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Extraordinary Rendition
Don Pendleton
On the streets of a democratic Russia, espionage, civil war and Mafiya control dominate a new kind of battlefield. Bolan's mission: locate, extract and deliver a ruthless Russian arms dealer to a transport team ready to take him back to the United States to stand trial.But the Russian made friends in high places–CIA, FBI, KGB–during his career as both a player and a pawn. With compromising leaks high up in counterintelligence circles, and a hard force of specialized handlers keeping him alive and doing deals with rogue nations, the arms merchant is a hard man to get to, much less take alive. Bolan doesn't get hung up on odds, risk or the roll of the dice. He's focused on a mission gone sour in hostile territory–and his personal commitment to finishing by any means necessary.
Brognola recognized Sokolov for what he was
The man was a player and a pawn. He armed the killers, but he also served them. And above him, shadowing his every move, were men and women who could take him off the board at any time. He lived because they found him useful for the advancement of their agendas.
The big Fed knew that removing Sokolov from circulation was a good thing. Putting him on public trial, revealing some of those he served might also benefit humanity. It wouldn’t stop the global arms trade or any of the slaughter that resulted from it, but it might slow the pace of killing. For a while.
If anyone could do the job, Mack Bolan was the man.
Extraordinary Rendition
Mack Bolan®
Don Pendleton
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
It is ironical that in an age when we have prided ourselves on the intelligent care and teaching of children we have at the same time put them at the mercy of new and most terrible weapons of destruction.
—Pearl S. Buck
1892–1973
What America Means to Me
Gods are born and die, but the atom endures.
—Alexander Chase
1926–
Perspectives
Forget the old line about meddling in God’s domain. This time terrorists are meddling in mine. And they’ll regret it.
—Mack Bolan
For Private First Class Ross A. McGinnis
1st Platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry
God keep
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
Kotlin Island, Gulf of Finland
Special Agent Robert Marx thought it was funny how things seemed to change but actually stayed the same. Staring across the dark, cold water of the gulf before him, he could see the bright lights of Saint Petersburg. Founded under its present name in 1703, the regal city had been renamed Petrograd in 1914, changed to Leningrad in 1924, then had become Saint Petersburg once more in 1991.
The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Take extraordinary rendition, for instance.
It was a fancy name for kidnapping, dreamed up by some Washington bureaucrat back in the eighties, a means of returning international fugitives to America for trial, even when they were sheltered by a hostile state. After 9/11 the phrase had morphed into a euphemism for shipping terrorist suspects off to friendly nations where “aggressive questioning” was commonplace.
Another euphemism. Why not call it torture?
Regardless, the pendulum had swung again, and the Justice Department was saving rendition for hard-case felons whose wealth and/or political connections placed them effectively beyond the law’s reach.
Scumbags like Gennady Sokolov.
For his sake, Special Agent Marx and seven other members of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team were standing in the icy early-morning darkness of Kotlin Island, twenty miles west of Saint Petersburg and a mile west of the Kronstadt seaport.
There were no hostages at risk this night. The mission was a basic find-and-snatch.
Extraordinary rendition.
Their target was a dacha built by Sokolov as a retreat from the daily grind of his murderous business. The team had helicoptered in from the mainland, and their chopper was waiting to take them back again, plus one. A charter jet was also standing by at Pulkovo II International Airport, eleven miles from downtown Saint Petersburg, with its flight plan to London on file.
From there, it was home to the States.
If they lived through the night.
Marx had handpicked his team, choosing only the best. He had two seasoned snipers, one packing a Remington M-40 A-1 .308 sniper rifle fitted with a Unertl target scope, and the other armed with a Barrett M-86 A-1 “light Fifty” in case they had to take out any armored cars. Chuck Osborne carried a Benelli M-4 Super 90 semiauto shotgun, for opening doors and flattening humans. Marx and the other four men on his team were armed with Heckler & Koch MP-5 SD-6 submachine guns, with retractable stocks, integrated suppressor and 3-round-burst trigger groups. As sidearms, all HRT members carried the “Bureau Model” Springfield Armory TRP-PRO in .45 caliber.
Good to go.
They’d waited two hours for Sokolov and his men to fall asleep. Now it was time to make the grab and get the hell off Kotlin, before they ran out of luck.
The snipers were deployed, already covering the grand three-story house, as Marx led his team through the dark toward their selected entry point. It might not be an easy snatch, considering the target, but they’d trained on a scale model of the house, built back at Quantico specially for their mission.
