Cold War Reprise

Bolan ran a mental countdown to the moment when a “Flying Squad”—Scotland Yard’s version of SWAT—showed up to the scene of a raging gun battle on the bank of the Thames. The Executioner knew that he had minutes, but with the skill and professionalism of the assassination cadre, he’d need every second of that Doomsday countdown to put the killers away. Now, Bolan not only had Alexandronin’s life to worry about, but also the British policemen who would be caught in the cross fire.

Three weapons in the front meant that the rest of the team was swinging around the back to strike at the Executioner from behind. Bolan charged to the back alley, Beretta leading the way. His suspicions were confirmed when he heard the whispered announcement of “in position” from a new speaker on the communications hookup.

Bolan whipped around the corner, his Beretta’s muzzle jammed into an assassin’s face, breaking his nose. The soldier’s off hand slapped the gunner’s Uzi against the wall and though the hitter triggered his subgun, the rounds spit through empty air. Bolan triggered his Storm, the solitary 9 mm round blowing off the back of the killer’s skull, disgorging a cone of spongy brain matter and blood into the face of the second man with them. The remains of the dead man’s skull contents turned the assassin’s shooting glasses into a blood-sprayed mess he couldn’t see through.

The Executioner tossed the corpse of the point man aside and pivoted the gun in his hand to strike the surviving killer in the head. The Slavic gunman stepped back, tearing his glasses off, the motion helping him to avoid the weight of the handgun as Bolan’s swing jammed it up against the wall. Now able to see, the Russian killer lunged forward, forearm trapping Bolan’s gun hand against the wall.

The close-quarters gunfight suddenly turned into a brawl as the assassin chopped at Bolan’s neck, but the soldier deflected most of the lethal precision with his shoulder. The neck-breaking blow degraded to a clumsy slap that cuffed Bolan’s head above his ear. The gunman tried to bring his Uzi to bear, but the Executioner had trapped the subgun between his hip and the wall. The frustrated hitter tried to nail his opponent between the eyes with a backhand stroke, but Bolan took the blow on the crown of his head. The curved surface of his skull denied the murderer a solid hit, sparing Bolan anything worse than scalp abrasions.

The soldier snaked his foot behind his enemy’s ankle and with a surge of strength, barreled the gunman backward and off balance. The assassin stumbled onto his buttocks, the Uzi wrenched out of his grasp. No longer restrained, Bolan had both arms free to tackle the killer prisoner. He dropped on the gunman, knees slamming into the hardman’s shoulders with jarring force, pinning the man to the ground under his 200-plus-pound frame. Bolan fired off a hard punch to the prone assassin’s jaw, a knockout blow that jammed the mandible into a heavy juncture of nerves at the side of his neck. The Slav wasn’t rendered unconscious, but neural overload left his eyes glazed over, staring glassily into the murky, starless night sky.

“Kroz! Report!” a voice over Bolan’s radio demanded. The stunned Russian groaned incoherently as if to answer the broadcast order. Bolan took a moment to pull his Combat PDA, activating its 8 megapixel digital camera to record the gunman’s face, just in case this particular prisoner had as short a shelf life as his last one. Bolan punched the assassin once more, and the stunned, glassy eyes closed with unconsciousness.

Bolan brought the microphone to his lips. “Kroz can’t come to the phone right now. However if you leave a message at the beep…”

“Shit! Shit!” the Russian on the other end swore. “Switch frequencies! Channel B!”

The alternate frequency plan might have worked, had not Bolan captured not one but two different radios. Bolan checked Kroz’s unit for indications of the secondary communications frequency and found that Kroz had scratched his dial to mark the next channel. The soldier plugged his earphone into Kroz’s unit and clicked over to the frequency.

“…fucking guy?” one of the conversants complained in Russian.

“Maintain radio discipline,” the leader of the death squad ordered.

Sowing panic among his enemies was a good weapon for evening the odds against superior numbers and firepower. As it was, the assassination team was down four shooters in the space of a few minutes. With two sharpshooters and three gunmen on hand, that was nearly half of the Russian force.

“Central says to abort!” another voice cut in. “The mission has been compromised.”

So, the assassins have a coordination and operations center, Bolan thought. If they’re going to cut and run, there’s a chance that they could give me a better look at who ran this op.

Bolan scurried back to the front of the bar, listening to the Russians as he did so.

