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But Bolan was already running.
HE HIT THE DOORS of the warehouse three steps behind the frantic girl. His eyes were drawn to the LED display and what he saw flooded his system with fresh jolts of adrenaline.
00:00:09.
He sprang forward, growling with the exertion and caught the girl as he dived toward the hiding spot he had first pulled her out from. She turned like a ferret and sank her teeth into his palm.
00:00:08.
He swore and let go instinctively as blood pooled up out of the cuts. The girl was under the desk and with incredulity he saw that her “sister” was a little rag doll as filthy as its owner with bright black eyes. He reached out with his unwounded hand and caught the girl by her shirt. Doll firmly in her grip, she came away easy now and he pulled her tightly to him.
00:00:05.
He saw the readout and knew he couldn’t make it. His feet hit the ground as he drove with his legs against the concrete like a running back breaking for open field after a hand off. He cut around an overturned barrel and cursed the half second it caused him.
The girl was babbling now at him in some dialect he was too keyed up to catch, but she was also hugging him tightly. He saw the door standing open and put on the last burst of speed left in his body. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, banging against his ribs with the exertion and his breath was coming fast and hard.
00:00:02.
He hit the door at a dead sprint just as he felt the air around him suddenly draw backward in a vacuum rush that stung his eyeballs. He drew the girl closer against him as he felt the flash of sudden heat come rolling up behind him like a fast-running locomotive.
Cowering on the pavement, Karen Rasmussen watched him dive through the doorway. He seemed to hang for a moment in the air and she could see the ball of fire rushing up behind like a film image on fast forward.
Bolan was hurtling through the air, twisting as he flew to catch the angle out of the doorway and the orange freight train of a fireball rushed past him. The concussive force sent the doors flying like tumbling dice.
She couldn’t stop screaming as she watched, and Bolan twisted as he fell to protect the girl, landing hard along one arm and shoulder. He grunted with the impact and recoiled slightly off the pavement before sprawling wide to cover as much of the girl’s flesh with his own body as he could.
Behind them jets of flame shot out windows and air vents and punched holes through the roof. Black smoke appeared instantly, and debris began to rain down. The teenager felt her throat choke up with sudden, sharp pain and she realized she had been screaming but that the blast had deafened her.
She stopped, coughing, and then looked up at the savage bonfire lighting up the dockside neighborhood. She felt tears filling her eyes as she realized the bastards were dead.
Just like that, it was over.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bolan eased himself into a chair in the war room at Stony Man Farm. “What’s up, Bear?” he said to Aaron Kurtzman.
Kurtzman, head of the Stony Man cybernetics team, turned his wheelchair toward Bolan. “What’s up, Mack? Got you some coffee. Barb and Hal will be here in just a second.”
Bolan took a seat at the long hardwood table. In front of him was a steaming mug of black coffee and a plain manila folder marked with a single red stripe over a bar code and the word “Classified.”
He had always preferred this place in the old farmhouse to the newer Annex. He had taken a lot of mission briefings here, formed innumerable strategies, argued tactics and made life and death decisions. He shrugged the thought away and reached for his cup of coffee as Barbara Price and Hal Brognola entered the room. Bolan nodded in greeting and took a drink.
He frowned at the bitter taste. “That’s a nice batch you brewed there, Bear,” he said wryly. The thickset man grinned like a Viking from behind his black beard and hit a button on his console panel. “Good for what ails ya,” he agreed. A section of the wall slid down, revealing a huge screen.
“Nice work in Split,” Brognola said. He sat in a chair and dropped a thick attaché case on the table in front of him. “The State Department is very grateful.” He paused and smiled. “If they knew who exactly to be grateful to, that is.”
“The girl?” Bolan asked.
“She’s fine,” Price said. The honey-blond mission controller took her own seat. “We channeled her into an American relief organization. She’ll be safe until she can be returned to her family in Jakarta.”
Bolan nodded. His face was impassive, but he felt pleased. “What’s that leave us with now?” he asked.
