Shadow Strike

CHAPTER TWO

Azores Islands

The sea foamed white and clean before the cutting prow of the HMS Reliant, while behind the destroyer a school of bottlenose dolphins played in the churning wake.

Staying close to the Reliant were three heavily armed frigates. Their overlapping Doppler radar ceaselessly swept the sky above, and state-of-the-art sonar probed the murky depths below. The missile pods were primed, depth charges and torpedoes were ready for action, and sailors stood on the decks cradling L-85 assault rifles. But they lounged against the gunwales, kept their faces to the sun and mostly talked about women.

The entire crew of the convoy was fully prepared for battle, but expected nothing more serious than a mild case of sunburn to happen. Everybody knew the monthly trip to South Africa was about as dangerous an assignment as standing guard at Buckingham Palace when the royal family was away on vacation. Boring, but necessary for the general good of the United Kingdom.

It was early in the morning, with the sun still low on the horizon. But the sky was clear, the wind warm. And standing on the flying bridge of the Reliant, Captain Olivia Taylor, wearing a pair of nonregulation sunglasses, was watching the dolphins splash and play, and occasionally feed on the smaller fish that were attracted to the churning foam, incorrectly thinking it was food. Evolution in action.

Opening a bottle of suntan lotion, Taylor spread some on her exposed arms and neck, working up to her cheeks. This assignment was a cakewalk, as her American father had liked to say, a task so easy it would border on dull if it hadn’t been for the vital nature of their cargo.

Roughly a hundred years ago, Great Britain had owned most of South Africa, and was making a serious attempt to get the rest of the continent, when the Boer War erupted, closely followed by Zulu uprisings. Then there was the Great War, World War II…and every conflict seemed to whittle down their African holdings a little bit more until they were reduced to being landowners in just a few locations.

Closing the cap on the bottle, Taylor had to smile. But those last few were choice locations, indeed. Snug in the bowels of her destroyer was the yearly run from the Imperial Gold Mines UK Limited—a hold full of gold bullion worth millions of pounds. Which was why the Royal Navy had been assigned to convey the gold from Johannesburg to London, the final destination being the main vault of the Bank of England, the most impregnable fortress this side of Fort Knox in the United States.

“Cup of tea, Skipper?” a young officer asked, stepping onto the flying bridge. He was carrying two large plastic mugs, the bottoms oddly curved.

“Lord, yes, James! My thanks,” Taylor said with a smile. Taking the mug, she drained half of it in a single gulp. “Ah, like blood to a vampire!”

Chuckling, Lieutenant James Jones set his mug on the railing of the platform. Its curved bottom fit perfectly over the steel pipe and locked into place with a snap. “Now, that sounds like a line from a bloody Hammer film back in the seventies.”

“Ah yes, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.”

“To be honest, Skipper, I was thinking more along the lines of those curvy Hammer Girls, and their rather famous low-cut gowns.”

She took another sip. “I’m sure you were, Lieutenant. To each his own. Peter Cushing is more to my liking. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat!”

The officer laughed. “As you say, Skipper, to each their own.”

Just then, a wing of fully armed RAF striker fighters streaked by overhead.

“Cheeky bastards, rattling our chains like that,” Jones muttered, squinting at the disappearing jets.

“Just doing their job, Lieutenant,” Taylor replied, finishing off her tea. “Any sandwiches in the galley?”

“Yes, ma’am. What would you like?”

She laughed. “I’ll get them myself, James. No sense—”

Unexpectedly, a loudspeaker bolted to the armored wall of the warship crackled to life. “Captain to the bridge, please! Captain to the bridge!”

With a sigh, Taylor hurried inside, passing off the empty mug to a waiting rating. The young sailor took it, saluted and scurried away.

“Trouble?” Taylor asked the room in general.

Control panels lined the room, a dozen computer screens showing the exact state of everything important on the navy ship, from the temperature of the main bearings in the Rolls-Royce engines, to the amount of 30 mm ammunition left in the bunkers for the forward Oerlikon miniguns. A dozen men and women were sitting at their posts, heads bent solemnly over the controls like priests in prayer.

