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Given the choice, Bolan would have preferred walking in, cutting through the DMZ to the south by means of routes already secured and verified by Special Forces teams assigned full-time to covert LRRP/SU ops in the no-man’s land between the north and south of the Asian peninsula.
But as happened so often when Stony Man Farm and the Executioner were called into play, the operation depended on complete invisibility while at the same time remained hamstrung by timing. The train Bolan intended to intercept was going to be on target on time, and only for that time. The Oval Office wanted a surgical strike with no collateral damage.
The land was arrayed below the plummeting commando in an uneven checkerboard of blacks and grays. He flared his canopy hard at the last moment, attempting to curtail his momentum as the ground rushed up. He heard then felt his rucksack crash into the copse of trees, then two heartbeats later his feet, tightly clamped together, broke through the mesh of interwoven branches at the top of the canopy. He kept his legs pressed together as gravity yanked him down through branches and tree trunks. He took several bone-jarring impacts before his parachute caught and his neck whip-lashed hard into the special support collars leaving him sore but unharmed.
Taking stock of his surroundings, he looked down and saw he was about forty feet from the ground, caught halfway up a good-size evergreen. His chute seemed securely trapped above him, but he was too far out from the main trunk for the branches to have enough girth to support him.
Hitting his quick-release clip, Bolan let his rucksack fall, then pulled himself along the branches of the pine tree until he was on a more stable support. He disengaged the jump harness and secured his nylon ribbon of a rappel cord from a pocket in the lower leg of his padded suit.
He slipped the strong, flat cord through a D-ring carabiner positioned at his waist and kicked away from the tree, dropping to the ground in a smooth arc. On the forest floor he quickly removed his jumpsuit, helmet and supplemental oxygen along with the rest of his rappel harness. He made no effort to retrieve his chute and paid only cursory attention to camouflaging the gear he was leaving behind. If there was anyone close enough to stumble onto it in the dark, then the mission was probably blown in any case.
From his pack Bolan secured first his primary weapon, a Chinese model AKM with folding paratrooper stock, and a night-vision-goggle headset. Like a modern-day version of the childhood boogeyman, he hunted at night, could see in the dark and was armed with fearsome claws. Straining against the weight, Bolan slipped into the shoulder straps of his rucksack then took first a GPS reading before double-checking his position with a compass to verify his start point. Satisfied, he set off down the steep, narrow valley toward the dull gleam of the wide river below.
In many ways his cross-country navigation was almost more dangerous than the HAHO jump, or even than the potential difficulties he faced in his coming swim. Every model of night-vision device available offered depth perception difficulties. The scree-covered terrain was rocky and steep, making his footing uncertain, and he was cutting down not an actual path but rather a rain wash gully. With two hundred pounds on his back each step downhill sent a biting jar through his knees and lower back, threatening to turn his ankles constantly as his heels came down on loose gravel and powdered dirt. The topography was so steep and uncertain Bolan spent half the two-kilometer descent sliding on his backside as opposed to on his feet.
By the time Bolan reached the floor of the wash he was drenched in sweat and breathing hard. He squatted among the cover of some weeds and cheat grass behind a row of dense shrubs well back from the two-lane blacktop that ran parallel to the river, resting long enough for his heart rate to recover and his breathing to even out. He washed down a couple of the “Go” pills the military gave their pilots on long flights with a full canteen of water. He then opened his rucksack and broke out the dive gear. By his watch he noted he was seven and a half minutes ahead of his pre-op planned time schedule.
With such a strenuous overland hike and steep descent he had been unable to don his wet suit until just prior to submersion or risk heat fatigue and dangerous dehydration. He quickly stripped and donned the neoprene wet suit. Once he was dressed, he pulled on North Korean army fatigues over the insulated swim gear and retied his combat boots.
He was stripped down to the essentials for his swim, and other than his primary weapon everything he needed was tightly fitted inside an oversize butt pack or secured across his body in the numerous pockets of his fatigues or pouches on his H-harness web gear.
