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Cold War Reprise
Don Pendleton
Early in his blitz days, Mack Bolan single-handedly shook the KGB to its core. Now intelligence puts him in a face-off with Spetsnaz soldiers revitalized as the new enforcement arm of old-guard Russia.At its helm, a secret consortium is determined to restore the terror tactics of the former Soviet Union, but bigger and bloodier than ever. Bolan's hunt begins in London, where he avenges the deaths of two Russian friends, but leads him deep into Moscow, where trained killers backed by money and power plan an explosive death knell to Russian freedom…and millions of innocents. It's a repackaged enemy backed by old-school terror, a breed Bolan intends to take down once again with lethal force.
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 (http://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?”