They were as ready as they’d ever be.
Marx led the way, as usual. He was his own point man, never asking any other member of the HRT to do a job he personally shunned. Another thirty yards or so, and they’d have cover from the dacha’s seven-car garage while they prepared for entry.
Just a little farther, and—
The night vanished around them in a blaze of metal halide lamps. A deep metallic voice demanded their immediate surrender, first in Russian, then in English.
Marx reacted while the faceless drone was midway through his spiel, raising his SMG and firing at the nearest bank of lights. His team responded instantly, blazing away to either side. Their submachine guns whispered, while the big Benelli shotgun thundered. From a distance, Marx’s snipers opened up, but they were short on living targets.
Half the halide lamps were dark and smoking when the muzzle-flashes started winking all around the FBI strike team. Marx staggered as a bullet struck his body armor, bruising his chest underneath the Kevlar vest. He shifted targets, firing at live enemies instead of floodlights now, seeing the mission go to hell and praying that he could still get his team out intact.
But two of them were down already, Jurecki and Zvirbulis—their two Russian-speakers—sprawled on the driveway’s pavement, deathly still. Marx didn’t want to see the pools of crimson spreading underneath their supine forms, steaming from contact with the frigid air.
Marx felt his magazine run dry and dropped it, reaching for a fresh one. He’d withdrawn the new mag halfway from its pouch on his tactical vest when a slug punched through his armpit, slipping past the armor, tumbling through his rib cage and right lung.
The shock of impact dropped Marx to the pavement. Numb fingers lost their grip on his SMG, and he heard it clatter out of reach. Around him, twitching, jerking, he could see the other members of his team dropping like shattered mannequins.
Maybe the snipers could escape in time and reach the waiting chopper. If they weren’t cut off on their retreat and—
Marx blinked as a shadow fell between him and the halide lamps that hadn’t been shot out. It took the last of his remaining strength to turn and face the weapon leveled at him.
“Goodbye, American,” the gunman said.
CHAPTER ONE
Moscow, Russia
Mack Bolan had the Beatles in his head, Paul and John singing “Back in the USSR” as his Aeroflot Airbus A330-200 circled in a holding pattern over Domodedovo International Airport.
But it wasn’t the USSR anymore. Now, it was the Russian Federation, totally divorced from all the cold-war crimes of communism, prosperous and overflowing with democracy for all.
Sure thing.
And if you bought that, there were time-share contracts on the Brooklyn Bridge that ought to make your eyes light up, big-time.
This wasn’t Bolan’s first visit to Russia, but familiarity didn’t relieve the tightening he felt inside, as if someone had found the winding stem to his internal clock and given it a sudden twist. Nerves wouldn’t show on Bolan’s face or in his mannerisms, but they registered their agitation in his gut and in his head.
Russia had always been the big, bad Bear when he was growing up, serving his country as a Green Beret, and moving on from there to wage a one-man war against the Mafia. Moscow, the Kremlin and the KGB—under its varied names—had lurked behind a number of the plots Bolan had privately unraveled, and had spawned a fair percentage of the threats he’d faced after his government created Stony Man Farm and its off-the-books response to terrorism.
Then, as if by magic, virtually overnight, that “evil empire” had been neutralized. Governments fell, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union shattered like crockery dropped on concrete.
Threat neutralized?
Hardly.
In some ways, from the global export of its vicious Mafiya to home-grown civil wars, continued spying and subversion, and free-floating swarms of ex-government agents peddling the tools of Armageddon, Mother Russia was more dangerous than ever.
And Bolan was going in to face the Bear unarmed.
Well, not the whole Bear, if his mission briefing had been accurate. More like a litter of rabid cubs, protecting a rogue wolverine.
Bolan broke that train. His enemies this time—like every other time—were men, not animals.
No other animal on Earth would kill thousands for profit. Or for pleasure.
The pilot’s disembodied voice informed him that their flight was cleared for landing. Finally.
Domodedovo was one of three airports serving Moscow, the others being Sheremetyevo International and Vnukovo International. Among them, the three handled forty-odd-million passengers per year. It should be relatively easy, in that crush, for one pseudo-Canadian to pass unnoticed on his way.
Should be.
Bolan had flown from Montreal to London with a Canadian passport in the name of Matthew Cooper. He was carrying sufficient ID to support that cover, including an Ontario driver’s license, Social Insurance card and functional platinum plastic. He also came prepared with Canadian currency.