Working quickly he fit the poncho-style vest of the rebreather system over his head and shrugged it across his shoulders before pulling the neoprene hood of his wetsuit into place. He fit the mouthpiece and tested the oxygen circuit. Designed for short, shallow dives, the rebreather offered scuba capabilities while eliminating the telltale trail of bubbles of other commercial diving rigs.
Holding his facemask and swim fins in one hand, Bolan cradled his primary weapon in the crook of his arms and crawled out from his place of concealment and into the mouth of the metal culvert running under the North Korean highway.
Coming out the other side, he slid into the cold, sluggish water of the Yellow River with all the deadly, fluid agility of motion as a hunting crocodile. Once in the water he spit into his mask and rinsed the faceplate before putting it on and then tucked his swim fins into place around his boots.
Submerging into the frigid and inky black he began kicking steadily into the middle of the deep river where the current was strongest. Staying about two yards below the surface, he used the luminous dials of his dive watch to judge the approximate distance of travel.
Bolan surfaced after fifteen minutes and stopped kicking, letting the current carry him in among the heavy beams of the crossed pillars supporting a railroad bridge across the river. Working quickly, he stripped his dive gear and let it float down into the cold gray appetite of the water. Reaching up, he grabbed hold of a wide crossbeam and began to climb.
He pulled himself up, hand over hand, twisting around the cross beams and climbing higher and higher. Above him the horizontal beams housing the tracks grew closer and closer and the wind picked up the nearer he drew to the lip of the canyon. He climbed with his Kalashnikov hung muzzle down across his back, and by the time he reached the top the water had stopped dripping behind him. He double-checked his watch and crawled into position, fitting himself tight into the trestle joist.
Intelligence stated that the protocol for all military rail transports leaving the Yellow River Restricted Military Zone stopped on the other side of the bridge to allow for routine security inspections of transport documents. There were schedules to be kept, protocols to be followed, routines to be adhered to. He would have the three-minute window it took for the brakeman to change the tracks to get out from under the bridge and onboard the train without being seen by the armed sentries of the Army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the DPRK.
The time frame itself was ludicrous enough, as any delay along the way could have thrown the whole operation into jeopardy, but such a tight schedule hadn’t dissuaded Bolan, and Stony Man hadn’t apologized during his initial briefing.
The Executioner focused wholly on the task ahead of him and with the patience of a trapdoor spider as he lay in wait as the North Korean freight train approached then skidded to a stop in a shower of sparks and the harsh squeal of steel-on-steel. Spotlights glared down the length of the track as the military checkpoint on the far side of the bridge followed their established practice. This night the institutionalized paranoia of the DPRK would prove well founded.
Bolan scrambled up through the girders and pulled himself onto the train track. He looked down the serpentine length of the transport train toward the lead engine and saw two men in heavy military overcoats climbing into the engineer’s compartment. The searchlight mounted at the top of the checkpoint shack began to rotate and play along the length of the train.
Bolan began to move fast.
He scrambled up next to the coupling housing between two railroad boxcars and out of the path of the advancing searchlight. The powerful beam of illumination ran down the train, and Bolan shrank back into the protective enclosure of the railcar’s shadow. Once it was past, he scrambled upward, climbing smoothly until he reached the apex of the boxcar.
At the summit he slid over the end of the train and quickly scanned in both directions. Five cars down there was a gap between the roofs of the olive-green boxcars, indicating a flatbed railcar. Beneath him the train began to sway as the brakes were kicked off and the engineer let go with a whistle blast to signal the imminent movement of the long train.
The industrial locomotive lurched to a start and began to gather speed, slowly at first but then with greater and greater momentum as the train began to push forward. Bolan hugged the roof as the train moved past the checkpoint and plunged into the sharply mountainous countryside beyond the river. He clung precariously for several minutes as the train finished gathering speed and began placing more and more distance behind it from the access station out of the restricted area.
Finally ready, Bolan lifted up off the roof of the boxcar and began to navigate his way down the line of cars.
THE MISSILE COMPONENTS were housed in wooden crates, but there was no disguising them if a person knew what to look for. The main crates were thirty-two feet long, holding the medium-range intercontinental rockets while additional storage boxes housed the powerful engines and the advanced computer guidance systems inside the conical tips. Stony Man intelligence had them en route to Pyongyang and from there to Iran by freighter.