“Principal target still breathing. Cannot disengage anyhow,” the hit team’s commander returned.

“Scorch the earth,” the coordinator snapped. “Principal is no longer an issue. Avoiding his partner is!”

“Confirm command scorch,” the leader said.

“Burn it all down!” the commander bellowed.

Bolan snapped open the stock of his Uzi. He wasn’t certain of the extent of the firepower the death force had on hand, but the people in the dive were at risk. He used the Uzi’s butt to punch out a window into the bar.

Inside, patrons huddled close to the floor, terrified of the rattle of full-auto weaponry ripping and roaring outside. Though there was a likelihood of the presence of murderers and other scum being among this crowd, Bolan had little proof of their collective guilt, let alone knowledge of actions warranting death by high explosives. He fired a burst into the ceiling and the crowd rose as one, a human tide breaking for the back door, shoving out into the alley. No one wanted to go out the front, which would take them right into the middle of the current firefight. It was better than giving away that Bolan was listening in on the Russians’ party line by shouting a warning to the bar bums.

The first thunderbolt impact blew the doors off the dive, tearing them off of their hinges. Splinters and shrapnel forced the Executioner to duck out the window to avoid being sliced by the rocketing wave of debris. He popped back up and saw that the panicked patrons had managed to evacuate long before the interior of the bar was turned into a blast crater. The force of the explosion informed Bolan that the enemy had resorted to RPGs, rocket-propelled grenades that could be reloaded quickly and were devastating to a range of 300 yards.

Bolan snaked through the broken window with whiplash speed, dropping to the shattered floor as the next 77 mm warhead impacted at the corner he had been hiding behind earlier. The concussive fury of the thermobaric warhead was so violent, Bolan could feel it through the brick wall. Had he delayed in leaving the causeway beside the bar, he would have been pulverized by the fuel-air explosive’s radius of ignited atmosphere. As it was, Bolan had to shake the cobwebs from his head.

He hoped that Alexandronin had retreated to more solid cover when the death squad broke out their heavy weapons. Bolan rushed across the explosion-ravaged bar and vaulted over the counter. He look around swiftly to see what kind of crowd-calming firepower the bartender had. Crouching behind the bar, he was at eye level with the shelves beneath the counter and saw a bolt-action Enfield sitting on a shelf. A box of .303 stripper clips sat next to it. It was an unusual combination for bar-room defense, but the SMLE had been sawn down to a fourteen-inch barrel for faster handling in the bartender’s area. The sawed-off Smelly was a better option than a cut-down shotgun, and even at fourteen inches, the .303 rounds would cut through body armor and put a man down like a sledgehammer. It would also be more than sufficient to counter the enhanced reach of the Russians’ snipers.

Bolan stuffed the stripper clips into his pocket, then chambered the first round on the rifle. He couldn’t expect razor-fine precision with an untested set of iron sights, and an unregulated load of ammunition, but the soldier’s years of marksmanship gave him enough experience to be able to hit a man-size target at three hundred yards with bone-smashing authority.

The Enfield’s stock took out a window behind the bar, and Bolan slithered out into the next causeway. The handy little bolt action was short enough for the soldier to maneuver through the narrow passage and he poked around the corner. He was barely visible at the range the enemy rocketeers were firing from. The smoky trails of the RPG-7 shells cut across the dock front, pinpointing the enemy’s position about two hundred yards downrange.

Bolan could see Alexandronin’s former hiding spot had been hit by a rocket grenade, but there was no sign of his Russian ally. The soldier hoped that his friend’s leg injury hadn’t slowed him so much that he hadn’t reached safety before the 77 mm warhead impacted. Suddenly an Uzi crackled close to the Russians’ position. Bolan saw the stocky outline of Alexandronin leap back behind cover. While Bolan had engaged the other team of gunmen, Alexandronin had to have scrambled to flank the death squad.

Bolan shouldered his Enfield and fired, his first .303 shot missing the head of an Uzi-wielding gunman by inches. However, the powerful rifle round tore into the upper chest of a Russian holding one of the rocket launchers. The sharp-nosed slug excavated a gory tunnel through muscle, organs and bone, dropping the rocketeer in a messy pile of dead, twisted limbs.

