stone face. “I was looking at the dancers and didn’t hear a word you said, darling.”

Relaxing at the obvious lie, Shelly blessed him with a smile, a glimmer of the girl she had once been peeking out from the overlaying years of abuse. “Come on, the vault is this way,” she said, turning to briskly walk away.

Checking for any oddly placed mirrors that might be hiding a surveillance camera, Bolan stayed close, watching the crowd as much as the waitress.

But nobody seemed to be paying him any undue attention. Every gaze was locked on the Asian women, who were naked by now and oiling each other in a pretend wrestling match.

When they reached a curtained alcove, Shelly parted the black drapes, and Bolan observed that they were very heavy and thickly coated with a tan foam on the inside to retard the ambient noises of the club. Beyond them was a short hallway and another set of soundproof curtains. Past that in a small room lined with metal lockers, two large men were sitting at a table, playing cards. One had a beard, the other a Mohawk, and they were both openly armed, automatic pistols tucked into shoulder holsters, their jackets draped over the back of their chairs.

Keeping his back to the wall, Bolan read both of them as low-level guards, just some muscle to keep out the drunks. Next to them was a second door, made of solid steel and equipped with an alphanumeric keypad.

“Hey, Chuck,” Shelly said in greeting. “Meet the new guy.”

“No names,” Bolan said. “Not yet, anyway.”

Both men kept playing cards, but shifted position in their chairs for faster access to their weapons. Okay, they were big, Bolan noted, but not completely stupid. Too bad for them.

“You the mechanic from Detroit?” asked the man with the Mohawk, shifting the cards in his hand.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” the bearded man said with a sneer, sliding a hand inside his jacket to scratch his stomach. “Whatcha want, Blackie?”

Bolan grunted. That was a not-so-subtle reference to him being a Black Ace, a professional killer. “I’m here to see Mad Mike,” he replied in a bored voice.

The two men broke into laughter, and Shelly went pale, as if just speaking the nickname could get you killed. Looking nervously at the three men, she abruptly turned and departed, closing the soundproof curtains in her wake. Soon the hard clicks of her high heels faded away.

“Okay, what’s your business with the boss?” asked the bald man, rising from the table. Something under his shirt jacket hit the Formica table with a metallic thump.

Bolan showed no reaction but immediately changed his tactics for gaining entry. These men were wearing military body armor, not a cheap bulletproof vest like the doorman. These weren’t guards, but street soldiers. Muscle for the boss.

“Don’t worry about it.” Bolan chuckled, drawing the Beretta and firing twice.

Each man jerked back as a 9 mm Parabellum slug slammed into his chest directly above the heart. As the slugs ricocheted away, the guards doubled over, gasping for breath and clawing for their own weapons. Stepping closer, Bolan swung the Beretta fast, clubbing them both across the back of the head, and they dropped to the floor like sacks of dirty laundry.

It would have been faster and safer to simply execute the guards. But since Bolan didn’t know for sure that they deserved death, he would allow them to live for the time being.

Removing a pair of 10 mm Glock pistols from their shoulder holsters, he tossed them into a wastebasket.

Checking the guards, he found a transceiver on the bearded man, along with a throat mike and earplug. Plus an access card. Tucking in the earbud, he switched on the radio, hoping it was already on the correct channel. There was only silence. Damn.

Going to the wall, Bolan searched alongside the door until finding a disguised access slot in the woodwork. He slipped in the card, and a panel slid back, revealing a glowing sheet of plastic with the outline of a human hand. He grunted at that. A biometric refusal system. That was pretty high tech for a Brooklyn gun dealer. Suddenly, he had a very strong suspicion that his tip from Leo Turrin was right on the money, and that something big had happened here yesterday, something a lot more dangerous than selling cheap Taiwanese revolvers to gangbangers.

Looking over the unconscious men, Bolan chose the one with the better shoes. That meant he was probably getting paid more, which translated as holding a higher position in the criminal organization.

Pressing the hand of the man against the panel, Bolan heard a soft chime, and the armored door slid into the wall. Directly ahead was a long hallway illuminated with bright halogen lights and lined with closed doors. The walls were brick, the floor terrazzo, and there were no security cameras.

Dropping the limp body in the path of the door to prevent it from closing, Bolan shrugged off his leather duster and drew both his weapons. The Beretta 93-R machine pistol rested comfortably in his left hand, while the right was filled with a .50-caliber Desert Eagle. Quantity and quality. A very deadly combination.

Easing along the hallway, he strained to hear any noises, but there was only the soft whir of the air-conditioning system blowing a warm breeze from hidden vents, then the radio earbud crackled.