Price snorted and Bolan turned to her in surprise. “A ghost hunt,” she answered.
Brognola turned to Kurtzman and nodded. “Show him,” he said.
The cyberwizard typed briefly on his keyboard and hit his roller mouse with a thumb. Instantly the big screen recessed into the wall came alive. Bolan turned in his seat and regarded the digital image.
First what was obviously an official military portrait appeared in HD quality. Bolan narrowed his eyes and scrutinized the picture. The uniform was Russian, Soviet era, and the rank general or colonel-general, the equivalent of a three-star general in the U.S. Army. The man himself had brutal, peasant stock features.
“That’s Victor Bout,” Brognola said. “The man himself.” Bolan saw a square-faced Caucasian with short, almost bristling salt-and-pepper hair, and narrow-set eyes over a thick nose. The man had a lantern jaw, and he wasn’t smiling. “He used to command his own internal security division in the GRU, the Soviet Military Intelligence.”
Bolan grunted. He had tangled with more than one GRU and former GRU agent in his day. They tended to be even more brutal and direct-action prone than their KGB counterparts. “Let me guess,” Bolan offered. “He turned to criminal enterprise when the Communists lost power?”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Kurtzman stated.
“He’s more than that, though,” Price interrupted. It was her turn to nod at Kurtzman. Instantly the picture on the screen was replaced by four. Victor Bout was in a slick dark blue power suit instead of an olive-drab uniform, his military haircut and regulation mustache replaced by a modest ponytail and a full but well-groomed beard. In another picture the barrel-chested man was standing in swimming trunks on the bridge of a private yacht. Two beautiful women with perfect bodies and eyes so vapid they came out clear as diamonds in the pixilated image, lounged behind him, drinks in hand. In the third, Bout was sitting at the table of some obviously expensive restaurant talking to a mahogany-skinned man in his twenties.
“Who’s Bout talking to?” Bolan asked.
“That is the son of the head of the financial projects committee of the United Nations,” Kurtzman answered.
“Oil-for-food?”
“Oil-for-food,” Brognola acknowledged.
The second man in the fourth picture needed no identification. It was the president of Venezuela.
“Well, that’s no problem,” Bolan said dryly. “I just saw on the international news how the guy isn’t a rogue leader at all. He’s just someone who disagrees with the U.S. on oil policy.”
“Sure,” Price said. “Suspend the constitution, muffle the press, jail dissidents, start a war with Colombia…whatever.”
“I do get the point,” Bolan stated, turning away from the screen. “Our good Mr. Bout is a very powerful, very well-connected gentleman.”
“And he’s only third in command of his syndicate,” Brognola said, leaning forward. “He is the principal adviser to one of the premier oligarchs in Russia today, a man in control of Siberian oil fields, Moscow central banking and Black Sea shipping. Colonel-General Bout’s last-known location, Split, Croatia. Status, currently missing.”
“Okay, he’s missing. But he didn’t just pop up because he’s next on some hit list,” Bolan pointed out.
“Bear,” Price said.
Kurtzman hit the space bar then the Ctrl and Tab buttons on his keypad with a practiced motion. The screen changed. Now there was an image of a lanky, disheveled man of some obvious height.
In the picture he stood next to a red Mini-Cooper on a European or Mediterranean city cobblestone street. He had to have been close to seven feet tall.
“Akhilesh Pandey,” Brognola announced.
“Mr. Pandey,” Price continued, “is the premier researcher of cloning technology in India today.”
“Current status, also missing. Last-known location, Split, Croatia,” Kurtzman stated.
“Ah,” Bolan said. “I’m sensing a perfect storm.”
“Sort of. Well,” Price allowed, “if you factor in the location, then you’re exactly right. This a perfect storm. Bear, let’s talk Prisni Prijatelji.”