The Executioner had been deployed to send a message about the traffic of such advanced and powerful weapon systems, and he carried enough Semtex explosives in his kit to guarantee there would be no misunderstanding.
From his position on the boxcar overlooking the flatbed where the pyramid stack of rockets had been secured, Bolan was able to count four guards. The train was traveling at full speed now and the mountain winds were bitter and harsh, driving the sentries into sheltered alcoves. Bolan felt confident he could place his demolition charges unobserved.
He moved quickly, sliding down the iron ladder built into the boxcar. He landed on the access platform just as a fifth soldier, with NCO markings on his uniform, came around the edge of the car on the signalman’s catwalk.
The man was shorter than Bolan by half a foot, stockily built with high, flat cheekbones and dark brown eyes that widened almost comically in surprise at the sudden apparition of a dark-clothed Occidental. The man clawed for a 9 mm Tokarev TT30 pistol as Bolan, hands empty, leaped forward.
The man managed a short bark of surprise before Bolan struck. Lunging forward, the Executioner lifted his left knee to his chest and kicked explosively, driving the heel of his combat boot in the man’s chest and driving him backward over the railing of the catwalk.
The North Korean soldier flipped and struck the basalt-and-gravel dike running next to the tracks in a spinning tumble before bouncing away. Then the racing train was gone and sparks flew as a burst of AKM fire slammed into the railcar next to Bolan’s head.
Spinning, the big American dropped to one knee even as he cleared his silenced pistol from its shoulder holster. From the walkway next to the rockets on the flatbed a North Korean soldier leveled a Chinese AKM at him, aiming for a second burst.
Bolan’s pistol chugged softly and spent brass tumbled out of its breech and off over the edge of the train, as lost in the night as the noncommissioned officer had been. The Korean sentry jerked under the impact of the 3-round burst, his head snapping and blood splashing off to the side. As he tumbled to the floor of the railcar, his partner suddenly appeared directly behind him.
For a heartbeat the two men looked at each other, then Bolan’s rounds found the other man’s chest and he pitched forward, victim of a lead coronary. The man struck the floor of the flatbed, then rolled and was sucked away in a flash.
Bolan leaped forward, grasped the cold metal railing in one hand and vaulted the barrier onto the railcar. The wind cutting across the exposed carriage was hard and cold. He had to move quickly. The burst of weapons fire had to have alerted the other pair of armed guards, but Bolan could only hope that the noise of the train had deafened the reports for any reinforcements positioned inside the railcars.
The Executioner landed hard on his rubber-soled boots, which absorbed some of the shock of his impact. He went down to one knee, then came back up. His right hand tucked his pistol away as his left reached around and swung the silenced Kalashnikov from behind his back on its sling. He took up the assault rifle just as a third North Korean soldier rounded the corner at the far end of the platform, his weapon up and hunting for a target.
Bolan squeezed the Kalashnikov’s trigger and felt the recoil of the long rifle thump into his shoulder. The heavy-caliber rounds burned across the space between the two combatants and ripped the other man apart, then Bolan caught a flash of motion out of the corner of his eye and instinctively pivoted to face the new threat.
CHAPTER TWO
The final guard had circled and climbed over the secured crates housing the disconnected rockets. The muzzle of the man’s weapon blazed a star pattern, but green tracer fire buzzed harmlessly past Bolan as he drew down and punched the man from his perch with a short burst.
Bolan did not hesitate. He sprinted forward, hurtled across the body of the second man he’d killed, and charged down the length of the flatbed. As he ran, he let the silenced AKM drop to his side and pulled his ready-prepped satchel charges from their web belt carriers and rushed to put them into position.
He moved back and forth in a huddled crouch around the ends of the rockets, working with feverish efficiency. The Semtex was such a powerful compound and he had packed so much into his satchels that the procedure wasn’t difficult. Proximity with the engines was enough, and he slapped down the charges and primed their radio receivers for his signal.