That caught the attention of the death squad survivors. The shooters turned their Uzis and remaining sniper rifle toward him and fired where Bolan’s last muzzle flash had flared. A hail of bullets tore into his old position, but the Executioner had gone back into the bar via the broken window and crouched in the smoky wreckage of the building’s rocket-shattered doors. Focusing on the distant muzzle flashes and adjusting his hold for his last known miss, Bolan fired, working the bolt with lightning quickness. The Enfield had more than enough power to kill a man at two hundred yards, and over the radio set, he heard two agonized grunts, one of which dissolved into a death rattle.

Bolan stuffed the stripper clip into the top of the Enfield and shoved its ten trapped rounds into the deep reservoirs of the rifle’s magazine.

“Get that RPG on the bar again!” the field leader growled.

“Arkady’s dead! The fucker killed Arkady!” another hitter snapped.

“Shut up and stay focused!” the commander ordered, frustration in his voice.

Alexandronin’s Uzi snarled again in the distance, and Bolan’s ally had to have hit the man who’d picked up the RPG. The 77 mm shell speared up into the night sky on top of a column of rocket exhaust. It peaked at three hundred meters before gravity overpowered the exhausted, sputtering rocket engine. The grenade spiraled as it descended, smoke spilling out of its tail and etching the warhead’s course back to ground level. The heavy explosive load detonated on impact with a bright flash. The fireball’s brilliance flashed into a smoky cloud that obscured Bolan’s view of the enemy kill force. Since visibility was a two-way street, the Executioner charged toward the opposition’s last known position, trading his Enfield back to the fully charged Uzi.

“Report! Report!” the field commander bellowed.

“I’ve got movement on the walkway!” one Russian answered. “Gregori’s down!”

“Stop the gunman!” the commander urged. “Fire!”

There was a grunt over the radio, the sound of a fist striking flesh. Somewhere in the foggy haze, Alexandronin had hurled himself into hand-to-hand combat with the last of the enemy assassin’s hit men.

T HE RPG BLAST LANDED so close to Vitaly Alexandronin that it shocked the Russian expatriate to the core. Shrapnel had opened several lacerations on his head, arm and torso. Pain burned through his stocky body, but it was only a background ache, adrenaline numbing him to his body’s protestations. His fist throbbed from where he had punched the reporting gunman in the ear, carpal bones cracking against hard skull. It was a clumsy attack, but the hard-liner thug had been knocked off his feet. Blood poured from the hit man’s ear where the ruptured eardrum drained out.

The man’s head hadn’t flexed like a jaw would have, and the result was broken knuckles and fractured hand bones. Alexandronin dismissed the self-diagnosis. Catherine, the love of his life, had been shattered far worse by scum such as the one he had struck.

Alexandronin speared his fist under the sternum of his stunned opponent, driving the breath out of the assassin’s lungs. As the gunman folded up in pain, he dropped his Uzi. Alexandronin chopped down hard on his downed foe’s throat. The killer’s trachea collapsed, accompanied by the sickening crunch of his larynx. Blood poured over the dead man’s lips, his eyes bulged out by the force of the blow.

“Two bastards I give in your memory, my love,” Alexandronin rasped. As he spoke, he tasted blood in his mouth. A cough pushed up a mouthful of sticky crimson. He was so high on adrenaline, he had ignored the pain of a piece of shrapnel that had cut between his ribs and penetrated deep into one lung.

It was bad, he knew, if he could fill his mouth with blood on one weak cough. But Alexandronin was not dead yet. The man he knew as Belasko would need a prisoner or two to continue closing down the foul conspiracy that had taken Catherine away from him.

The team commander’s attention had been drawn by Bolan, the two men maneuvering around each other, Uzis snarling and cracking in a leaden debate of point and counterpoint. It was a ballet of bullets and dodges between the two men.

Alexandronin scooped up the partially spent Uzi of the man whose throat he had crushed and reversed it into a club. The assassination team’s field commander didn’t notice his primary target’s sudden charge until the eight-pound mass of the submachine gun hammered between his shoulder blades with stunning force.

The commander folded to the ground, insensate as Bolan held his fire.

“You’re hit,” Bolan noted, ignoring the unconscious prisoner that Alexandronin had just taken.

The Russian smiled, putting his best face on the lie. “It is far from my heart, Mikhail.”

The buckle of the expatriate’s knees betrayed the truth, however. Bolan reached out and caught his ally before he collapsed to the ground. The soldier lowered Alexandronin to a reclining position. He looked for the injury that had caused him so much weakness. Bolan ripped open his friend’s shirt and saw the ugly, puckered gash over Alexandronin’s ribs.