The cyberwizard again worked his keyboard. First a map of the world appeared in greens and blues on the screen, overlaid with lines of latitude and longitude. Then the perspective of the screen shifted smoothly. Bolan watched as it zeroed in on the Mediterranean, then slid past the boot of Italy to tighten focus on the Adriatic Sea. It shifted to the Croatian coastline, played south and settled on the city of Split.
Once in place, the screen’s software put a white box around the city and began cycling its resolution, pulling it into focus. A street map from satellite imagery stamped with the discreet logo of the National Reconnaissance Office appeared. From an overview of the entire city Kurtzman quickly clicked down the area of observation into tighter and tighter resolution until an area of five square urban blocks filled the screen.
“I was less than three blocks away when I hit the triad in that warehouse,” Bolan commented.
Frowning as the others murmured their agreement, Bolan leaned forward. The western edge of the built-up area consisted of wharfs and industrial piers as well as several large, squared-off jetties. Beyond that, to the north, south and west the area bordered the other streets of the city of Split. Inside the designated area there was a mixture of buildings from commercial to hospitality to warehouses.
Bolan turned and cocked an eyebrow in question to the leadership cadre of Stony Man Farm. “Prisni Prijatelji?” he asked.
“Prisni Prijatelji,” Price confirmed.
Settling back in his chair Bolan took another drink of his coffee. “Explain.”
“Split has taken over from Berlin as ground zero where east means west. Hell, what East means now is something a lot different from what it meant in the bad old days of the Soviet Empire,” Brognola began. “But, for purposes of the War on Terror to our intelligence services, Split is a very important place. As important as Islamabad and more important than Damascus, Beirut or Amman. European and Middle Eastern businessmen mix there in prolific numbers, forming a smoke screen of legitimacy for the thriving black markets beneath the surface.”
“Oil money meets former Soviet stockpiles of weapons?” Bolan offered.
“Sure,” Price broke in. “Plenty of that going on. But Asian and South American drug pipelines into Europe intersect there. Terrorist cells and fugitives purchase papers and forged documents. Mercenaries cavort. International banking uses Croatian cutout companies to laundry money. As you discovered, there are thriving white slavery rings running girls from Asia into Eastern Europe and girls the other way back out again. It’s a flipping strip mall of international criminal activity from the pettiest to the largest.”
“Which is why Bout was there,” Bolan observed. “He was serving as an intermediary for his banker boss?”
“That’s what we think,” Brognola agreed. “But as bad as Split is, in general that area along the waterfront—” he indicated the neighborhood with a blunt fingertip “—is the epicenter. Ground zero, part criminal-free fire zone and part intelligence DMZ.”
“What do you mean?” Bolan asked.
“That neighborhood is one massive front. Fronts for criminals, fronts for intelligence operatives keeping an eye on the international syndicates…and each other. Success begets success. Once the big players realized how much information there was to be gleaned from this little neighborhood in Split, the services of half a dozen countries began to lean on their governments to look the other way. Let the snakes play in a nest all together so that we could get them in other places.”
Price spoke up. “Once word of the hand-off approach leaked out of the tier one agencies to their second tier allies, on both sides, it really began to heat up as every two-bit station chief from any third world country saw opportunities to get their own cut with the geopolitical immunity. Bribes and payoffs began pouring out of the sector. Enough to ensure the local and Croatian federal police keep their noses clear.”
“UN peacekeepers?” Bolan asked.
“Some,” Price admitted. Then she shrugged. “They’re positioned closer to the main industrial docks and the rail lines. They’re mostly just symbolic now in Split anyway. Besides all it would take is a word from the intelligence community to the OIC of whatever detachment has Prisni Prijatelji as their district to get them to stand down.”
“I’ve seen cities where the local police have been paid enough to steer clear of certain neighborhoods,” Bolan said. “Usually it’s a mess of a free-fire zone between pushers and street gangs.”