He wasn’t interrupted though he knew that with so many of the sentries missing it was only a matter of moments before he was discovered; the law of averages demanded it. He worked coolly, planting the satchel charges as efficiently as he could, then standing and sprinting for the next boxcar. Only one more flatbed to go and he would have ensured the destruction of the rocket housing, guidance systems and engines.
He turned and scrambled to the edge of the flatbed. The train swayed and rolled beneath his feet as he circumnavigated the heavy chain tie-downs and sharp-edged corners of the crates housing the rocket components. Looking back the way he had come, Bolan turned and jumped lightly across the distance between the two railcars, letting his primary weapon dangle off its sling against his torso. He caught hold of the hard steel rungs of the ladder set into the freight car and quickly climbed upward.
As soon as his head cleared the edge of the carriage, wind tore into him. He scuttled over the side, got to his feet, caught his balance and began to move forward. He ran steadily, scanning ahead and hunting for the second flatbed containing the unmarked crates and their deadly payloads. The second hand on his watch continued cutting off segments of time with irrevocable consistency.
Finally he saw the break in the row of boxcars that indicated the second flatbed. On one side of the train the mountainside, thick with evergreens and heavy bushes, rose like a retaining wall while on the other side the drop into the valley was sheer and unforgiving. Bolan’s luck had held mainly due to the relaxed posture of an army long used to a subjugated population and one too technologically and financially challenged to provide its ground units with radio communications.
Bolan stopped running and dropped to one knee, the AKM up and ready. He cursed under his breath. A curve in the track allowed him to see the boxcar directly in front of the second flatbed from more than just one angle, and the news was not good.
The final railcar was a club carriage designed to carry passengers, and on a military train that could only mean more soldiers. To reach the second rocket storage area he was going to have to cross a railroad car filled with armed men. Just that quickly the factors working against his success had multiplied exponentially. Bolan worked the pistol grip of his assault rifle as he shrugged against the weight of the modified rucksack on his back. He rose and approached the sleeper car.
THE CURVE OF THE RAILROAD track continued along an inward spiral against the side of the mountain, exposing the inside surface of the train to Bolan from his position on the boxcar roof. He saw the dark face of the passenger car suddenly split open and a rectangle of yellow light spill out. Bolan dropped flat on his belly as a dark figure stepped out onto the train platform.
Immediately, Bolan noticed that the figure was dressed in civilian clothes, a leather overcoat draped across his fireplug frame. The man was talking animatedly into a cell phone. From less than twenty yards away Bolan was immediately struck by how compact, and thus how new, the communication device was. Cutting-edge cellular phones were not available to the average Korean, or even the average military officer. By default Bolan realized he was seeing someone very important. In his other hand the man carried a black leather briefcase Bolan recognized as a laptop carrier.
Moving surreptitiously Bolan raised his night-vision goggles. He had taken off the apparatus before his swim and kept it secured while he moved along the train to avoid the depth perception problems inherent to their use. Now he moved carefully to bring it up over his eyes and then zero in with the zoom function.
The North Korean on the cell phone jumped into abrupt focus. There was plenty of ambient light coming from the passenger car for the advanced-technology glasses to bring every stark line of detail into view. Bolan played the image-enhancement lens across the man’s face and knew from accessing his mental mug shots that he was looking at a major player in the North Korean government. He dredged the name from the recesses of his memory—he was looking at Kim Su-Kweon, department chief of the Research Department for External Intelligence—RDEI. The RDEI was a nefarious and sinister organization linked to activities as diverse as creating infiltration tunnels under the DMZ and selling methamphetamines to Yakuza interests in Japan.
If the RDEI was a web, then Kim Su-Kweon was the fat spider at its center. The man turned his back to the wind, his leather satchel swinging in his other hand. Bolan knew instantly he had to acquire that laptop. If he could secure it and then blow the train, there would be every reason for the North Korean command and control to believe the device had been lost in the explosion. It would be an intelligence coup of significant proportions.
