Kurtzman looked concerned

“Hal won’t be particularly pleased with you hitting up old contacts.”

Brognola was the least of his worries, Bolan mused. With a death squad on the loose in the streets of London, the Executioner knew that it was time to load up for bear.

In this particular case, the ursine was a breed the Executioner had hunted before, a ghost species he’d hoped had disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Unfortunately, the Soviet Bear was still a living, vital threat, and its predatory hunger had claimed the lives of two of Bolan’s old allies.

Hunting season was on again.

Cold War Reprise
Don Pendleton

Mack Bolan®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Douglas P. Wojtowicz for his contribution to this work.

Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,

Some boundless contiguity of shade,

Where rumour of oppression and deceit,

Of unsuccessful or successful war,

Might never reach me more.

—William Cowper

(1731–1800)

It would be nice to shut out the evils of the world,

but my conscience demands that I search for the truth

of every rumor of oppression and deceit, and try to

head off all wars to make them unsuccessful.

—Mack Bolan

CONTENTS

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 ONE

Mack Bolan was no stranger to the London night, having come to the grand old city early in his war against organized crime and returning for multiple engagements since. Yet the Executioner was not on a hunt this night, nor was he being pursued.

Bolan had the collar of his black wool long coat turned up against the cold, his arctic-blue eyes scanning the dock for trouble. He was walking with a light load, relatively speaking, carrying only a Beretta Px4 Storm in his shoulder holster, with a compact version of the same model tucked into his waistband at the small of his back for backup. The two sidearms accepted 17-round standard or 20-round extended magazines, equaling the firepower of his usual standard, the Beretta 93R machine pistol, while fitting into a smaller profile.

With his instincts at full alertness, Bolan spotted ordinary potential threats—drunken soccer hooligans, knife-armed thugs on the prowl for mugging victims and smugglers awaiting their contacts. The London dockyards were a wilderness, but as long as the Executioner was there to keep an appointment, he had to maintain a low profile.

Bolan sidestepped a pair of drunken sailors who staggered out through the door of a musky-smelling dive. Sweat, alcohol, cigarettes and even a few whiffs of marijuana thrown in for good measure assaulted Bolan’s nostrils as he went into the dockyard bar. The crowd turned its attention to the newcomer, who was over six feet tall, powerfully built, clad in black with chilling blue eyes that cut like lasers through the gloom of the tavern. A jukebox and a television set struggled against the undercurrent of slurred and hushed conversations, failing to do more than contribute to the wall of white noise. That was the point, though. No one sound carried farther than a tabletop, allowing plotters to plot and cheaters to cheat without being overheard by interested parties.

A stocky Slavic man gestured from his corner booth. Two shot glasses bracketed a bottle of clear liquor in front of him, and to one side, an ashtray was overflowing with crushed-out butts. Bolan knifed through the bar as the Slav poured the booze into his shot glasses, pushing one of the little servings of the clear stuff to what was to be Bolan’s seat. Bleary, smoke-stung eyes looked up at the Executioner.

“Mikhail Belasko,” Vitaly Alexandronin greeted, lighting another cigarette as Bolan slid into the booth.

“The name’s Cooper, now,” Bolan corrected, taking a sip. It was a bitter, foul version of vodka that tasted as if it had been filtered through sweat-crusted socks. “Couldn’t find anything better?”

“Tastes just like the crap I distilled in Afghanistan,” Alexandronin replied. “Except British feet stink a bit more.”

Bolan chuckled. Alexandronin offered him an unfiltered cigarette and Bolan accepted it. The Russian’s lighter fired it up, and Bolan took a single puff before resting the cigarette between the knuckles of his left hand. He didn’t want to offend Alexandronin’s hospitality, and Bolan had the discipline to avoid slipping back into a nicotine habit. “Bad booze and worse cigarettes? This is war mode for you, Vitaly.”

“Why else would I invite you by for a drink?” Alexandronin asked. “It’s not for my health.”

Bolan frowned, but he wouldn’t interrupt the Russian, breaking the rule of polite conversation by going for hard data right off the bat. He could see that Alexandronin was ragged, his jowls hanging loosely as if he hadn’t eaten for a month. The Russian’s fingertips were completely bronzed by nicotine stains, but the last time Bolan had interacted with the defected former KGB agent, his skin had been a healthier shade due to quitting smoking. Lack of sleep darkened Alexandronin’s eyes into an impenetrable shadow. “Is it about Catherine?”

Alexandronin took a long pull off of his cigarette, blowing the smoke through his wide, blunt nostrils. His brow crinkled and Bolan knew he’d touched a raw nerve. “The pitiful excuse for lawmen in this damned city claim that she was jumped by soccer hooligans. The thugs broke Catherine to pieces, and she lingered in a hospital for the last of her days.”

Catherine Alexandronin was not a name on the Stony Man watch-list database, but Bolan cursed himself for not keeping an eye out for her. He had last known her as Catherine Rozuika, a TASS journalist who had helped Bolan and Alexandronin derail an effort to turn back the democratic processes of the early Commonwealth of independent states. The hard-liners were not willing to give way to the end of the old Soviet Republic and freely and blatantly killed anyone in their path. The Executioner had stopped the plot and through his Stony Man contacts, had arranged for a new life for the pair in London.

Catherine had been a beautiful woman. Back then, Bolan had enjoyed a few moments of tenderness with the lady reporter. The news of her death by a brutal beating was like a knife in the soldier’s heart. Something, though, had sparked Alexandronin’s paranoia. “You said the police ‘claimed.’ You don’t buy that story.”

Alexandronin knocked back his glass of vodka. “The law looks at the ambush of an investigative reporter as just another case of drunk sports fans. But this was not the work of alcohol-besotted misanthropes.”

A stack of photos plopped in front of Bolan and he leafed through them, studying the photographic records taken at the emergency room and during her autopsy. Bolan’s sharp mind already spotted inconsistencies between the police reports and reality.

“Pay attention to the broken right arm,” Alexandronin said.

“The end result of a standard Spetsnaz cross-forearm disarmament snap,” Bolan replied. “Using one limb as a fulcrum, the gun hand is deflected, the force shattering the ulnar bones. Catherine was armed, and she pulled her weapon to defend herself.”

“We have enemies,” Alexandronin replied. “Mere hooligans would have just picked up the gun and shot her with it.”

“They were sending a message,” Bolan suggested. “Stop snooping. Question is, what was she snooping into?”

“The newspaper she worked for ‘misplaced’ her most recent notes,” Alexandronin added. “None of her coworkers will even stay in the same room as I am in.”

Alexandronin opened his shirt. A bloody bandage was on his upper chest. “I’m still snooping and I nearly caught all six inches of the blade that did this.”

“You find out anything about what she was looking into?” Bolan asked as the man buttoned his shirt.

“It was initially a fluff piece, allegedly, talking to Chechen refugees who had emigrated here to England. They’re trying to escape the troubles back home,” Alexandronin answered. “But she confided in me that the refugees were scared.”

“Of the Russian government or their own people?” Bolan asked. “Chechen rebels are hardly saints, even if the world is admitting that Moscow is longing for the good old days of the cold war.”

“Russia has changed some, but not enough,” Alexandronin said. He poured himself a fresh shot of vodka, then hammered it down in one gulp. “There is a group in Moscow, a highly trained antiterrorism special branch.”

“They call themselves the Curved Knife,” Bolan mused. He flicked a tower of ashes off his untouched cigarette. “Doesn’t take too much imagination to see that the Curved Knife is an allusion to the old Sickle that crossed the Hammer as the symbol of the Communist party.”

“The Sickle symbolism is not lost on anyone who’s aware of them,” Alexandronin said. “They are no more than the midnight knockers from the old days of the KGB. They are the same type of bastards who picked up those considered unfaithful to the Party and helped them to disappear.”

“Usually with a bullet in the head, and a trip to the bottom of a bulldozed pit,” Bolan added. He took a token puff on the cigarette, washing the foul taste away with the bitter liquor. He looked down at the glass, then held it out for Alexandronin to refill.

“The stuff grows on you,” the Russian noted with a chuckle, pouring another round.

“Helps to keep the bad taste of this news out of my mouth,” Bolan answered. “Catherine lived a few days after the beating?”

Alexandronin nodded. “She never recovered consciousness. Internal hemorrhaging finally took its toll. I told the doctors to pull the plug. Russians live, or Russians die. The limbo of being trapped in a coma is neither, and it traps the soul in a broken sack of flesh.”

Bolan nodded. “She never said anything about what happened to her in that case.”

Alexandronin sighed. “She didn’t even say goodbye. Not out loud.”

He pushed an envelope toward Bolan. The name “Mike” was scrawled on the front, a reference to his old identity of Mike Belasko, long since discarded. In the dive, its scene of strawberries was an island of freshness. “She wrote one for me, as well, my friend. I didn’t look at yours.”

Bolan glanced down at the slender envelope, then sliced it open with his pocketknife. Catherine’s strawberry-scented perfume filled his nostrils, bringing him back to their time together, entwined in each other’s limbs. There was a small, folded slip of paper within.

“‘My soldier, I could never replace your lost rose. May you someday find peace, and never forget the night we shared. Cat.’”

Bolan folded the slip and put it back in its envelope. He fought off the heartache those simple words left in their wake. He met Alexandronin’s gaze.

“It was never a secret that you two had been lovers,” the Russian told him. “That didn’t mean she was less of a devoted wife to me.”

“I feel your pain, Vitaly,” Bolan told him. “And I’ll help find her murderers.”

“No, comrade. I will help you,” Alexandronin replied. “My race is nearly run, and I miss Catherine far too much to want to live in a world without her.”

“That’s the melancholy talking, Vitaly,” Bolan said, but not too forcefully. “Keep her memory alive.”

Alexandronin’s attention was seized by movement at the door. His hand slid off the table, resting on his belly, just above his belt line. Bolan looked at the reflection of the two men in the surface of the vodka bottle. They both had Slavic features and were dressed in black. Their hawk-sharp eyes scanned the bar patrons, seeking out their designated prey.

“I assume you are armed, Mikhail,” Alexandronin said.

Bolan nodded. “The two at the front are just the flush team. If we cut through the back, we’ll run straight into the trap team.”

“Sharp as always, my friend,” Alexandronin mused. “So we go through those two?”

“Provided they don’t have someone hanging back behind them. They could be supported by another trap team or even snipers,” Bolan said. “That’s how I’d do it if I were setting this trap.”

“So what is our plan?” Alexandronin asked.

“Let me talk to those two,” Bolan told him. “Maybe I can head off any violence. This place isn’t choir practice, but I’d hate for bystanders to get hurt.”