“Lung hit,” Alexandronin explained. “Not near heart…probably pleural artery…Can’t control that kind of bleeding in the field…”

“Quiet. Save your breath,” Bolan ordered.

“Adrenaline…pumped oxygen through blood…” Alexandronin continued. “No breath left to save. I’ll be gone in…minutes. You have…last gift.”

“Vitaly, damn it!”

Alexandronin cupped Bolan’s cheek, smiling at the big American. “Don’t mourn for me, Mikhail. My comrade, my brother, I had already died the day Catherine did.”

Bolan pressed a button on his PDA. “I’ve already transmitted a call for an ambulance. Hang on and the paramedics can stabilize you.”

“It would just be surviving, my friend,” Alexandronin told him. “Not living.”

He coughed, blood foaming on his lips. Bolan stroked the dying man’s forehead, frowning. “Give Catherine my love when you see her again, Vitaly.”

Alexandronin smiled weakly. “The dead all know the love meant for them unspoken in the hearts of the living. We do not need revenge to prove that fealty.”

“What plot these men are protecting, it needs to be stopped,” Bolan said. “I’ll end it.”

Alexandronin clapped Bolan on the shoulder. “It is your way. It’s why I called you. You will protect others from suffering as I did when Catherine was taken away from me.”

Sirens sounded in the distance. “Take your prisoner, Mikhail. Those are police, not paramedics.”

Alexandronin closed his eyes, his last breath a deep sigh.

“Sleep well, my friend,” Bolan whispered, lowering Alexandronin’s head gently to the ground.

The Executioner hauled the unconscious assassin over his shoulder and darted down a causeway to reach his rental car. He left behind the ghosts of the friendly dead to their much delayed reunion.

The warrior intended a different gathering for the damned souls he was about to pass judgment on.

CHAPTER THREE

Opening up the interface to the Russian Intelligence Agency’s GUI system, Kaya Laserka noted that she had twenty-four new e-mail messages. The field agent, assigned to the Moscow Organized Crime Interagency task force, clicked on the tool bar, taking her to her electronic Inbox. Most of the mail was one form of memo or another, mostly tedious reminders and uninspiring trinkets like tenure awards or daily positive reinforcement sayings.

The header of one e-mail, however, brought a chill to Laserka’s spine.

“Catherine was murdered,” it read in bold, blocky font.

Laserka waited what seemed an eternity as her slow T1 connection, burdened by the equivalent of Third World technical issues, struggled to load the message. There was a link to a London newspaper Web site that carried the report of a brutal, coma-inducing beating of Catherine Rozuika Alexandronin. There was also an appended note that she had been taken off her life support when her husband, Vitaly, was informed that she had been rendered brain dead. The return e-mail was to a free online service, one she didn’t recognize. However, the title Outcast 1995, contained the year her mentor and training officer, Vitaly Alexandronin, left Russian Intelligence amid a government scandal. Laserka had no doubt who the sender was.

Almost a decade and a half before, Laserka had been a fresh young rookie to Russian Intelligence, and Alexandronin had given her a wealth of lessons and experience that carried her across the intervening years. Laserka fired off a response e-mail, but the server spit back a “message not deliverable” response.

The mail had been sent four days earlier, Laserka noted. She had been stuck on an investigation and away from her work terminal. She’d only just returned to Moscow the previous night after a week in the field, running a surveillance operation. She’d had no urge to go to the office. She had been tired, sweaty and hungry, and only wanted to scrub her auburn hair clean of the stink of perspiration, stale coffee and an ever-hanging cloud of cigarette smoke trapped in her locks. Laserka was as fit and trim as when she was just a raw recruit, but closing in on the latter half of her thirties meant that she didn’t have the same reserves of energy to make a quick trip down to the office after the end of a stakeout detail.

Running her knuckle across her full, wide lips, Laserka tried to interpret the disappearance of Alexandronin’s e-mail account. It was probably a security ploy on her old mentor’s part, using a one-time temporary address, then closing it down. Alexandronin was still a reviled name in the halls of the RIA because of his interference with an effort to put things back to what many KGB veterans felt was a finer time and way of doing business. Laserka had escaped the prejudice of the old hard-liners by being young, pretty and a hard worker. A short hospital stay during the time Alexandronin was offending the old guard also conveyed a cloak of anonymity to the lady agent.