Bolan pulled his NVDs clear of his face as Kim Su-Kweon shut his cell phone and turned toward the door leading into the passenger railcar. Bolan pushed up off his stomach and raised his silenced AKM up to cover the man.
Catching the motion out of the corner of his eye, Kim turned in surprise. He gaped in shock as he saw the black-clad apparition of the Executioner above him. He barked out a warning and dropped his cell phone, which clattered to the platform and skittered away to be pulled under the thundering wheels of the train. His hand clawed inside his overcoat as Bolan moved lightly to the edge of the boxcar roof. The North Korean intelligence agent pulled his pistol free and tried to bring it to bear.
Bolan loosed a 3-round burst into the man’s face from under six yards and splashed his brains across the steel bulkhead of the railcar behind him. The intelligence agent was thrown backward by the inertia of the heavy-caliber rounds, and his laptop case fell from slack hands as he pitched forward, then crumpled to his knees on the steel mesh of the platform. Bolan rushed forward and leaped across the distance between the two cars.
He landed hard and folded up but fought to keep his feet in the sticky pool of Kim’s spilling blood. The door opened and a uniformed soldier with an AKM in his hands appeared in the entranceway. Bolan didn’t hesitate to knock him back into the passenger car with a quick burst that clawed out his throat and blasted the back of his head off.
The man fell backward, and Bolan caught a glimpse of more soldiers rushing forward as the dead man tumbled into the car. The Executioner threw his weapon to his shoulder and poured a long, ragged burst into the tight kill zone of the passenger car hallway, chewing men apart with his bluntly scything rounds. Still firing one-handed he scooped up the fallen laptop case and raced for the metal access ladder set into the side of the railcar superstructure.
He shoved the case through a suspender on his H-harness web gear and let the silenced AKM hang from its cross body sling. He pushed himself hard, felt the laptop start to slip and stopped to shove it back into place.
Below him a burst of gunfire tore through the open train door and bullets rattled and ricocheted off the boxcar behind him. Bolan heard a man screaming in anger and more than one in pain as he lunged over the top of the car and onto the roof. Below him a North Korean soldier rushed onto the grille of the landing and swung around, bringing his weapon to bear. Bolan flipped over onto his back in a smooth shoulder roll and snatched up the pistol grip of his weapon. He thrust the weapon forward against the brace of the sling and angled it downward.
He pulled the trigger and held it back, letting the assault rifle rock and roll through half a magazine before easing up and rolling to his feet. He took two steps and the laptop case fell. He dropped with it and caught it before it bounced away. He used his left hand to unsnap the carabiner hook between his web gear belt and suspender. Quickly he hooked that through the handle of the black leather case and reconnected it to his belt.
He was almost too late.
He saw the muzzle of the Chinese AKM thrust over the edge of the railcar roof and he dived forward. He tumbled haphazardly across the roof as the soldier on the ladder let loose with his weapon. Bolan’s chin struck the metal of the carriage structure and he bit his tongue, filling his mouth with the copper tang of his own blood.
Green ComBloc tracers and 7.62 mm slugs tore past him as he slid toward the edge of the roof and the long, steep drop below. He reached out with his left hand and grabbed hold of the metal lip running along the top of the railcar, spreading his legs wide to slow his momentum. From just a few feet away he thrust the muzzle of his AKM forward and triggered a burst.
His rounds roared into the exposed weapon firing at him and ripped it from the soldier’s hands as the hardball slugs tore through the stock and receiver, shattering it beyond use. The soldier’s hand disappeared in an explosion of red mist, and his scream was ripped away by the rushing wind.
Bolan spun on the slick metal of the roof and gained his feet. He pushed himself up, fired a second burst of harassing fire, then turned and sprinted in the opposite direction. As he neared the edge of the car and the flatbed containing the second shipment of missile components came into view, he saw a North Korean soldier scramble into position while trying to bring his assault rifle to bear.
Bolan fired and knocked him spinning off the railcar. The man screamed horrifically as he tumbled over the edge like a pinwheel, bounced off the basalt lip of the track and plunged down the mountainside below like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake. Bolan leaped into the air and landed on top of the flatbed car. He ducked and slid over the side of the pile just as a North Korean soldier sidled around the end of the flatbed freight car. The soldier fired as Bolan was freeing the last of his satchel charges. The Executioner thrust his own assault rifle forward by the pistol grip, using the sling like a second hand and pulled the trigger.