“As is your way, comrade. Precision and concern for those around you,” Alexandronin stated. He patted the old Heckler & Koch P7 stuffed into his belt. “Respect for accuracy is another thing we have shared, my friend.”

“Can the past tense, Vitaly. The Russian government has an agency off the leash, so I’m going to need your help,” Bolan admonished. “You get killed, who do I tap for intel?”

“Remember Kaya?” Alexandronin asked. “She’s still with the government. Russian Intelligence.”

Bolan winced. “Do you really want to risk her life?”

“She risks it keeping in covert contact with me, Mikhail,” Alexandronin explained.

“Three heads are better than two. Stick with me.”

Alexandronin’s eyes narrowed, his lips turning up into a smile. “You have done more with much less, Mikhail.”

“Focus,” Bolan warned.

Alexandronin nodded. “I am.”

Bolan stubbed out his cigarette, burying it with the other stubby butts in the pile flowing over the top of the ashtray. The soldier palmed his shot glass and got out of the booth. The two black-clad Slavs eyed Bolan suspiciously, confirming to the Executioner that the men were professionals. They focused on him like antiradiation missiles launched at a radar installation. The pair wore their jackets loosely in contrast to Bolan’s snugly fitted wool long coat. The custom-tailoring of Bolan’s coat hid his two Berettas completely, but the lumpy loose jackets worn by the two Russians indicated that the pair were armed with more than flat, sleek auto pistols. Their eyes locked on the glass in Bolan’s hand.

Bolan passed between the pair, shoving them rudely aside. His elbow connected with something big and heavy hidden under the lapels of one jacket. Bolan cursed the pair in Russian. “Move aside, you sons of whores. I need more vodka!”

“Fucking bastard,” one of the professionals snarled, returning his response in Georgian-accented Russian. “Who do you think you are?”

Bolan met his gaze. “A thirsty man in front of two jackbooted thugs. Two pathetic leftovers of a dead regime if my eyes serve me right!”

“You don’t look Russian,” the other hardman said in English. His accent was flawless, further proof that these men weren’t just pulled off the street. “What relation are you to Alexandronin?”

“Brothers in blood,” Bolan returned. “What is your interest?”

“That man is a traitor,” the Georgian gritted in Russian. “And if you consider him your brother—”

“Shut your mouth!” the English speaker said to his companion. He glared at Bolan. “Walk away from this if you value your life, ‘brother.’”

Bolan smirked. “I was just about to suggest the same thing to you.”

Behind him, Bolan could tell that Alexandronin was moving because the Georgian’s interest was suddenly locked on to the booth.

“Trying to distract us?” the Georgian asked.

Bolan snapped his arm straight, the palmed shot glass shattering against the Georgian’s cheekbone. Broken glass slashed ragged wounds through his eyeball and cheek. The other hardman stepped back, driving his hand into his jacket for the heavy chatterbox concealed beneath. Bolan kicked out, catching the English speaker in the side of his knee, folding the man’s leg with the crack and pop of dislocating cartilage and unsprung tendons.

The background drone of the bar suddenly went silent as the millisecond of explosive action brought a spray of blood and the ugly crunch of a shattered knee joint to the patrons’ awareness. The Georgian screamed, half blind from the broken splinters sticking out of his punctured eyeball. Alexandronin slipped up behind him, grabbed a handful of collar and twisted. The tightened neck of his shirt smothered the Georgian hit man’s agony as fabric garroted across his windpipe.

The blunt, short barrel of Alexandronin’s P7 jammed into the Georgian’s kidney. “You reach for the weapon under your coat, and your kidney will end up decorating the floor.”

Bolan helped his broken-kneed opponent to both feet, reaching under the man’s jacket to use the grip of the harnessed machine pistol he wore as a handle to maneuver him. From feel, Bolan recognized it as an Uzi of some form. A good tug let his captive know that Bolan had command of the situation.

The bartender looked under the counter at some form of fight-pacifying weaponry, but the sheer speed and violence of action dissuaded him reaching for it. Whoever the barkeep thought Bolan was, he had the reflexes to counteract anything that he kept under the bar. “Please, guv’nuh, take it outside.”

“That was my plan,” Bolan told him.

Alexandronin tossed some folded pound notes in front of the bartender. “Another bottle of potato juice for the road.”

The Georgian gurgled as the bartender put a bottle on the counter. Alexandronin leaned in toward his captive, smiling. “Grab my vodka for me, friend.”

The Georgian picked up the bottle and the four people left the confines of the bar. Both Bolan and Alexandronin held their prisoners directly in front of them as human shields. By the time they were outside, Bolan had his man’s Uzi well in hand and down by his thigh, safety selector clicked to full automatic.

“Let your rifleman know that he’d better hold his fire,” Bolan warned as they stood under the bar’s overhang. “Unless you wouldn’t mind having a new orifice torn in you.”

The limping, agonized Slav spoke into a collar microphone, speaking quickly. The hardman was straightforward, as Bolan had proven his fluency in Russian, making it clear that any deception would be futile. Bolan couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation because his prisoner wore an earphone, but the hostage explained that he had been compromised.

“Where’s your shooter?” Bolan asked.

“There are two of them,” the hobbled prisoner replied.

“The bar’s quiet again,” Alexandronin noted. He pocketed the bottle of vodka, no longer needing a chokehold on his prisoner as the man was busy holding the tattered remnants of his glass-shredded face together. “The backdoor team is likely moving up.”

“Point the way,” Bolan ordered. “Vitaly, stay sharp.”

“Da,” Alexandronin said.

A distant rifle cracked instantly, and the black-clad human shield jerked violently against Bolan. The prisoner’s blood gushed out of a hole torn into his breastbone, arterial spray spurting through the centralized chest wound like a fountain. Now a deadweight in Bolan’s arms, the corpse still provided some use as a protective barrier, and the Executioner pushed out into the street. Alexandronin forced his prisoner ahead of him, as well, but the riflemen focused on Bolan, their bullets crashing into the unfeeling form of the dead man.

Bolan spotted a muzzle flash, lined up his Uzi and fired the submachine gun. The chatterbox had a range of 200 yards in trained hands, and no living man was more familiar with the stubby Israeli machine pistol than the Executioner. The distant gunmen stopped shooting, but Bolan didn’t feel as if he had scored a hit. Suppressive fire, however, still was worth the spent ammunition, and Bolan looked for the second rifleman. Alexandronin stumbled, the Georgian bending backward as the Russian’s P7 discharged. Alexandronin’s claim of spraying the hit man’s kidney across the bar floor didn’t quite come true as the 9 mm round missed the organ completely. The deadly slug, however, still tore through Alexandronin’s opponent, slashing a stretch of aorta apart.

“Vitaly!” Bolan called.

“Their round went through my thigh,” Alexandronin said, limping to cover.

Bolan began snatching items from the dead man’s pockets, spare magazines and a radio specifically. He let the body tumble lifelessly to the ground as he rushed to scoop up his ally. Together they ducked between a couple of buildings. The leg injury was a shallow furrow along the outside of Alexandronin’s thigh. The bullet had struck far from the femur or the femoral artery, meaning that the man could still walk, though his leg was drenched. Bolan recognized the smell of the rotten vodka they had been drinking. A bone injury would have been crippling, but had the blood vessel been nicked, Alexandronin’s life would be measured in seconds. Bolan looked his friend in the eye. “Bad news. You lost the vodka.”

Alexandronin grinned. “A tragedy, Mikhail. I can still walk.”

Bolan dumped the spent magazine from his Uzi, feeding it a full one he’d plucked from its former owner. The savvy warrior also took a moment to secure the earpiece and the body of his hostage’s radio to his harness. Being able to listen in on the conversation of his enemies would be a force multiplier.

The bar front opened and Bolan caught a glimpse of four men bursting through the doors, scrambling to cover. Bolan fired off a short burst that sent the dark-clad assassins deeper behind their cover.

“Get to a safer position,” Bolan ordered Alexandronin. “I’ll cover you.”

The Russian shook his head. “This is my fight, too, Mikhail.”

“You’re hurt and slowed down,” Bolan argued.

“I can turret,” Alexandronin replied. “You can still move quickly. Together we can surround them.”

Bolan didn’t have time to argue about tactics, especially since Alexandronin was right. He handed his friend the Uzi and the remaining spare magazine. “Don’t die.”

The Russian smiled. “I have men to kill before I rest, Mikhail.”

“Remember that,” the soldier said, drawing his Beretta.

The Executioner raced across the street, covered by a spray of rapid shots from Alexandronin.

Once more, London was a host to Bolan’s cleansing flame.

CHAPTER TWO

Alexandronin’s first burst of Uzi fire kept the assassins’ heads down as the Executioner charged around their flank, Beretta Storm leading the way. Bolan held his fire, his Russian ally leaning on the trigger to keep the enemy focused away from him.

“Which of those two idiots lost control of his Uzi?” one killer snarled in Russian.

“Probably both,” another answered his comrade. “They were both human shields, remember?”

“Longbow to Tomahawk, be alert! One operator moved around to your side of the street,” another, presumably a sniper, informed the hit crew. Bolan was glad that he’d taken the time to relieve his former prisoner of his comm link. Aware that the enemy was on to him, Bolan sidestepped into the open and fired four quick shots at the squad in front of the bar. Two of his shots struck one gunman center mass, but the impacts had no affect on the would-be murderer.

Bolan snaked back behind cover as the Russians’ Uzis crackled, ripping the air he’d stood in moments before. The assassins were wearing body armor, good stuff, too, as Bolan had Dutch-loaded his Beretta with high-velocity hollowpoints and full-power NATO ball ammunition. The high-pressure ball rounds were effective against a good deal of ballistic vests, meaning that the killers had expected heavy opposition. The corner that Bolan had ducked behind was chewed up as a trio of submachine guns tracked to keep the big American pinned.

Bolan ran a mental countdown to the moment when a “Flying Squad”—Scotland Yard’s version of SWAT—showed up to the scene of a raging gun battle on the bank of the Thames. The Executioner knew that he had minutes, but with the skill and professionalism of the assassination cadre, he’d need every second of that Doomsday countdown to put the killers away. Now, Bolan not only had Alexandronin’s life to worry about, but also the British policemen who would be caught in the cross fire.

Three weapons in the front meant that the rest of the team was swinging around the back to strike at the Executioner from behind. Bolan charged to the back alley, Beretta leading the way. His suspicions were confirmed when he heard the whispered announcement of “in position” from a new speaker on the communications hookup.

Bolan whipped around the corner, his Beretta’s muzzle jammed into an assassin’s face, breaking his nose. The soldier’s off hand slapped the gunner’s Uzi against the wall and though the hitter triggered his subgun, the rounds spit through empty air. Bolan triggered his Storm, the solitary 9 mm round blowing off the back of the killer’s skull, disgorging a cone of spongy brain matter and blood into the face of the second man with them. The remains of the dead man’s skull contents turned the assassin’s shooting glasses into a blood-sprayed mess he couldn’t see through.