“Unknown, ma’am,” said an ensign, rubbing the back of his neck. “But with this much glimmer in our belly, I thought it wise to be safe instead of sorry.”

“Fair enough,” Taylor said, pushing back her cap. “Status, please, chief.”

“We’re traveling the exact same route we took going down to South Africa,” Chief Michelson replied crisply, his gaze locked on a glowing sonar screen. “We know every hill and rock under these waters, and there’s something new below. Something big.”

“A dead whale?” Jones asked curiously. He had followed the captain inside.

“No, much larger than that, sir. Sonar says irregular shapes, mounds of it. Could be a wrecked ship.”

“Damn. Have there been any storms in the vicinity, or known pirate attacks?” Taylor asked. “If a commercial vessel sank in these shallow waters, there could be survivors about. What about it, Ears?”

“Possibly a civilian wreck, Captain,” the sonar operator replied. Eyes tightly closed, he held the earphones in place with both hands. “But it would have to have been a small ship, maybe a fishing boat or pleasure craft. I’m not hearing any metal below, just lots of wood and plastic.”

“Sounds like a speedboat to me,” James stated, crossing his arms. No metal meant there was no threat to the convoy. “Ears, what’s the depth?”

“Five hundred meters, and rising,” the sonar operator called out briskly, hunched before the glowing computer screen.

“Lieutenant, send out a couple of hovercraft… No, belay that,” Taylor said with a grimace. “Uncork a Lynx helicopter and do a sweep for any survivors. Hundred meters, three hundred and five. Move quick now.”

“Debris spotted in the starboard water, sir!” an ensign interrupted, touching his headphones. “Multiple lifejackets, broken wood and general flotsam!”

“Get that Lynx flying, Lieutenant,” Taylor snapped, sitting in the command chair. All around her banks of video monitors strobed into life, showing every aspect of the colossal vessel. “Helm, increase speed to maximum. Chief, have one of the frigates stay behind and conduct a full S and R op.”

“Search and rescue, aye, aye, ma’am,” he said with a brisk salute. “But may I suggest—”

Just then, the entire destroyer rocked from the force of a powerful explosion.

“What the bleeding hell just happened to my ship?” the captain demanded, glancing at the overhead monitors. A forward compartment was taking on water—not much, but steadily. A port side depth charge launcher had gone off-line, and two of the crew had vanished, last seen near the anchor chain winch.

“Unknown, ma’am!” the sonar operator reported crisply. “Sonar is clean. There is no hot noise in the water! Repeat, no hot noise!”

“Thank God for that. What about radar?” Taylor demanded, twisting her head.

“Clean and clear, Skip,” the ensign replied. “Five by five. Whatever is happening is coming from below.”

“The water is clear,” Ears repeated sternly.

“Well, something just hammered us like a Christmas bell!” Jones snarled, just before a second explosion shook the vessel, closely followed by another, then six more in rapid succession.

Reaching up, the captain grabbed a hand mike from an overhead stanchion. “All hands hear this, all hands hear this, battle stations! I repeat, battle stations!” she snapped. “This is not a drill. We are under attack!”

Instantly, Klaxons and horns began to hoot all over the destroyer, and swarms of sailors poured out of hatchways to surge across the tilting deck and take their assigned positions at the weapons stations.

“How could you possibly know this is an attack, and not a catastrophic mechanical failure?” Jones demanded, grabbing on to a stanchion as the ship shook again, even harder this time.

“That wreckage on the ocean floor,” Taylor growled in reply. “It had to be a trick to make us stop!”

The ship rocked again as a water plume rose off the starboard side.

“But we accelerated!”

“Then let’s hope we escape!”

By now, the overhead monitors showed several breaks in the primary hull, with multiple compartments taking on water faster than the gauges could read. One engine was already dead, and screaming was coming from the galley.

