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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.