The Executioner tossed the corpse of the point man aside and pivoted the gun in his hand to strike the surviving killer in the head. The Slavic gunman stepped back, tearing his glasses off, the motion helping him to avoid the weight of the handgun as Bolan’s swing jammed it up against the wall. Now able to see, the Russian killer lunged forward, forearm trapping Bolan’s gun hand against the wall.

The close-quarters gunfight suddenly turned into a brawl as the assassin chopped at Bolan’s neck, but the soldier deflected most of the lethal precision with his shoulder. The neck-breaking blow degraded to a clumsy slap that cuffed Bolan’s head above his ear. The gunman tried to bring his Uzi to bear, but the Executioner had trapped the subgun between his hip and the wall. The frustrated hitter tried to nail his opponent between the eyes with a backhand stroke, but Bolan took the blow on the crown of his head. The curved surface of his skull denied the murderer a solid hit, sparing Bolan anything worse than scalp abrasions.

The soldier snaked his foot behind his enemy’s ankle and with a surge of strength, barreled the gunman backward and off balance. The assassin stumbled onto his buttocks, the Uzi wrenched out of his grasp. No longer restrained, Bolan had both arms free to tackle the killer prisoner. He dropped on the gunman, knees slamming into the hardman’s shoulders with jarring force, pinning the man to the ground under his 200-plus-pound frame. Bolan fired off a hard punch to the prone assassin’s jaw, a knockout blow that jammed the mandible into a heavy juncture of nerves at the side of his neck. The Slav wasn’t rendered unconscious, but neural overload left his eyes glazed over, staring glassily into the murky, starless night sky.

“Kroz! Report!” a voice over Bolan’s radio demanded. The stunned Russian groaned incoherently as if to answer the broadcast order. Bolan took a moment to pull his Combat PDA, activating its 8 megapixel digital camera to record the gunman’s face, just in case this particular prisoner had as short a shelf life as his last one. Bolan punched the assassin once more, and the stunned, glassy eyes closed with unconsciousness.

Bolan brought the microphone to his lips. “Kroz can’t come to the phone right now. However if you leave a message at the beep…”

“Shit! Shit!” the Russian on the other end swore. “Switch frequencies! Channel B!”

The alternate frequency plan might have worked, had not Bolan captured not one but two different radios. Bolan checked Kroz’s unit for indications of the secondary communications frequency and found that Kroz had scratched his dial to mark the next channel. The soldier plugged his earphone into Kroz’s unit and clicked over to the frequency.

“…fucking guy?” one of the conversants complained in Russian.

“Maintain radio discipline,” the leader of the death squad ordered.

Sowing panic among his enemies was a good weapon for evening the odds against superior numbers and firepower. As it was, the assassination team was down four shooters in the space of a few minutes. With two sharpshooters and three gunmen on hand, that was nearly half of the Russian force.

“Central says to abort!” another voice cut in. “The mission has been compromised.”

So, the assassins have a coordination and operations center, Bolan thought. If they’re going to cut and run, there’s a chance that they could give me a better look at who ran this op.

Bolan scurried back to the front of the bar, listening to the Russians as he did so.

“Principal target still breathing. Cannot disengage anyhow,” the hit team’s commander returned.

“Scorch the earth,” the coordinator snapped. “Principal is no longer an issue. Avoiding his partner is!”

“Confirm command scorch,” the leader said.

“Burn it all down!” the commander bellowed.

Bolan snapped open the stock of his Uzi. He wasn’t certain of the extent of the firepower the death force had on hand, but the people in the dive were at risk. He used the Uzi’s butt to punch out a window into the bar.

Inside, patrons huddled close to the floor, terrified of the rattle of full-auto weaponry ripping and roaring outside. Though there was a likelihood of the presence of murderers and other scum being among this crowd, Bolan had little proof of their collective guilt, let alone knowledge of actions warranting death by high explosives. He fired a burst into the ceiling and the crowd rose as one, a human tide breaking for the back door, shoving out into the alley. No one wanted to go out the front, which would take them right into the middle of the current firefight. It was better than giving away that Bolan was listening in on the Russians’ party line by shouting a warning to the bar bums.

The first thunderbolt impact blew the doors off the dive, tearing them off of their hinges. Splinters and shrapnel forced the Executioner to duck out the window to avoid being sliced by the rocketing wave of debris. He popped back up and saw that the panicked patrons had managed to evacuate long before the interior of the bar was turned into a blast crater. The force of the explosion informed Bolan that the enemy had resorted to RPGs, rocket-propelled grenades that could be reloaded quickly and were devastating to a range of 300 yards.

Bolan snaked through the broken window with whiplash speed, dropping to the shattered floor as the next 77 mm warhead impacted at the corner he had been hiding behind earlier. The concussive fury of the thermobaric warhead was so violent, Bolan could feel it through the brick wall. Had he delayed in leaving the causeway beside the bar, he would have been pulverized by the fuel-air explosive’s radius of ignited atmosphere. As it was, Bolan had to shake the cobwebs from his head.

He hoped that Alexandronin had retreated to more solid cover when the death squad broke out their heavy weapons. Bolan rushed across the explosion-ravaged bar and vaulted over the counter. He look around swiftly to see what kind of crowd-calming firepower the bartender had. Crouching behind the bar, he was at eye level with the shelves beneath the counter and saw a bolt-action Enfield sitting on a shelf. A box of .303 stripper clips sat next to it. It was an unusual combination for bar-room defense, but the SMLE had been sawn down to a fourteen-inch barrel for faster handling in the bartender’s area. The sawed-off Smelly was a better option than a cut-down shotgun, and even at fourteen inches, the .303 rounds would cut through body armor and put a man down like a sledgehammer. It would also be more than sufficient to counter the enhanced reach of the Russians’ snipers.

Bolan stuffed the stripper clips into his pocket, then chambered the first round on the rifle. He couldn’t expect razor-fine precision with an untested set of iron sights, and an unregulated load of ammunition, but the soldier’s years of marksmanship gave him enough experience to be able to hit a man-size target at three hundred yards with bone-smashing authority.

The Enfield’s stock took out a window behind the bar, and Bolan slithered out into the next causeway. The handy little bolt action was short enough for the soldier to maneuver through the narrow passage and he poked around the corner. He was barely visible at the range the enemy rocketeers were firing from. The smoky trails of the RPG-7 shells cut across the dock front, pinpointing the enemy’s position about two hundred yards downrange.

Bolan could see Alexandronin’s former hiding spot had been hit by a rocket grenade, but there was no sign of his Russian ally. The soldier hoped that his friend’s leg injury hadn’t slowed him so much that he hadn’t reached safety before the 77 mm warhead impacted. Suddenly an Uzi crackled close to the Russians’ position. Bolan saw the stocky outline of Alexandronin leap back behind cover. While Bolan had engaged the other team of gunmen, Alexandronin had to have scrambled to flank the death squad.

Bolan shouldered his Enfield and fired, his first .303 shot missing the head of an Uzi-wielding gunman by inches. However, the powerful rifle round tore into the upper chest of a Russian holding one of the rocket launchers. The sharp-nosed slug excavated a gory tunnel through muscle, organs and bone, dropping the rocketeer in a messy pile of dead, twisted limbs.

That caught the attention of the death squad survivors. The shooters turned their Uzis and remaining sniper rifle toward him and fired where Bolan’s last muzzle flash had flared. A hail of bullets tore into his old position, but the Executioner had gone back into the bar via the broken window and crouched in the smoky wreckage of the building’s rocket-shattered doors. Focusing on the distant muzzle flashes and adjusting his hold for his last known miss, Bolan fired, working the bolt with lightning quickness. The Enfield had more than enough power to kill a man at two hundred yards, and over the radio set, he heard two agonized grunts, one of which dissolved into a death rattle.

Bolan stuffed the stripper clip into the top of the Enfield and shoved its ten trapped rounds into the deep reservoirs of the rifle’s magazine.

“Get that RPG on the bar again!” the field leader growled.

“Arkady’s dead! The fucker killed Arkady!” another hitter snapped.

“Shut up and stay focused!” the commander ordered, frustration in his voice.

Alexandronin’s Uzi snarled again in the distance, and Bolan’s ally had to have hit the man who’d picked up the RPG. The 77 mm shell speared up into the night sky on top of a column of rocket exhaust. It peaked at three hundred meters before gravity overpowered the exhausted, sputtering rocket engine. The grenade spiraled as it descended, smoke spilling out of its tail and etching the warhead’s course back to ground level. The heavy explosive load detonated on impact with a bright flash. The fireball’s brilliance flashed into a smoky cloud that obscured Bolan’s view of the enemy kill force. Since visibility was a two-way street, the Executioner charged toward the opposition’s last known position, trading his Enfield back to the fully charged Uzi.

“Report! Report!” the field commander bellowed.

“I’ve got movement on the walkway!” one Russian answered. “Gregori’s down!”

“Stop the gunman!” the commander urged. “Fire!”

There was a grunt over the radio, the sound of a fist striking flesh. Somewhere in the foggy haze, Alexandronin had hurled himself into hand-to-hand combat with the last of the enemy assassin’s hit men.

T HE RPG BLAST LANDED so close to Vitaly Alexandronin that it shocked the Russian expatriate to the core. Shrapnel had opened several lacerations on his head, arm and torso. Pain burned through his stocky body, but it was only a background ache, adrenaline numbing him to his body’s protestations. His fist throbbed from where he had punched the reporting gunman in the ear, carpal bones cracking against hard skull. It was a clumsy attack, but the hard-liner thug had been knocked off his feet. Blood poured from the hit man’s ear where the ruptured eardrum drained out.

The man’s head hadn’t flexed like a jaw would have, and the result was broken knuckles and fractured hand bones. Alexandronin dismissed the self-diagnosis. Catherine, the love of his life, had been shattered far worse by scum such as the one he had struck.

Alexandronin speared his fist under the sternum of his stunned opponent, driving the breath out of the assassin’s lungs. As the gunman folded up in pain, he dropped his Uzi. Alexandronin chopped down hard on his downed foe’s throat. The killer’s trachea collapsed, accompanied by the sickening crunch of his larynx. Blood poured over the dead man’s lips, his eyes bulged out by the force of the blow.

“Two bastards I give in your memory, my love,” Alexandronin rasped. As he spoke, he tasted blood in his mouth. A cough pushed up a mouthful of sticky crimson. He was so high on adrenaline, he had ignored the pain of a piece of shrapnel that had cut between his ribs and penetrated deep into one lung.