“Helm, evasive tactics!” Taylor said calmly, her heart wildly pounding. “Sparks, call Gibraltar for rescue! Engine Room, all pumps to maximum!”

Just then, there came a deafening explosion, and one of the escort frigates rose from the ocean on a boiling column of steam and flame. As the stunned bridge crew of the Reliant watched, the frigate broke in two, spilling crew and machinery into the water.

“Are we being nuked?” Jones demanded, blood flowing from the palm of his clenched fist. “Did we hit a ruddy volcano?”

“I have no idea,” Taylor said honestly, her hands pressed firmly to the cushioned arms of her chair.

Another powerful explosion shook their vessel, and a sailor yelled as he went over the side. Several water columns appeared alongside another frigate, and the armored hull ripped open wide to show the burning decks inside, broken human bodies flying away in chunks. Diesel fuel and oil spread across the choppy waves like thick blood. The second frigate was listing badly to the side, while the third was already nose deep in the water and quickly sinking.

“Ma’am, the Cardiff is gone,” the radar operator said in an emotionless voice, his face deathly pale.

“What in the… Captain, sonar is dead!” Ears called out, staring in horror at the screen. It was glowing a solid, featureless green, every attempt by the onboard computers completely overwhelmed.

“Well, fix it!” Captain Taylor bellowed, as the destroyer rocked again and a water plume rose high on their port side. Honest to Jesus, if she didn’t know any better she would have sworn that was an underwater mine!

Ears held out his hands, his fingers hovering inches away from the complex controls. “But I don’t even know what’s wrong, Skip! This…this is impossible!”

“Fix it anyway!” Jones demanded, as yet another explosion shook the warship.

“Forget target acquisitions! Every station fire blind into the water!” Taylor shouted into the hand mike. “Weapons Officer, set depth charges for—” That was when she saw a dozen metallic spheres rise to the surface of the ocean surrounding the convoy. They were covered with short, dull spikes and…

Mines! The convoy was being attacked by bleeding underwater mines! she realized in shock. But any British navy ship could withstand the concentrated attack of a dozen conventional mines, maybe twice that number!

Except that as she watched, more and more of the dark spheres appeared on the waves, dozens upon dozens of them, until they made the sea look like a cobblestone street. Taylor could barely believe the sight. It was a nightmare come true. There had to be thousands of them! There wasn’t a ship in the world that could withstand that sort of mass attack. But how had the things gotten so close? Had the sonar been sabotaged? That was the only logical answer, because otherwise it would mean that—

The entire ocean seemed to erupt into a solid sheet of flame as the jostling mines clanged into one another to start a hellish chain reaction, a nonstop series of bone-jarring blasts that filled the universe. Briefly, men and women screamed as there arose the terrible keening of tortured metal being twisted out of shape. But even as Captain Taylor dived for the self-destruct button that would destroy the communications code in the main computer, she felt the ship heave upward, and for an unknowable length of time there was only pain and chaos.

FIGHTING HER WAY back to consciousness, Captain Taylor found herself waist deep in water, with the strange sensation of being in an elevator that was descending. Sinking, my ship is sinking! But that was difficult to confirm at the moment. Her left eye wasn’t working, her chest ached and both legs felt oddly numb. The ceiling lights were gone, but a couple of the emergency wall lights had survived intact and were emitting an eerie green luminescence.

Glancing around, the captain discovered that she was trapped in an air pocket on the bridge—the inverted bridge. The deck was above her head, and she was awkwardly standing on the ceiling. Smashed electrical equipment crackled from the control boards, blood was everywhere, and pieces of her command crew bobbed about in the water like fishing chum. A jumbled array of tattered arms and legs swirled in the water, then the head of Lieutenant Jones floated by, his face contorted in a final scream. Her stomach lurched at the grisly sight, but she banished those thoughts, and concentrated solely on staying alive. Her job now was to destroy the main computer and then escape from the sinking wreck. Of course, the only two exits were blocked by folded layers of crushed steel, but that wasn’t her main concern at the moment.