Whenever Alexandronin wanted to get in touch with his former student and partner, he would create a temporary, easily disposable and recognizable e-mail address that would last only long enough for a brief, anonymous exchange. This kept Laserka from getting into trouble with her superiors, but kept the friendship the pair shared alive and vital. Sometimes, the two gave each other news of prevailing politics that would affect her career or his exile, as far as they could determine.

The death of Catherine did not appear to be a random act of violence. That Catherine and Vitaly both were targets of bitter old enemies was not news to Laserka. Husband and wife both kept themselves armed, contrary to Great Britain’s inane and ineffectual firearms laws. Laserka had noted several instances of violence over the years that the English nanny legislation had failed to prevent.

On a whim, Laserka performed a quick search, entering the keywords “Russian, violence and London” into the news database. Almost instantly, several article links popped up on the screen, detailing a violent battle that had left eight dead in the London docks, only a few hours before. The only person with identification was a Russian national. The name was not a surprise to Laserka, though reading “Vitaly Alexandronin” plunged a dagger of sadness between her ribs. She tried to blink away the beginnings of tears, swallowing hard to remove the knot of a forming sob from her throat.

Laserka closed the search engine and hurried to the washroom after shutting down her computer.

Though they had been separated for almost fifteen years, the man had been like a surrogate father to her. She barricaded herself into the toilet stall and took a seat, allowing the tears inspired by the death of a dear friend and his wife to flow. Being in the minefield of RIA office politics had given her the ability to smother her sobs to inaudible squeaks and deep breaths, but her eyes cast forth a torrent of weeping. Laserka was glad that department regulations frowned upon the wearing of mascara at the office. At least now she didn’t have to mop streaks of black left in the wake of her tears.

She could imagine Alexandronin chiding her for being so lazy and mannish about her appearance, happily giving in to regulations rather than spend a few moments beautifying herself in the morning. A chuckle broke through where sobs had been held silent and at bay. Her mentor had always been one to find the positive in life. It was a trait that the cold war veteran had developed to keep himself sane through years of Soviet oppression. The gentle memory of friendly admonishment felt like a message from the ghost of her mentor, reaching between the worlds of the living and the dead to give her a bit of comfort.

It took a few minutes for the tears to pass, toilet tissue sopping the wetness from her cheeks. Finally, Laserka took a deep breath, checked her reflection in the mirror and returned to her desk. No one paid attention to her; a pair of reading glasses swiftly perched on her nose hid her eyes somewhat. They wouldn’t have a good chance to see the redness in them. She fired up her computer again, keeping herself buried out of sight inside her drab, gray cubicle.

Laserka had paperwork on the surveillance operation to complete, and the sooner it was done, the sooner she could go back home to her Spartan apartment and mourn for her friend and mentor, preferably with a bottle of vodka. The quiet goodbye ceremony would be a proper send-off for Alexandronin and his beloved wife.

Laserka opened her notebook to enter her data into the GUI when she noticed a small warning flag on her screen. She clicked on it and opened up a new window.

“Unauthorized Web search activity, Laserka, K., scanning articles pertaining to Vitaly Alexandronin,” the pop-up declared. Laserka bit her lower lip in concern, cursing her curiosity and decrying the snoopiness of the RIA information technology team.

“Report to Supervisor Batroykin for debriefing,” a new pop-up informed her.

Batroykin was a bastard and a half, stuffed into a half-bastard-sized container, she thought. The old-school KGB veteran was five feet tall and nearly five feet in circumference, a bald little blob of rice pudding packed into a polyester tent of a cheap suit. For the illustration of the pathetic old guard who clung to the ideals that Alexandronin betrayed, Laserka didn’t have to go much farther than the bloated, multiple-chinned official.

Laserka took a damp kerchief and pressed it to her eyes to lessen the bloodshot qualities of her whites. The cool water from her glass helped to ease the burning irritation behind her lids, but not the irritant that now started to fester under her skin, the irritation of Batroykin. She frowned, looking at her eyes in the small mirror she kept in a drawer. They still looked reddened, but there was no sign that she had been crying. It was more as if she had just suffered a small allergy attack. Many of the things in her office, from the hand-sanitizing gel to shavings from her pencil sharpener could have given her eyes her current amount of discoloration.