It was bad, he knew, if he could fill his mouth with blood on one weak cough. But Alexandronin was not dead yet. The man he knew as Belasko would need a prisoner or two to continue closing down the foul conspiracy that had taken Catherine away from him.

The team commander’s attention had been drawn by Bolan, the two men maneuvering around each other, Uzis snarling and cracking in a leaden debate of point and counterpoint. It was a ballet of bullets and dodges between the two men.

Alexandronin scooped up the partially spent Uzi of the man whose throat he had crushed and reversed it into a club. The assassination team’s field commander didn’t notice his primary target’s sudden charge until the eight-pound mass of the submachine gun hammered between his shoulder blades with stunning force.

The commander folded to the ground, insensate as Bolan held his fire.

“You’re hit,” Bolan noted, ignoring the unconscious prisoner that Alexandronin had just taken.

The Russian smiled, putting his best face on the lie. “It is far from my heart, Mikhail.”

The buckle of the expatriate’s knees betrayed the truth, however. Bolan reached out and caught his ally before he collapsed to the ground. The soldier lowered Alexandronin to a reclining position. He looked for the injury that had caused him so much weakness. Bolan ripped open his friend’s shirt and saw the ugly, puckered gash over Alexandronin’s ribs.

“Lung hit,” Alexandronin explained. “Not near heart…probably pleural artery…Can’t control that kind of bleeding in the field…”

“Quiet. Save your breath,” Bolan ordered.

“Adrenaline…pumped oxygen through blood…” Alexandronin continued. “No breath left to save. I’ll be gone in…minutes. You have…last gift.”

“Vitaly, damn it!”

Alexandronin cupped Bolan’s cheek, smiling at the big American. “Don’t mourn for me, Mikhail. My comrade, my brother, I had already died the day Catherine did.”

Bolan pressed a button on his PDA. “I’ve already transmitted a call for an ambulance. Hang on and the paramedics can stabilize you.”

“It would just be surviving, my friend,” Alexandronin told him. “Not living.”

He coughed, blood foaming on his lips. Bolan stroked the dying man’s forehead, frowning. “Give Catherine my love when you see her again, Vitaly.”

Alexandronin smiled weakly. “The dead all know the love meant for them unspoken in the hearts of the living. We do not need revenge to prove that fealty.”

“What plot these men are protecting, it needs to be stopped,” Bolan said. “I’ll end it.”

Alexandronin clapped Bolan on the shoulder. “It is your way. It’s why I called you. You will protect others from suffering as I did when Catherine was taken away from me.”

Sirens sounded in the distance. “Take your prisoner, Mikhail. Those are police, not paramedics.”

Alexandronin closed his eyes, his last breath a deep sigh.

“Sleep well, my friend,” Bolan whispered, lowering Alexandronin’s head gently to the ground.

The Executioner hauled the unconscious assassin over his shoulder and darted down a causeway to reach his rental car. He left behind the ghosts of the friendly dead to their much delayed reunion.

The warrior intended a different gathering for the damned souls he was about to pass judgment on.

CHAPTER THREE

Opening up the interface to the Russian Intelligence Agency’s GUI system, Kaya Laserka noted that she had twenty-four new e-mail messages. The field agent, assigned to the Moscow Organized Crime Interagency task force, clicked on the tool bar, taking her to her electronic Inbox. Most of the mail was one form of memo or another, mostly tedious reminders and uninspiring trinkets like tenure awards or daily positive reinforcement sayings.

The header of one e-mail, however, brought a chill to Laserka’s spine.

“Catherine was murdered,” it read in bold, blocky font.

Laserka waited what seemed an eternity as her slow T1 connection, burdened by the equivalent of Third World technical issues, struggled to load the message. There was a link to a London newspaper Web site that carried the report of a brutal, coma-inducing beating of Catherine Rozuika Alexandronin. There was also an appended note that she had been taken off her life support when her husband, Vitaly, was informed that she had been rendered brain dead. The return e-mail was to a free online service, one she didn’t recognize. However, the title Outcast 1995, contained the year her mentor and training officer, Vitaly Alexandronin, left Russian Intelligence amid a government scandal. Laserka had no doubt who the sender was.

Almost a decade and a half before, Laserka had been a fresh young rookie to Russian Intelligence, and Alexandronin had given her a wealth of lessons and experience that carried her across the intervening years. Laserka fired off a response e-mail, but the server spit back a “message not deliverable” response.

The mail had been sent four days earlier, Laserka noted. She had been stuck on an investigation and away from her work terminal. She’d only just returned to Moscow the previous night after a week in the field, running a surveillance operation. She’d had no urge to go to the office. She had been tired, sweaty and hungry, and only wanted to scrub her auburn hair clean of the stink of perspiration, stale coffee and an ever-hanging cloud of cigarette smoke trapped in her locks. Laserka was as fit and trim as when she was just a raw recruit, but closing in on the latter half of her thirties meant that she didn’t have the same reserves of energy to make a quick trip down to the office after the end of a stakeout detail.

Running her knuckle across her full, wide lips, Laserka tried to interpret the disappearance of Alexandronin’s e-mail account. It was probably a security ploy on her old mentor’s part, using a one-time temporary address, then closing it down. Alexandronin was still a reviled name in the halls of the RIA because of his interference with an effort to put things back to what many KGB veterans felt was a finer time and way of doing business. Laserka had escaped the prejudice of the old hard-liners by being young, pretty and a hard worker. A short hospital stay during the time Alexandronin was offending the old guard also conveyed a cloak of anonymity to the lady agent.

Whenever Alexandronin wanted to get in touch with his former student and partner, he would create a temporary, easily disposable and recognizable e-mail address that would last only long enough for a brief, anonymous exchange. This kept Laserka from getting into trouble with her superiors, but kept the friendship the pair shared alive and vital. Sometimes, the two gave each other news of prevailing politics that would affect her career or his exile, as far as they could determine.

The death of Catherine did not appear to be a random act of violence. That Catherine and Vitaly both were targets of bitter old enemies was not news to Laserka. Husband and wife both kept themselves armed, contrary to Great Britain’s inane and ineffectual firearms laws. Laserka had noted several instances of violence over the years that the English nanny legislation had failed to prevent.

On a whim, Laserka performed a quick search, entering the keywords “Russian, violence and London” into the news database. Almost instantly, several article links popped up on the screen, detailing a violent battle that had left eight dead in the London docks, only a few hours before. The only person with identification was a Russian national. The name was not a surprise to Laserka, though reading “Vitaly Alexandronin” plunged a dagger of sadness between her ribs. She tried to blink away the beginnings of tears, swallowing hard to remove the knot of a forming sob from her throat.

Laserka closed the search engine and hurried to the washroom after shutting down her computer.

Though they had been separated for almost fifteen years, the man had been like a surrogate father to her. She barricaded herself into the toilet stall and took a seat, allowing the tears inspired by the death of a dear friend and his wife to flow. Being in the minefield of RIA office politics had given her the ability to smother her sobs to inaudible squeaks and deep breaths, but her eyes cast forth a torrent of weeping. Laserka was glad that department regulations frowned upon the wearing of mascara at the office. At least now she didn’t have to mop streaks of black left in the wake of her tears.

She could imagine Alexandronin chiding her for being so lazy and mannish about her appearance, happily giving in to regulations rather than spend a few moments beautifying herself in the morning. A chuckle broke through where sobs had been held silent and at bay. Her mentor had always been one to find the positive in life. It was a trait that the cold war veteran had developed to keep himself sane through years of Soviet oppression. The gentle memory of friendly admonishment felt like a message from the ghost of her mentor, reaching between the worlds of the living and the dead to give her a bit of comfort.

It took a few minutes for the tears to pass, toilet tissue sopping the wetness from her cheeks. Finally, Laserka took a deep breath, checked her reflection in the mirror and returned to her desk. No one paid attention to her; a pair of reading glasses swiftly perched on her nose hid her eyes somewhat. They wouldn’t have a good chance to see the redness in them. She fired up her computer again, keeping herself buried out of sight inside her drab, gray cubicle.

Laserka had paperwork on the surveillance operation to complete, and the sooner it was done, the sooner she could go back home to her Spartan apartment and mourn for her friend and mentor, preferably with a bottle of vodka. The quiet goodbye ceremony would be a proper send-off for Alexandronin and his beloved wife.

Laserka opened her notebook to enter her data into the GUI when she noticed a small warning flag on her screen. She clicked on it and opened up a new window.

“Unauthorized Web search activity, Laserka, K., scanning articles pertaining to Vitaly Alexandronin,” the pop-up declared. Laserka bit her lower lip in concern, cursing her curiosity and decrying the snoopiness of the RIA information technology team.

“Report to Supervisor Batroykin for debriefing,” a new pop-up informed her.

Batroykin was a bastard and a half, stuffed into a half-bastard-sized container, she thought. The old-school KGB veteran was five feet tall and nearly five feet in circumference, a bald little blob of rice pudding packed into a polyester tent of a cheap suit. For the illustration of the pathetic old guard who clung to the ideals that Alexandronin betrayed, Laserka didn’t have to go much farther than the bloated, multiple-chinned official.

Laserka took a damp kerchief and pressed it to her eyes to lessen the bloodshot qualities of her whites. The cool water from her glass helped to ease the burning irritation behind her lids, but not the irritant that now started to fester under her skin, the irritation of Batroykin. She frowned, looking at her eyes in the small mirror she kept in a drawer. They still looked reddened, but there was no sign that she had been crying. It was more as if she had just suffered a small allergy attack. Many of the things in her office, from the hand-sanitizing gel to shavings from her pencil sharpener could have given her eyes her current amount of discoloration.

She gathered her nerves, then walked into Batroykin’s office. The bald, pasty gnome glanced up at her, his beady eyes looking at how her skirt hugged her athletic but still curvaceous hips, eyes lingering down to her feet clad in short-heeled pumps.

Laserka cleared her throat. “You called me, sir?”

“Have a seat, Kaya,” Batroykin offered, waving his hand to a chair in front of his desk. He made no bones about the leer he directed at her toned, muscular calves.

Laserka took the offered seat, in no mood to raise a fuss over his obvious sexual harassment. In fact, she was hoping to capitalize on it to keep her out of trouble. For the man-blob’s sake, she even crossed her legs to give him a good show. It was callous to appeal to Batroykin’s lechery to lessen any harsh punishment she may have incurred by snooping online for news about Vitaly Alexandronin and his wife, but surviving in a Russian bureaucracy was a deadly chess game. “You sent a warning to me about a news article I looked up? The murder of Vitaly Alexandronin?”

“Actually, it was the article about the brutal attack on a defected reporter in London,” Batroykin said. “A hyperlink in an e-mail you opened today.”