As Taylor feebly splashed her upside-down chair toward a sparking controls board, she noted that the only reason she was still alive was that the windows were all still intact, the bulletproof plastic merely scratched. She felt a sudden jarring from below, and loose sand swirled outside the windows. They were at the bottom already?

Creaking and groaning, the Reliant began to settle into place, the crippled vessel warping around the steel-reinforced shell of the bridge.

“God bless all navy engineers!” the captain panted, then gasped at the sight of moving lights outside the windows. In growing astonishment, she saw a dozen scuba divers swimming along the murky seabed, heading her way.

Wild hope of rescue flared just for a second, until she realized those were nonregulation diving suits, and the masked strangers were carrying acetylene torches and crowbars.

In a surge of cold adrenaline, Taylor fought her way through the morass of body parts to reach the glowing SD button, smash the glass covering and press hard. She felt it click, and there was an answering thump through the water from the pressure of the explosive charges cutting loose. Now the military codes of her nation were safe, the communication chips and data files utterly destroyed. Whoever these bastards were, they would learn nothing from those molten remains!

Just then, a scuba diver riding an underwater sled drove into view, and she bitterly cursed at the sight of a net being dragged behind the sled. The nylon threads bulged with gold bars…and corpses, the faces of the dead sailors familiar to her. These weren’t enemy spies, but common, ordinary thieves—and for some unknown reason, body snatchers.

“Filthy bastards!” Taylor screamed in white-hot rage.

As if hearing the curse, the driver slowed and looked about for the source. He seemed quite startled to see the live naval officer on the other side of the cracked window. Then he smiled and waved hello.

Sputtering expletives, Taylor irrationally drew her sidearm and fired all fifteen rounds. However, the 9 mm slugs merely smacked into the heavy plastic and stayed there like flies in amber. The resilient material that kept in her precious air supply also prevented her from reaching out to the thief.

Grinning behind his face mask, the skinny driver waved again and continued on his way.

Raging impotently, the captain holstered the pistol, unable to think of anything else to try at the moment.

Forcing herself to remain calm, she tried to conserve oxygen, biding her time as the strangers looted the Reliant of its entire cargo of gold bullion, and then departed.

She waited a few extra minutes just to make sure, then surged into action. Rummaging among the dead crew, she found a pocketknife and started scratching details of the thieves into the tough plastic—their numbers, descriptions and type of weapons carried. But then the skinny driver unexpectedly returned.

Quickly, the captain moved away from the window, but it was already too late. Reaching into a canvas bag slung at his side, the skinny man pulled out a WWII limpet mine and clumsily attached it to the plastic. He set the timer, smiled, threw her a salute and swam away once more.

Trapped inside the wreckage, Captain Taylor could do nothing but curse until a bright flash of light filled her universe.

Flintstone, Maryland

TURNING OFF THE MAIN ROAD, Hal Brognola skirted the little town of Flintstone and drove the rented truck into the vast rolling countryside of Maryland. The old vehicle rattled and clanked at every pothole and gully, and the big Fed hoped he wasn’t leaving a trail of broken parts all the way back to his office in the Justice Department.

Occasionally checking the GPS on his dashboard, he finally took an unmarked dirt road that snaked into the hillsides to finally end at a long-abandoned stone quarry. Windblown leaves covered the ground, ancient garbage was scattered everywhere, and the sagging remains of huge machines slowly rusted away into indecipherable mounds of debris.

Coming to an easy stop, Brognola set the parking brake, but left the engine running in case of trouble. A stocky man with graying hair, the big Fed could still bench-press his own weight at the gym. Although, to be honest, it did seem to take more of an effort these days to achieve those results.

As head of the Sensitive Operations Group for the Justice Department, he normally wore a two-piece suit, but this day Brognola was in less formal attire—a denim vest, red flannel shirt, worn pants and leather boots. Flintstone was a hardworking, blue-collar town, home to a cement factory. Nobody wore a suit around here, not even the mayor.