The shots were hasty and he was off balance as he fired, but he hosed the area in a spray-and-pray maneuver designed to force the man backward. He rolled over, feeling the hard edge of the wooden crate bite into his hip, and squeezed the trigger again, then broke off, recentered and fired once again.
The bullets caught the North Korean soldier center mass and he staggered under their impact, his weapon tumbling from useless hands as Bolan let the muzzle recoil climb so that bullets chewed the man apart, drilling him from sternum to skull in a staccato hail of slugs.
Bolan turned and slid the last satchel into place, keying up the transponder for his electronic signal. Soldiers rushed to the edge of the roof of the boxcar next to him and started firing down at him. Wood splinters flew in the air as a fire team of North Korean soldiers shot at him. He ducked behind the end of the crates and threw his rifle to one side. Green tracer fire burned past his position as he recentered the shoulder straps of his specially outfitted rucksack.
He pulled the transmitter out of its pocket as more and more rifle fire drew down on his position. Grabbing hold of the electronic device, he turned toward the edge of the train overlooking the open valley. He sucked in two quick breaths and sprinted out from cover. Three hard steps and he was on the edge, then he kicked off and threw himself out into space. Behind him the withering fire petered off as the uniformed men on the train watched him fall, hypnotized into stunned amazement.
Bolan felt the air rushing up into his face with surprising force. He saw the snakelike twisting of the Yellow River five hundred feet below him, then turned and hit the button on his detonator. There was a pause half a heartbeat long, then the train was blown off the mountain at the two flatbed points containing the rocket bodies and engines. A yellow ball of fire rolled out from the mountain and a wave of heat descended on Bolan as he fell.
His fist came up to his left breast just beside the suspender of his H-harness web gear and jerked the D-ring handle. There was a pause that lasted for entirely too long in his racing thoughts as he plunged below three hundred feet and the dark water of the river came into sharper focus.
The minichute, also called a stunt chute—of the kind used by BASE jumpers—rushed out and caught. Bolan was jerked to a stop for a moment, then gravity reclaimed him and he began to fall toward the river again, his descent slowing modestly. At fifteen feet above the surface, when the dark water of the river filled his vision beyond his dangling feet, Bolan hit the cut-away and dropped out of his harness to fall like a stone.
He struck the cold water for the second time that night and felt it rush in over his head. Letting the current take him, his hand went to his waist where he shrugged out of his web gear and let it float away, keeping only the laptop carry case. He kicked for the surface and deployed his final piece of gear, a life vest designed to keep him buoyant in the water.
Above his head the side of the mountain burned. Working quickly, he swam to the shore and pushed the black leather case out of the water. Putting one knee down on the gravel against the current, Bolan opened the case to make sure it had kept the water out and then resealed it. Moving quickly, he used the air-tight pouches that he had used to transport his satchel charges to insulate the carry case then, after securing it to himself, he swam back out into the fast-moving current.
Forty minutes later he activated his emergency beacon and let the river carry him out toward the Sea of Japan.
When Jack Grimaldi got the signal, he flew the seaplane in low under the radar and put the pods down on the choppy water beyond the breakers fronting the rocky shoreline. He knew North Korean naval units were responding as he pulled Bolan out of the situation, but aggressive electronic jamming by units of the U.S. Air Force based out of the Japanese mainland easily outclassed their counterparts in the DPRK.
SIX HOURS LATER the Stony Man cybercrew cracked the encryption security on the laptop and things really began to roll.
The first of the hijacked information was the most important.
Under Kim Su-Kweon’s control, his intelligence agency had forged an alliance with the Hong Kong triad known as the Mountain and Snake Society. Mostly the deal had involved the laundering of forged American money and as a secondary outlet for North Korea’s prodigious methamphetamine production operation. But Stony Man had discovered that the use of the triad cutouts extended far beyond that.