“Oh, because I had done a little digging. Alexandronin was found dead earlier this morning,” Laserka replied.

Batroykin showed interest in the form of a worm-like white eyebrow arching on his puttylike brow. “So you weren’t contacted by the traitor? He didn’t try to ask for your help in determining the assassination of his wife? After all, you had been his partner for the first year of your career.”

“My training officer, not my partner, sir,” she lied. “How would you like being condescended to every day for eight hours?”

“How am I sure you’re not talking down to me right now?” Batroykin asked.

Laserka sighed, letting her so-called superior get a look at the low neckline of her blouse, purposefully unbuttoned to reveal her freckled cleavage. She caught a glint of delight in the old gnome’s eye, his pink, slug-like tongue glistening as he licked his lips. She spoke again, drawing his attention back to her face. “Because, sir, we have always had a good relationship. Or your approval of my performance has lead me to believe.”

She threw in her best seductive smile, then gave her lower lip a light bite.

Batroykin watched her with rapt appreciation, then cleared his throat. “So, do you know who had sent you the article about Catherine Rozuika?”

“I had asked when he first started these updates, but he evaded the question,” Laserka continued to lie. Having had over a decade and a half to develop a good cover story for the mystery e-mails, should they have been discovered, gave her more than sufficient practice to let the misinformation roll off her tongue. She hated to be duplicitous about her connection to Alexandronin and his wife, but the truth might cost her more than a paycheck.

She could always get another job, but she only had one brain for an irate hard-liner to put a bullet into.

“Any suspicions?” Laserka asked.

“Many loyal agents were purged from Russian Intelligence in the wake of Alexandronin’s exile,” Laserka said. “I have a list of four possible former operatives who would rightfully bear a grudge against him. It’s on my computer.”

“You mean this list, Kaya?” Batroykin asked, handing her a slip of paper. He had likely hoped to surprise her into revealing any inconsistencies in her story, but Laserka had purposefully constructed the list and her notes to maintain her secrecy with Alexandronin. “It is a very thorough research on your part.”

“I wanted to be able to present the bona fides of these e-mails if they resulted in something important,” Laserka explained. “I know how you prefer to have solid intelligence from reliable sources. Your thoroughness is legendary, sir.”

Batroykin showed a flash of ego gratification at her statement. “You are an excellent agent, my dear. I’m certain that I can make your inappropriate Internet usage into some vital information that I required. After all, what is your job?”

“Intelligence agent, sir,” Laserka answered, putting a small tinge of bubbliness into her voice.

Batroykin nodded, the magnanimous king of this particular cubicle farm, passing his approval down to a loyal serf. “Precisely, my dear.”

He got up, waddling around the desk to rest his plump hands on her shoulders. Laserka tried not to laugh at the similarity of this situation to western “sexual harassment training” videos. He gave her shoulders a squeeze that was likely meant to be soothing and seductive, but it was more like a mentally challenged farm boy trying to cuddle a kitten and crushing it inadvertently to death. She winced and restrained the urge to rake his face with her fingernails. For all his apparent softness, the squat gnome of a man had a grip like a vise.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, Kaya?” he suggested softly. “Perhaps go shopping for something nice to wear this weekend.”

“Why? What’s happening then?” Laserka asked, genuinely curious.

“I have to attend a formal gala for a ranking party member,” Batroykin replied. “It’s mostly an official invitation. I’d prefer to have a winsome, but skilled operative with me than my wife. In case the Chechens decide to cause unnecessary drama at the event.”

Laserka resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She and other female agents had been on these “escort missions” before, and they always ended up with skimpy dresses and unwanted gropes under their skirts. “I’m honored, sir. But my paycheck has already been spent.”

Batroykin returned to his seat behind the desk, pulling out a small plastic card. “Since this is an official sortie, you can use an agency purchase card.”

Laserka raised an eyebrow, taking the plastic.

“Dismissed, Kaya,” Batroykin said. “Oh, and my preference is for red, backless dresses. And make it a good one. These are important people, and they’ll know cheap off-the-rack crap at first blush.”

“Thank you, sir,” Laserka replied, wondering how she could get out of attending the function.

T RYING TO FIND A TRENDY and affordable backless dress in Moscow was hardly something that Kaya Laserka was familiar with. She would have had better luck locating a five kilogram package of Afghan Black Tar heroin or a cache of smuggled Heckler & Koch submachine guns. She sent out a few calls to friends on her cell phone, but the circles she ran in on the few brief moments she spent off the job were equally clueless about where to find something scarlet, slinky and fashionable. Finally, her friend Bertie gave her a suggestion that bordered on life saving.

“Why not give one of your informants a call? They should know where to find at least knockoffs of big-name dresses,” Bertie said. “Your boss wants skin and curves, not a label. He wouldn’t know Dior if the designer himself bit him and sang a chorus of ‘I’m a fancy dress I am!’”

“My hero,” Laserka said.

So here Laserka was, standing outside a warehouse that was a covert marketplace for smuggled goods from outside of Russia. Though capitalism and western retail had invaded Moscow with a vengeance, despite the political backslide of the current administration, the black market was still prosperous, usually having better prices than the state-and foreign-owned department stores, as well as a better selection. Laserka had changed out of her office wear, which would have labeled her as a government official of some sort. Instead, she wore a black turtleneck, a hooded sweatshirt with an unauthorized rhinoceros logo on one lapel, and a pair of knockoff jeans that hugged her long, athletic legs. She kept her pistol on hand, in a small black leather purse just large enough to hold the compact weapon and two spare magazines.

There were a couple of burly men at the side door to the warehouse, their build and alertness pegging them as former Russian army, probably hired as much for their size as for their military training to serve this particular clandestine market. Laserka walked up to the pair as they glowered at her. “Is the store open?”

One man’s eyes narrowed as if rusted gears struggled to motivate in his primitive skull. “Are you police?”

It was a standard challenge. If a buyer entered, denying his or her law-enforcement status, any evidence gathered on such an excursion was considered inadmissible to the well-bribed Russian judiciary. If Laserka did admit she was a cop, any purchase she made would be used against her by proprietors if she had to testify against them.

Since Laserka’s department dealt mainly with narcotics and military-grade weaponry, not jeans or watches, she grinned. “Off duty. I need a dress.”

The two hulking goons looked at each other, then chuckled. “Come on in, Off-duty.”

“Make sure you give us a good look when you try your dress on,” the other said with a leer.

Laserka winked and squeezed past the two hired muscle and entered the warehouse.

Inside, all she found were empty tables. Confusion seized Laserka for a moment. Certainly the proprietors toured a series of abandoned buildings to keep ahead of the Moscow police, but her informant, Vladimir, had said that the bazaar would be at this location today. It took only a few heartbeats to scan the empty warehouse for signs of life, and she whirled toward the doorway she’d just entered. She saw one of the six foot ex-Army hulks blocking the doorway, a wicked spring-blade knife locked in his hand.

Laserka leaped over an empty table, knowing she couldn’t get to her concealed Makarov in time. The sound of the knife spring echoed in the old warehouse as a four inch spear-point blade rocketed out of the handle. The razor-sharp tip plucked at the hood of her sweatshirt as she dropped out of sight.

“You and that spring knife!” the other thug snarled, shoving his way into the warehouse. He held a suppressed pistol.

“Mine makes less noise,” Spring-blade said, but he traded his empty handle for a more standard blade, a wickedly curved jambiya Arab-style knife.

The gunman grunted and triggered his handgun, bullets chasing after Laserka as she kept low, scrambling along the aisle of abandoned tables. “Stand still, Off-duty! It won’t hurt so much!”

The off-duty RIA agent flipped a table on its side as a barricade against the pistol-toting killer. Robbed of power by the suppressor they passed through, the slowed bullets plunked limply against the aluminum tabletop. The shield gave her the time to pull her Makarov from her purse. With a flick of her thumb, the pistol was live and ready to fire. She rolled out into the open and sighted on the gun-toting assassin. The gunman hadn’t expected Laserka to take the low road, firing from prone. He had been waiting for her to pop over the top of her barricade.

The Makarov barked twice, bullets punching into the would-be murderer’s center of mass. The hot little 9 mm rounds cracked the big man’s sternum, but their impact only seemed to stagger him. Laserka swung her aim up to the middle of the stunned thug’s face and cranked off two more shots that obliterated the goon’s face.

The table barricade rattled loudly as it was slapped aside by the burly knife man.

“You’re supposed to die, bitch!” the thug roared, lunging at her.

Laserka rolled, firing one shot at the blade-wielding killer as her Makarov passed across him. She was rewarded by a cry of pain from the raging slasher. The big killer landed on the concrete floor, the jambiya jarred from his fingers as he landed. Laserka was struggling to her feet when a massive paw wrapped around her gun hand.

Training took over and Laserka let herself be pulled in closer to her large opponent. With his strength adding to her momentum, she powered an elbow into the hollow of the burly assassin’s throat. The jolt was enough to shock him into releasing her arm. Laserka stumbled back, raising the Makarov again.

The pistol barked three times, recoil trying to wrest her off target, but Laserka held on tightly, punching the last of her magazine through her opponent’s face.

Panting, Laserka denied a wave of relief that wanted to pass through her. She reloaded her gun quickly.

Batroykin and Vladimir had set her up to be murdered.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bolan slapped the cheek of his prisoner, trying to get him to wake up. It was a relatively gentle action, but the assassination team leader bit down hard. The head killer had only started to blink with returning consciousness when something crunched in his back teeth. The sound of the breaking capsule, combined with a sudden fit of convulsions had Bolan rushing to pry the man’s mouth open. It was too late, almond-smelling foam bubbling out of the dead man’s mouth.

The corpse’s eyes rolled up in his head, and Bolan cursed that he didn’t have time to retrieve the other unconscious death squad member that he had left behind the bar. Taking a paper towel, Bolan cleaned up the dead man’s mouth, wiping bubbling drool from his lips. Pulling out his PDA, Bolan clicked a picture of the lifeless face. As an afterthought, he took the dead fingers and dipped them into ink from a broken pen and used a sheet of complimentary stationery to record the corpse’s fingerprints.

Bolan looked over the Uzi and the magazines he’d confiscated in the assassination attempt. He took some clear adhesive tape and laid it along the bodies of the magazines, then laid out the strips on more plain white paper. Close examination of the tape picked up three or four good, readable fingerprints. The warrior took a moment to compare the results with the prints taken off the corpse sitting limply in the chair. To his sharp eyes, they appeared different enough to be worth copying and transmitting back to Stony Man Farm. Thanks to the science of forensics, Bolan was able to disprove the adage, “dead men tell no tales.”

Bolan linked up with Aaron Kurtzman at Stony Man Farm in the electronic ether utilizing his wireless secured broadband connection from his laptop.