Easing a S&W snub-nosed revolver out of a shoulder holster under the vest, Brognola thumbed back the hammer, but stayed behind the wheel, listening to the soft clatter of the engine. Nothing was moving in the jagged expanse of the stone quarry. There wasn’t a tree, a bush or even a stray dog, just rocky desolation. Even the construction shacks and mill had collapsed into jumbled piles unfit for anything but burning in a wood stove.

The sole exception was a colossal lifting crane, the long box girder neck extending over the main pit. For some reason it reminded Brognola of a gallows, and sent a shiver down his spine. The message he’d received from Mack Bolan had used all the correct code prefixes. But codes had been broken before, and the big Fed had more than his share of enemies. The list seemed to go on forever these days, and the only thing getting shorter was his tolerance for the bloodthirsty sons of bitches who broke the law, and then demanded its protection.

“Choose one or the other,” he growled softly, involuntarily tightening his grip on the checkered handle of the .38 Police Special.

Just then, he heard the soft rattle of a rock tumbling down a mountain of broken slabs. Instantly, Brognola turned in the exact opposite direction, with the S&W level and two pounds of pressure on the six-pound trigger.

“I see sitting in an office hasn’t slowed you down in the least.” Bolan chuckled, stepping into view from behind a granite boulder.

“Not yet, anyway.” Brognola grinned, lowering the barrel of his weapon. “Okay, what’s with meeting out here in the middle of nowhere? I mean, for God’s sake… Flintstone?” He snorted. “I had to check two maps before I even found the place!”

“Too many new faces in D.C.,” Bolan said, pulling a small black box from his belt and moving it slowly about. “We need privacy.”

“You checking for bugs?” Brognola asked incredulously, then clamped his mouth shut and looked around at his car. Slowly, he turned off the engine, and thick silence descended.

A minute passed, then another.

“Okay, we’re clear,” Bolan announced, tucking away the box. “This EM scanner was built for me by a friend at JPL Laboratories, and has twice the range of anything the Farm can come up with.” The Farm was Stony Man Farm, home base for the Sensitive Operations Group. “It also jams cell phones and digital recorders, and sends out an ultrasonic pulse to check for any parabolic reflectors.”

“What’s the range?”

“Half a mile.”

“That should do the trick,” Brognola stated, tucking the revolver into its shoulder holster and climbing out of the car. “You don’t trust anything, do you?”

“Just a few old friends,” Bolan replied with a smile, extending a hand, and the men shook.

“It’s been a while since we last met face-to-face, Striker,” Brognola said. “I’ve had an awful lot on my plate.”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard.” Bolan released his grip. “Come on, I have a camp set up over here. Canvas chairs, sandwiches and beer.”

“Now you’re talking,” Brognola said amiably.

Following a zigzagging path through the field of broken slabs and boulders, Bolan finally led Brognola into a small clearing. There were a couple of canvas chairs set up near a foam cooler. There was also a battered canvas backpack on the ground nearby, an M-16/M-203 assault rifle combo lying on top.

“Expecting company?” Brognola asked, scanning the nearby rocks for suspicious movements.

“Just prepared for it,” Bolan said, sitting in a chair and flipping back the lid of the cooler. Inside was a six-pack of beer, a couple deli-wrapped sandwiches, several grenades and a 9 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun with a sound suppressor attached.

Brognola tried not to chuckle. The man never missed a trick. “Okay, the last I heard you were in Brooklyn checking on a smuggling ring.”

“It’s out of business.”

Yeah, Brognola knew what that meant. The smugglers were dead and buried.

“So what were they moving? Drugs, illegal aliens, slaves, DVRs, pornography…?”

“Weapons.”

He frowned. “Saturday night specials or—”

“Damn near everything, including North Korean underwater mines.”

“Damn! How many?”

“Couple of thousand.”

“Who the hell would want those in Brooklyn?”