The Mountain and Snake Society had aggressively expanded its influence, most commonly by brute force, into any area on the global stage where there was a Chinese population presence or criminal activity already in existence on an international scale. The waterfront areas of Split, Croatia, had certainly qualified on the latter if not always on the former, and North Korean intelligence had entered into an arms trafficking enterprise with Russian oligarch Victor Bout through intermediaries of the Mountain and Snake Society triad.
The triad subsidiary had then taken it upon itself to expand its own business interests and began performing mercenary criminal functions for Chechen, Russian and Azerbaijani mafia-style organizations. Most significantly to Stony Man had been the triad’s agreement to provide a safehouse for and act as intermediaries to, the kidnapping of the daughter of an American official in Split.
The disappearance of Karen Rasmussen had baffled American security services who had focused their resources on known terror organizations in the area, leading them up one blind alley after another. Kim had known exactly where the young woman was being held and what was to become of her.
Now the Executioner did, as well.
CHAPTER THREE
The long-range helicopter dropped out of the Eastern European night and hugged the ocean surf. Bolan looked out through his door on the copilot side and eyed the waters of the Adriatic Sea. It was even darker than the night, its water black and disturbingly deep. On the horizon in front of them a mile or so out, the brilliant lights of Split flared with near blinding intensity.
Bolan looked over at the helicopter pilot, his old friend Jack Grimaldi. The man, dressed in aviator flight-suit and helmet offered him a thumbs-up and pointed at the GPS display on the helicopter dashboard.
“One mile out,” Grimaldi said.
The pilot’s face was cast in the greenish reflection of his dome lights, making his features stark and slightly surreal. Bolan reached down between them, then secured his dive bag across his body, which was sheathed in a black dry suit of quarter-inch neoprene against the chilly water below them.
Grimaldi banked the helicopter and lowered into a hover above the rough sea. A sudden gust of wind hammered into the side of the aircraft and threatened to send it spinning into the waves. Reacting smoothly, the Stony Man pilot fought the struggling helicopter back into a level hover. The wind gust carved a sudden trough in the ocean beneath them, turning a three-yard drop to nearly ten in the blink of an eye. If Bolan had leaped when that gust had hit, his amphibious insertion would have shattered bones and left him crippled and helpless in rough seas.
“I don’t like this, Sarge!” Grimaldi yelled.
Looking up from the increasingly violent water, Bolan nodded his agreement. “We’ve been over this before,” he shouted back, pulling the hood of his dry suit into place. “It’s the most expedient manner to infiltrate Azerbaijani custom controls on such short notice.”
“Ten to one Karen is already dead and buried so deep in a hidden grave we’ll never see her again!” Grimaldi argued. “There’s too much about this we don’t know. We should pull back now before we lose track of two Americans,” he said pointedly. But he also said it like a man who didn’t quite believe the story he was pushing.
Bolan tugged his snorkel and facemask into place. “If there’s even one chance of getting her out, I’ve got to try.” He snapped his swim fins onto his belt and reached for the handle of the copilot door. He grinned at the frowning Grimaldi. “Try not to splatter me all over the Adriatic.”
“No promises, Sarge,” Grimaldi answered. But he nodded and worked his controls, fighting the helicopter into position.
Bolan opened the door and stepped onto the landing skid. Instantly sharp wind and needles of sea spray slapped into him. His dry suit kept him warm, but the exposed flesh of his face felt raw and brutalized. Though technically Mediterranean, the water still held a bite this time of year. He squinted hard against the spray and slammed the door of the helicopter shut.
Despite his joke about splattering on the water, Bolan knew he had to move as efficiently as possible to minimize the hovering helicopter’s exposure to the variables of the weather and sea. He looked down, saw a swell rise up to greet him and pushed away from the aircraft. He stepped off with one foot to clear the helicopter.
His grip in his clumsy dry suit mitten slipped on the rain-slick handle of the door as an erratic blast of air slammed into him like a subway car. His feet were knocked clear of the landing skid as Grimaldi frantically fought the helicopter back under control and Bolan tumbled out into space.