“I thought you told Hal that you were going on vacation,” Kurtzman said without preamble.

“It turned into a busman’s holiday,” Bolan confessed. “A friend of mine ended up on the receiving end of a Russian-speaking murder team.”

“Russian speaking? That will narrow down the database to compare these faces to,” Kurtzman replied. “Oh, you’ve got fingerprints, too?”

“Grabbed some enemy weapons. The prints came along with the spare ammunition,” Bolan explained. “Scotland Yard have anything yet on the bodies I left at the docks?”

“The dead are at the morgue at the East Metropolitan Police crime laboratory,” Kurtzman said. “Eight, including your friend. You said you left another behind? There aren’t any reports of suspects in custody.”

“Run the latent prints first, then,” Bolan requested. “The magazine came from his harness. It might help me track him down.”

“Running them through both IAFIS and its Interpol counterpart,” Kurtzman replied, referring to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Think of any other databases to check them against?”

“These people were well-trained, so try to hack into the Russian Defense Department,” Bolan suggested. “All records, even the closed files.”

“That would take a lot more time,” Kurtzman said. “We’re not dealing with a state-of-the-art U.S. agency’s computer system.”

“I figured as much,” Bolan answered. “I’m going to check with a few friends I have here in the Metropolitan Police. Maybe they have some suggestions for London’s Russian immigrant crime problem.”

“Hal won’t be particularly pleased with you hitting up old contacts. You’re not supposed to exist, Striker,” Kurtzman warned.

“Then don’t tell Hal. I’ve been around the globe hundreds of times. The folks I’ve met are the same people who make me seem almost omniscient,” Bolan said. “Computer hacking and satellite photography aren’t the only ways for someone to gather information.”

“What about your prisoner?” Kurtzman asked. “Is he doing any talking?”

“Only if Hell has its own version of Saint Peter as a receptionist,” Bolan replied. “He bit down on a cyanide capsule.”

“That’s old-school,” Kurtzman commented. “Haven’t seen a Russian bite down on one of those in ages.”

“He woke up as my prisoner, wrists tied. Plus, we were in a dark garage,” Bolan pointed out. “He probably thought I was going to hook his nipples or testicles up to a live battery.”

“Water boarding is the new vogue,” Kurtzman said. “Less painful and less chance of death.”

“Neither way is my style,” Bolan countered. “But how was he to know that?”

“Truth told,” Kurtzman said. “The Russian defense records are a garbled mess. I doubt the programmers have even heard of indexing software. That even presumes all of those fingerprints are stored electronically and not in metal filing cabinets.”

“What about IAFIS and Interpol?” Bolan asked.

“Scan’s still running,” Kurtzman replied. “This is real life. These checks don’t happen as quickly as a commercial break, Striker.”

“Give me a call on my PDA, then. I’ve got people to run down,” Bolan said.

“Keep your powder dry, Striker,” Kurtzman said, logging off.

Bolan went to the car and took out his standard concealed carry harness, replacing the Storm with his familiar Beretta 93R machine pistol and the rifle-accurate and powerful .44 Magnum Desert Edge. With a death squad on the loose in the streets of London, informed of his interference, the Executioner knew that it was time to load up for bear.

In this particular case, the ursine was a breed Bolan had hunted before, a ghost species he’d hoped had disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Unfortunately, the Soviet Bear was still a living, vital threat, and its predatory hunger had claimed the lives of two of Bolan’s old allies.

Hunting season was on again.

T HE LADY DETECTIVE was still pretty, Bolan reflected as he folded his tall frame into the passenger seat of the compact car she’d driven to the rendezvous.

“Gunfight at night, then you ring me up. There’s got to be a better way to arrange a date with me,” she said.

Bolan smiled. “I missed you, too, detective. How’s your partner?”

“Back at the station. Care to mention anything about the bodies you piled up?” the detective inquired.

“Russian speakers. Well-armed and coordinated,” Bolan said. “They were skilled, too.”

The detective shrugged, brushing back her golden hair. “Not skilled enough. You’re alive.”

“They hit their intended target,” Bolan confessed. “Vitaly Alexandronin.”

“Familiar name. I didn’t catch that particular case, but his wife was a reporter who ended up beaten into a coma,” the lady cop replied. “Case ended up with dead ends, but it stunk like a pile of rotted fish.”

“Vitaly told me he felt she was assassinated because she was snooping into Chechen refugees, picking up stories about the government’s crackdown on the rebels,” Bolan told her. “I didn’t leave too much behind, but you examine those guys. There might be links between them and Catherine.”

“They took out the wife in a beating, but brought machine guns and rockets for the husband?” the detective asked. Her lips pursed in disbelief.

“Vitaly was KGB and Russian Intelligence. He spent time doing all manner of dangerous things for his country before he offended the old guard,” Bolan explained.

“That begins to make sense,” the cop said. She sighed. “I remember when I got involved in one of your operations. My sister ended up dead and we had to drop my partner off at an emergency room. I still feel the ache in my ribs when it gets rainy and cold.”

“Rainy and cold in London? Ever think of moving to Jamaica?” Bolan asked.

“Sure, and then you show up down there hunting heroin smugglers, and zombie lords pop out of the woodwork,” the detective mused out loud. “Running afoul of Bloody Jack was enough horror movie for one lifetime, thank you.”

Bolan shrugged. “Is the coroner still our old friend from that case?”

“No, he retired,” the lady cop confessed. “It’d be a new guy who might actually be fooled by your identification.”

“Is he skilled, though? I’d hate to run a wild-goose chase because I couldn’t get the right info from forensics,” Bolan replied.

“Metro Homicide’s medical examiners aren’t complete primates in comparison to your flashy American crime solvers,” the woman quipped. She took a deep breath, looking out the windshield at the alley they were parked in. “I’m sorry I exploded all over you that night, Cooper.”

Bolan rested a comforting hand on her shoulder. “I know exactly how you felt. Remember, I had my sister murdered, as well.”

“Do you need any hands-on help with this?” she asked.

Bolan shook his head. “I don’t have any support on this one. It’s a personal mission.”

“So then you do need an extra gun hand,” she offered.

“I appreciate it, but I’ve seen enough friends die in the past few hours. The next time I blow through London, I promise if it’s a quiet trip…”

“We’ll have tea together?” the detective asked. She drew Bolan in for a tight hug. She felt the bulk of Bolan’s gun under his jacket. “Your life never works out that way, Cooper. Even if you do make it back here, you won’t have quiet time to spare.”

Bolan nodded. “True. Just take care of yourself, Mel.”

“I’d say the same for you, but…” She handed a small notebook to the warrior. “This is everything our Russian mob expert had on the local families. Might want to check out the Borscht Bolt. It’s a restaurant-turned-club for the Slavic set.”

Bolan smiled. “This won’t get back to your superiors?”

“After our last dance through this town, I’m bulletproof.” She started the car as Bolan climbed out.

She sighed. “Don’t make too much of a mess for me, Cooper.”

Bolan waved to the woman as she drove off. She was one hell of a good cop. He wished her safe travels until they met again.

T HE E XECUTIONER PULLED UP to the London Metropolitan Police Crime Laboratory and Forensic Science center. He secured his car and slipped his identification from his war bag. The badge identified him as Special Agent Matt Cooper of the FBI. Brognola would be put out to know that Kurtzman and Stony Man coordinator Barbara Price had set him up as being an interested party in the deaths of suspected Russian organized crime figures in London. His cover was that he was part of an Interopol task force tracking mafiya activity across Europe and the British Isles.

There was indeed such a task force. Price meticulously kept abreast of major organized investigations around the globe, thanks to her liaisons with the international intelligence community. Fostering an encyclopedic knowledge of national and international events allowed her to slip Bolan, Able Team and Phoenix Force into operational positions with a minimum of intrusive appearance. Stony Man Farm was able to place its operations teams quietly and efficiently with the establishment of such a road map.

Bolan doffed the Beretta 93R machine pistol and its shoulder holster. While it was hard to imagine a federal agency approving a mammoth handgun like the Desert Eagle, it was still not outside of the ordinary. Contrarily, an extended-magazine, suppressed machine pistol was over the top for even the most paranoid of gunslingers. Bolan solved the dilemma of a backup pistol with the Compact Px4, supplemented by three spare 20-round magazines.

Ready for action, Bolan entered the crime laboratory. The Metro cops waved him through after a thorough examination of his credentials and a frisk that revealed Bolan’s personal arsenal. Given that he was an American FBI agent, and their familiarity with the Bureau’s mandate of two service pistols at all times, the London cops cleared him through the medical examination wing.

“Just let us know if you need a rocket launcher down there,” the bobby at the desk told him.

Bolan laughed. “That’s why I pack this bazooka.” He patted the Desert Eagle.

That elicited a grin from the traditionally unarmed British peace officer. “Oh, good. Usually you Yanks don’t pack your senses of irony for a trip over here.”

“I found room in my carry-on bag,” Bolan returned with a smile. The light banter helped Bolan fit in despite the firepower he was packing. A little humor was one of the Executioner’s favorite tools for forging a quick friendship. The shared joke now could mean a vital trust gained later on.

Bolan slowed down as he saw a trio of men wearing coveralls and carrying toolboxes cross an intersection ahead of him. While it wasn’t uncommon to see maintenance men walking through the halls of any building, there was something in the brief glimpse Bolan had caught that set his neck hairs to stand. Though not a student of metaphysics and the scientific explanations for sixth senses and danger precognition, the soldier was aware that the subconscious mind had a vastly more powerful means of analyzing potential threats. He was aware simply because he had experienced it on countless occasions, to the point that he trusted his hunches as much as the latest satellite or radio intelligence.

Doing a quick review of his memory of the three men, he envisioned them in his mind’s eye. His subconscious mind opened up and that was when Bolan pegged the trio as Slavic men with traditional mafiya tattoos visible on their necks. The precise formation that they walked in pegged them as military men and their coveralls were loose, yet lumpy enough to be concealing more than just cell phones and pocketknives.

Bolan picked up his pace, rounding the corner in time to see the three men halted at a checkpoint just outside of the morgue. The policeman at the entrance was asking for their identification. Bolan’s combat computer kicked into overdrive as one of the “workmen” knifed a rigid hand into the peace officer’s throat. He charged down the hall as the British cop seized up. Bolan recognized the blade hand technique as being a Spetsnaz unarmed attack meant to collapse a person’s windpipe.

The cop had only a minute left in his life as he would choke to death. The trio of assassins pushed past him into the morgue. Bolan plucked his pocketknife out of its sheath and skidded to the police officer’s side. “I need a straw or a pen!”