“They had some of that,” Brognola stated. “But the organized syndicates leaned on the thugs. Can’t sell to the eurotrash touristas if bullets are flying everywhere and bodies are in the street. The territories are pretty well defined now. You get street violence occasionally and there are so many free-lancers hunting you can’t guarantee anything when the sun goes down and night comes. But it’s not like Compton in the late 1980s or something.”
“Lovely.”
“Make no mistake, Mack,” Price said. “Nobody but nobody in that section of the city is legitimate, or who they say they are. Your friends, the Mountain and Snake Society, have really solidified their control and the influence of both Chinese and North Korean intelligence with them. Everyone who’s not running a scam is a confidential informant. If they’re not a CI, then they’re an operative. Failing that, they’re a petty criminal.”
“Well, there are tourists,” Kurtzman broke in. “The libertine controls on the local nightclubs make it popular for twenty-something kids from the more prosperous regions of the EU to hang out there. It’s replaced Amsterdam as the ‘it’ city for the disaffected and chic bored.”
“Sheep for the wolves,” Bolan muttered.
“Exactly,” Price said.
“What’s Pandey doing there?” Bolan asked. “I get that you can score anything in this place, but doesn’t cloning tech seem just a little upscale even for this modern-day version of Casablanca?”
Kurtzman spoke up again. “The international law on bioweapons is very clear. Certain technologies used to regulate such weapons in mass quantities are as tightly controlled and monitored as their nuclear counterparts. Not so the cloning tech. You take a strain of weaponized Anthrax, or Influenza and you replicate them, or modify their DNA helixes to be sturdier then replicate them, and you can work in peace from international monitoring agencies until the bureaucrats writing the laws can play catch-up.”
“Seems almost too simple.” Bolan grunted.
“We’re always playing catch-up,” Price said.
“Unless we can be proactive,” Brognola observed.
“That’s where I come in.”
“As always, Striker,” the big Fed acknowledged. “As always.”
“Right now we know both men entered Prisni Prijatelji,” Price continued. “Then they disappeared. We want to know why and we want to know where. Two of Bout’s bodyguards, ex-GRU naval infantry Spetsnaz, turned up yesterday floating facedown in the ocean outside the neighborhood. Two days before that a call girl named Marlina Dubrovnik disappeared in Prisni Prijatelji’s only hotel.”
“A hotel where Pandey had a room where she was going to meet him?” Bolan supplied.
Brognola held up a loosely clasped hand and blew on it, spreading his fingers wide as he did so and showing it to be empty. “Just like that. She goes to his room. He lets her in. Then they’re gone.”
“We have people on them?”
“We did. Team of military spooks out of the Pentagon. The unit Rumsfeld created.”
Bolan nodded. “The Strategic Support Branch.”
“Right, a SSB team with some electronic and signal intelligence special reconnaissance units, Special Forces commo guys, a DIA electronic intelligence analyst. Solid operators. Code parole is ‘Center Spike.’ They had a military attaché operations in Zagreb. When the Agency caught Pandey’s movement out of New Delhi, they asked for assistance.”
“The Company asked for help?” Bolan asked.
Brognola shrugged. “Their best operatives are running Pakistan and Iraq these days. They had a lone tail on Pandey, and Prisni Prijatelji is no place for a single operator.”
Bolan lifted a single eyebrow. Brognola laughed. “Unless it’s you, Striker.”
Bolan turned serious. “The SSB unit know I’m going in?”
“They know something is going on and that they’re to provide imagery and surveillance assistance to an American intelligence operator,” Price said. “But I’ve had them replaced in position.”
“Replaced?”
“With Jack and Charlie Mott,” Price answered. “We’re going to keep this in the family.”
“Akira and I set up a line of communications to ensure Farm security,” Kurtzman broke in. “They constructed boosted relay stations for our Computer Room right here on the Farm. What Jack and Charlie have is real easy ‘point and click’ stuff, less sophisticated than the controls on the planes they fly. But, by them being live we’ll have the electronic equivalent of a field office right in your back pocket.”
Bolan turned toward Price. “So I still do my commo through the Farm?”