The order was brusque and direct, and while the sudden bark was stunning and confusing, one of the nurses caught on to him, spotting the bruise rapidly forming on the policeman’s throat and the knife in Bolan’s hand. “A tracheotomy!”

She plucked a pen from her pocket, biting one end, then the other off. Bolan held the policeman still, kneeling on the man’s forearm to keep him from blocking the incision. To punch a knife point through the tough, fibrous material of the trachea was difficult, but could be done quickly. Bolan speared the blade in vertically, along the grain of the windpipe, rather than go crosswise. Air suddenly hissed out through the blood-burbling wound, and the nurse pushed the hollow body of the pen tube into the cut.

“I’m going after the men who did this,” Bolan told her. “Keep him stable!”

Before she could even sputter “be careful” the warrior pulled his Desert Eagle and charged after the covert kill squad. Bolan couldn’t spare any more time than was necessary to rescue a fellow warrior from choking to death on a collapsed airway. The cleanup crew was on a kill mission to eliminate the evidence of their conspiracy.

More people would end up dead if the Executioner didn’t act quickly.

L UKYAN B ELKIN, THE LEADER of the cleanup crew, rubbed his sore fingertips after spearing them into the throat of the nosy, interfering bobby in the role of “rental cop” outside the morgue. He noticed a blur of movement from down the hall, but not seeing a gun in the running man’s hand, he pushed into the crime laboratory’s medical-examination ward. “Lock the door behind us.”

One of his companions leaned into the heavy steel door and threw the bolt. The squad member jammed a desk against the door to further hamper pursuit through the doorway. Once it was secured, Belkin reached into his toolbox, casting aside the drawer of utensils. Screwdrivers and hammers clattered onto the floor, revealing an area denial mine inside the case. The bomb was basically a canister of flammable fuel that could be dispersed by a nonincendiary charge. Once the fuel spread into a room-filling cloud, a spark would ignite the airborne droplets. The resultant fireball would incinerate everything in the morgue.

Obviously, Belkin didn’t intend to stay in the area when the blast occurred. His other companion cuffed a white-coated woman in the head with the butt of his machine pistol. The woman collapsed to the floor, staggered by the force of the blow. Belkin set about placing the trio of thermobaric charges at various points in the morgue to insure maximum devastation. The ally who had barred the doors threw open cabinets in the wall where the corpses were laying in cold storage. Their orders were to eliminate any evidence of the dead assassins found at the docks.

The fuel-air explosives would render everything in the morgue a useless, pulped and scorched mass. No chances were being taken in this regard.

A .44 Magnum round smashed through the lock that had just been secured. The metal door shuddered, and Belkin froze in surprise. He hadn’t seen any gunmen in the hall, and few London cops had handguns. Fewer still carried hand cannons with the power to penetrate a fireproof door. A powerful shoulder forced the door open, hurling aside the desk that was supposed to have barred it shut. Whoever was interfering with the cleanup crew had to have had prodigious strength. Belkin unslung his MAC-10 machine pistol from its coverall concealed holster, then fired the weapon at the door. A spray of 9 mm rounds splashed off of the steel panel of the bashed-open door. A huge muzzle flash filled the air where the door had opened, and Belkin grimaced as he took a thunderbolt to his chest armor.

The other two Russian hitters whipped their MAC-10s up in response to the Desert Eagle’s roar, but the Executioner had already slithered through the narrowly opened doorway, dropping prone to the floor. He was behind the cover of a countertop and cabinets where coroners would store their surgical supplies and wash up in the sink. The heavy countertop and the strong wood needed to support it gave the interloper considerable protection from the lightweight machine pistols that the team had brought with them.

“Get the woman!” Belkin shouted. “We need a hostage!”

The Russian operative winced as he crawled behind an overturned autopsy table. Being struck in the chest with a .44 Magnum slug, even while wearing body armor, was not one of the things that Belkin had ever wanted to experience. He was fairly certain that the bullet had broken a rib or two. He looked to see where his compatriots were and what they were doing. The unconscious morgue attendant laying on the floor stirred, but the two cleaners were cut off from her as the man behind the counter pinned them down with blazing fire from his entrenched position.

“I have a clean shot at the woman!” Belkin announced loudly. “Desist and pull back, or I’ll kill her!”

A smoking hole punched in the steel of the autopsy table, the bullet having penetrated mere inches from Belkin’s head.

“You try making that shot, your body won’t have to be taken very far,” Bolan returned. “Your choice!”

Belkin snarled. It was a standoff, and the timers on his bombs were counting down.

Only two minutes remained before the morgue would disintegrate in a fireball.

CHAPTER FIVE

Mack Bolan reloaded his Desert Eagle, fitting a carefully calibrated stack of antiarmor loads. His initial shot against the leader of the cleanup squad had been with his conventional 240-grain hollowpoint rounds. They had been enough to tear through the fire door or the relatively slender metal of the autopsy table, but against Kevlar and trauma plates, the Executioner needed something with a lot more punch. This magazine was filled with 350-grain, tungsten-cored .429-inch slugs that Bolan kept on hand for when he had to take on criminals in an armored personnel carrier or corrupt thugs hiding behind the protection of million-dollar, tank-skinned limousines. The copper skin wrapped around the hardened cores would protect the gun from the steel-mauling tungsten centers, and the powder charge was balanced to cycle the action of the big Israeli autoloader. Once he caught a glimpse of one of the coverall-clad foes, they would be dead, no matter what they wore.

During the reload, Bolan spotted a munition placed on the floor off to the side of the autopsy room. He recognized it as a fuel-air mine, designed for destroying enemy forces or stockpiles of ammunition and arms inside cave complexes. The FAE mines would also work with deadly efficiency to turn every ounce of organic material inside the morgue into charred ash. From the look of the one he saw, it was on a countdown timer, hence Belkin’s urgency to get a hostage. Bolan didn’t know how much time he had left, but considering the speed and precision of the Russian crew, it couldn’t be much longer than a minute.

The enemy gunmen were reloading their machine pistols, contemplating their options as the doomsday numbers ticked down. One of the shooters swung into view, his MAC-10 blazing. Another raced into the open, rushing toward the stunned woman they had pegged as their hostage.

Bolan dived out onto the tile floor, 9 mm rounds plucking at his sleeve and pant leg as the enemy gunner sprayed to keep him contained. Sheer quickness had taken him outside the shooter’s line of fire, and he hit the ground in a slide. The second gunman was in full charge toward the fallen morgue attendant, not noticing the Executioner until a .44 Magnum armor-piercing slug smashed through his vest, coring deep into his heart as if he were clad only in tissue, not trauma plate.

“Son of a bitch!” Belkin snapped, watching the spray of arterial blood gush out from both sides of his dying comrade’s perforated torso. The man’s forward momentum gave him two remaining steps on his final run before he crashed face-first to the floor in a boneless heap.

“Bastard!” the other Russian gunman shouted, swinging out into the open to get a better angle on Bolan.

The Executioner’s next shot tore through the vengeful Russian’s shoulder, blasting the muscle, bone and cartilage of the joint in an explosive detonation. Blood sprayed from the horrendous injury, and the limb sagged on the few remaining ligaments of sinew that hadn’t been destroyed by the Desert Eagle’s rocketing talon of copper and tungsten. The shooter folded in pain, his gun hand pinning the dangling arm in place. Bolan ended his suffering with a third shot that caught the Russian at the bridge of his nose. It was as if someone had taken a hatchet to a melon, the top of the man’s skull flying backward in a spraying volcano of brains and gore.

Two down, one to go, but there was also the threat of the thermal charges. Bolan charged toward the overturned autopsy table that the team leader had taken cover behind. On the run, he spotted a second of the mines in the far corner of the morgue floor. Given their size and the number of toolboxes that had been brought in by the “maintenance men,” he estimated that there was a third atmosphere-destroying bomb that had been brought in by the cleanup crew. As one part of the brilliant combat computer that was the Executioner’s brain contemplated minimizing the damage, the rest of his consciousness was focused on bringing down the last of the lethal conspirators. With a vault, Bolan leaped over the upturned table. He spotted his opponent in midair and, using the edge of the table as a fulcrum, he steered himself feet-first down into the cleaner’s gut. The air exploded from the Russian’s lungs and his head slammed back against the steel tabletop.

Bolan kicked the machine pistol out of the stunned man’s hand, skittering the weapon wildly across the tile floor. Belkin reached up and grabbed Bolan’s belt. The soldier responded with the heavy trapezoidal wedge of the Desert Eagle’s muzzle, lashing it across the man’s jaw. Having incapacitated the last of the conspiratorial gunmen, Bolan holstered the Desert Eagle and rushed to the closest mine.

The Executioner had hoped for a control lever that would allow him to disarm the explosive, but the enemy had sabotaged the mines’ control panels. The disengage mechanism had been destroyed.

Plan two, Bolan thought. The destructive power of the mines wasn’t a factor of the amount of explosives in them, but a mechanism of the fact that their concentrated fuel was dispersed through the atmosphere in an aerosol suspension that made the oxygen in the air into additional reactant for the secondary spark. By denying a large area of combustible air to the devices, they could be significantly defanged. It would require an airtight, heavy steel container to minimize the blasts.

Luckily, the refrigerated, hermetically sealed body-storage drawers in the morgue were exactly what Bolan needed. He shoved the mine into one shelf and swung the heavy steel door shut, snapping down the locking bolt. There was a brief sigh from the metal panel as the cabinet sealed itself, the airtight closure sucking into place.

“What…what’s hap…” the woman said, finally able to speak and move after her ordeal. Bolan scooped up a second mine from the tile floor.

“You need to get out of here,” Bolan ordered. “These are bombs.”

The morgue worker’s eyes widened. “Those drawers are under negative air pressure.”

Bolan paused for a half step. “Can you kill the ventilation?”

He continued his quick rush to stow the bombs away, parking the second mine into another empty storage drawer. Again, the door slammed shut, the locking bolt snapping into place just before the hiss of the air seal slurped the door tightly closed.

The woman limped toward a wall panel. She was bleeding from the forehead where the skin had been split, and it was likely that she had suffered head trauma when the Russian had struck her. “Ventilation shutoff…”

Bolan hauled the last thermic mine into his grasp and saw that there were no more empty shelves. He rushed to one of the sliding drawers where a dead Russian lay, his body riddled with bullet holes. Bolan grabbed the corpse under the arm and dragged him off the metal sliding slab. A spill on the floor would likely contaminate whatever evidence was on the body. If the mine detonated, it would kill dozens of people in the halls outside of the morgue.

The corpse flopped on the tile and Bolan shoved the mine in place. Slam! Latch! Hiss! Sealed.

Bolan spun away from the wall and dived toward the emergency ventilation cutoff. He punched the button hard enough to open a laceration on his palm, and the whole morgue seemed to gasp as if it were a living creature. Bolan scooped the woman into his arms and tucked her tightly into the corner, using his broad back to shield her. He’d equalized the pressure in his ears before firing the first shot from his bellowing Desert Eagle, so any explosion wouldn’t rupture his eardrums. He hoped that his body was enough to shield the morgue attendant, his hands cupped over her ears to protect them.

Belkin moved groggily, reaching for the handgun tucked under his coveralls. “Fucking…interloper…”

Those were the conspirator’s final words. If he had a thought behind them, it was cut off. The whole wall of the morgue devoted to body storage shook as if a train had crashed into the building. The hatches that contained the bombs were torn off of their hinges. One of them pulverized Belkin as it rocketed off, powered by the force of the explosive mine. The concussion wave bleeding off the wall hurled bodies to the floor, both the living and the dead. Bolan and his charge had been lifted off their feet by the heaving wall, but the soldier twisted so that the morgue attendant was cushioned by his body.

The storage drawers had done their job perfectly. Despite the wreckage wrought by their blasted hatches and a few fluttering pieces of burning paperwork that had been stored too close to the wall, the murderous power of the bombs had been smothered.

Bolan helped the woman to her feet, one hand under the back of her head to keep her stable. “Are you all right?”

“I’m Annette Brideshead,” she answered, large brown eyes blurry and unfocused. “I’m the medical examiner in charge of this shift.”

Bolan supported her, sliding his arm under her shoulder to keep her upright. Obviously she was mentally disconnected, not answering the question offered. “Can you walk?”

Brideshead’s unfocused eyes danced across Bolan’s face. He knew that her head would be wobbly atop her neck if he hadn’t been holding her. “I’m forty-five years old. I’ve been walking most of…Oh, dear.”

Bolan turned and saw that the leader of the cleanup crew was sandwiched between a storage hatch and the twisted wreckage of an autopsy table. At least Bolan assumed it was the leader. The ragged, bloody stump of a neck was all that remained above the shoulders. “Sorry for the mess, Annette.”

“The doors…You said those were bombs. Poison gas doesn’t act like that when it’s released, does it?” Brideshead inquired.

“Not gas, not like you thought. But it was good that you shut down the negative air pressure in the drawers,” Bolan replied. He didn’t want to think of the destruction that would have occurred if the aerosolized fuel had spread to the ventilation system, sucked up by the intake valves.

A policeman, the one Bolan had joked with only moments before, entered. He had a Glock 17 in hand and was ready for action. The bobby relaxed upon seeing Bolan ministering to Brideshead. “I thought you were only kidding about rocket launchers.”

Bolan looked around the corpse-strewed, blast-shaken morgue. He sat Brideshead down and folded his jacket to cushion her head. “Someone didn’t want me looking at the bodies stored here.”

“Haven’t these chaps heard of court orders?” the bobby asked as he holstered his pistol.

“That’s not the way these people operate,” Bolan replied. “Are there paramedics on the way?”

“Yes. Was that you that gave me mate a straw in the neck?” the officer asked.

“Headless over there crushed his trachea. He all right?” Bolan asked.

“Well, he was already laying down when the building bounced. He’s mighty thankful to you, Agent Cooper,” the cop said. Looking around at the mess, he sighed. “And for saving the rest of us from a right nasty bump, I’m adding my thanks, too.”

Bolan nodded in appreciation. “The sad thing is, I’m not done here.”

The British cop chuckled. “If it’s all the same, I won’t go running to any Russian restaurants for a while, Mr. Mafiya task force member.”

Bolan managed a weak smile for the officer. He patted the notebook in his pocket, unable to keep such a promise.

I T HAD TAKEN HOURS for Bolan to be cleared after the battle of the morgue. It took that long for the London Metropolitan police to be convinced of the order of events, especially the slicing open of the windpipe of a fellow officer, even with a crushed trachea. It also took that much time for the lawmen to return Bolan’s Desert Eagle, not that the Executioner hadn’t had spares stored back at his safehouse.

At least Bolan got a couple of mugs of coffee out of the interview process, which he followed up with an order of fish and chips to fill his empty stomach. Bolan tossed a French fry out the car window and picked up his PDA, dialing the Farm.

“Talked your way out of another mess, Striker?” Hal Brognola’s voice came over the line. Brognola was the director of the Sensitive Operations Group, based at Stony Man Farm, Virginia.

“Can’t go running to Daddy every time I stub my toe. I handled it,” Bolan replied. “I suppose Aaron let you in on my progress so far.”

“Two gun battles in less than twenty-four hours. He couldn’t keep me out of the loop after that. I’m sorry, Striker, but as much as you want to keep this away from government interference, this has become an issue of national security,” the big Fed told him.

“What have you picked up on this thing?” Bolan inquired.

“The two faces you sent Aaron belong to Spetsnaz troopers reported killed in action by the Russian Department of Defense,” Brognola stated. “Officially, you didn’t kill anyone.”

“So I’m fighting the Special Forces of the living dead?” Bolan asked. He couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “I knew the trend in horror movies was for smarter and faster walking dead, but they’re as much corpses as I am, Hal.”

“Now they really are dead.” Brognola sighed. “Of course, you remember your friends in Russian Intelligence.”

“Friends for real, Hal?” Bolan asked. “I’m a little too tired for wordplay.”

“No. Real friends,” Brognola emphasized. “A Russian Intel operative named Kaya Laserka just avoided being killed by a couple of thugs.”

“Laserka? She was Alexandronin’s trainee and partner. Did she get an e-mail from Vitaly?”

“Apparently so. She reported the incident and a friendly operator to Stony Man gave the report to us,” Brognola said. “She couldn’t get directly involved, and I don’t want to compromise her identity.”

“A friendly Russian agent?” Bolan asked. That lifted his mood some. “And a woman, so that really doesn’t narrow things down. Where is she?”

“Well, she’s holed up in her apartment for now. She was given a quick ‘how-to’ on going to ground. Barb gave her the lesson.”

“Barb” was Barbara Price, mission controller at Stony Man.

“And my description, so she doesn’t put a bullet in my head?” Bolan asked.

“Yes. I’ve got a flight for you leaving in two hours,” Brognola said.

“Get me one around midnight, Hal,” Bolan requested. “I’ve got one or two more stops to make here in London.”

“Damn it, Striker. What now?” Brognola complained.

“One of the men who was sent to kill Vitaly got away last night,” Bolan said. “He’s the only living witness that I have to what’s going on. I need some answers.”

“And you can’t let a guilty party stroll away from a murder attempt on a friend,” Brognola added.

“If I can’t protect the people who I care about, I can at least make certain that those who meant them harm get the punishment they deserve,” Bolan said.

“Does it quiet the ghosts?” Brognola asked.

“It placates my guilt,” Bolan answered. “Some.”

“All right. The plane will wait as long as it takes for you to show up, Striker. It’s a private charter, so he can delay for you,” Brognola told him. “Good hunting.”

“Thanks, Hal,” Bolan said. He closed the PDA, fired up the engine and drove toward the next battle in his War Everlasting.

K AYA L ASERKA PUT the phone down after the call from the woman named Barbara. She had arranged for a hotel room, quietly, and informed Laserka to expect to meet with a man who went by the identity of FBI Agent Matt Cooper. The Russian woman didn’t like that idea. “There was one man, several years ago. His name was Belasko.”

“You’ll find that Cooper is everything you’re expecting from Belasko,” Price told her.

“Everything?” Laserka inquired. “I doubt that anyone could match the man I knew. All right, what does Cooper look like?”

“Six three, black hair, powerful build,” Price rattled off.

“And cold blue eyes?” Laserka asked.

“Exactly.”

Laserka smiled, recognizing the general appearance of the man she had known as Belasko. “He’ll do fine, then.”

“I’m glad we understand each other,” Price replied. “Don’t worry. Help is on the way.”

Laserka packed a bag, slipping her Makarov back onto her belt’s inside-the-waistband holster. She draped her sweater over the handgun’s butt to conceal it, then she tucked another weapon, a tiny Glock 26, into her purse. She added two spare 15-shot magazines originally designed for the slightly larger Glock 19. Technically, the tiny Austrian pistol was considered a better design than her trusted old Makarov, smaller in length and height, chambered for a more powerful cartridge, and holding eleven shots. Still, the Russian Mak was flat, and its butt had room for all of her fingers on its comfortable grip. It just felt nicer than the teeny Glock. The 9 mm Mak had never let her down. Laserka knew sentimentality toward a tool meant to keep her alive was considered foolish, but she had an attachment that translated into comfort and superior skill.

Barbara had the right idea. Sticking around her apartment would only make her a sitting duck. If the men sent to kill her could find her while she was hunting for a dress on the black market, then they could easily be able to make a move on her in her own home. She tucked her purse tight under her arm and was ready to leave through the front door of her apartment. She heard the floorboards creak on the other side.

Since she wasn’t expecting visitors, she pivoted, scooped up her overnight bag and rushed for her window. A shadow fell across the fire escape and she put on the brakes, reaching for her Makarov. She looked toward the kitchen and saw that the light through the window in that room remained unbroken. Of course there wasn’t a fire escape at that point on the ledge, but Laserka hustled into the kitchen, drawing the sliding door shut behind her.

As it closed, she heard the front door rattle violently under a ferocious kick. She moved to the kitchen window. The front door shook again. When she heard the window just off of the fire escape rise, she opened the kitchen window at the same time. From the front, she heard the apartment door crack on the third kick. She saw the back of a man pulling through the fire-escape window as she slid out onto the ledge.

Laserka’s overnight bag was small and light, thankfully. If she’d been burdened with heavier luggage, balancing on the slender lip of cinder block would have been impossible. She let it hang on its shoulder strap, freeing her hands to grab the railing on the fire escape. She swung her legs down to the next landing, lowering herself to stand on the rail. Popping in front of the window that the second intruder had just gone through would have just been asking for a fight. She braced on the wall, then stepped onto the landing with a minimum of rattling metal.

“Where the hell is she?” she heard one man grunt.

She paused. “Oleg, is there anyone on the street?”

“The kitchen!” another voice swore. Whoever these men were, they had coordination, but no inkling of operational communications security. Laserka padded down the fire-escape steps, putting layers of grating between herself and her apartment. Laserka’s legs ached from the tension between speed and stealth on the metal steps. Still, she reached the bottom, apparently without being noticed. She clambered down the ladder, then cut away from the street, aware that Oleg and his friends might be watching her from above.

She walked four blocks before she walked down into the subway. By the time her hunters finished clearing her apartment and surmised that she was in the wind, she was stepping onto a train car, heading for the hotel to await “Special Agent Matt Cooper.”

Then, she’d start her own hunt, turning the tables on her tormentors.

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