Cold War Reprise

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.

Bolan kicked the machine pistol out of the stunned man’s hand, skittering the weapon wildly across the tile floor. Belkin reached up and grabbed Bolan’s belt. The soldier responded with the heavy trapezoidal wedge of the Desert Eagle’s muzzle, lashing it across the man’s jaw. Having incapacitated the last of the conspiratorial gunmen, Bolan holstered the Desert Eagle and rushed to the closest mine.

The Executioner had hoped for a control lever that would allow him to disarm the explosive, but the enemy had sabotaged the mines’ control panels. The disengage mechanism had been destroyed.

Plan two, Bolan thought. The destructive power of the mines wasn’t a factor of the amount of explosives in them, but a mechanism of the fact that their concentrated fuel was dispersed through the atmosphere in an aerosol suspension that made the oxygen in the air into additional reactant for the secondary spark. By denying a large area of combustible air to the devices, they could be significantly defanged. It would require an airtight, heavy steel container to minimize the blasts.

Luckily, the refrigerated, hermetically sealed body-storage drawers in the morgue were exactly what Bolan needed. He shoved the mine into one shelf and swung the heavy steel door shut, snapping down the locking bolt. There was a brief sigh from the metal panel as the cabinet sealed itself, the airtight closure sucking into place.

“What…what’s hap…” the woman said, finally able to speak and move after her ordeal. Bolan scooped up a second mine from the tile floor.

“You need to get out of here,” Bolan ordered. “These are bombs.”

The morgue worker’s eyes widened. “Those drawers are under negative air pressure.”

Bolan paused for a half step. “Can you kill the ventilation?”

He continued his quick rush to stow the bombs away, parking the second mine into another empty storage drawer. Again, the door slammed shut, the locking bolt snapping into place just before the hiss of the air seal slurped the door tightly closed.

The woman limped toward a wall panel. She was bleeding from the forehead where the skin had been split, and it was likely that she had suffered head trauma when the Russian had struck her. “Ventilation shutoff…”

Bolan hauled the last thermic mine into his grasp and saw that there were no more empty shelves. He rushed to one of the sliding drawers where a dead Russian lay, his body riddled with bullet holes. Bolan grabbed the corpse under the arm and dragged him off the metal sliding slab. A spill on the floor would likely contaminate whatever evidence was on the body. If the mine detonated, it would kill dozens of people in the halls outside of the morgue.

The corpse flopped on the tile and Bolan shoved the mine in place. Slam! Latch! Hiss! Sealed.

Bolan spun away from the wall and dived toward the emergency ventilation cutoff. He punched the button hard enough to open a laceration on his palm, and the whole morgue seemed to gasp as if it were a living creature. Bolan scooped the woman into his arms and tucked her tightly into the corner, using his broad back to shield her. He’d equalized the pressure in his ears before firing the first shot from his bellowing Desert Eagle, so any explosion wouldn’t rupture his eardrums. He hoped that his body was enough to shield the morgue attendant, his hands cupped over her ears to protect them.

Belkin moved groggily, reaching for the handgun tucked under his coveralls. “Fucking…interloper…”

Those were the conspirator’s final words. If he had a thought behind them, it was cut off. The whole wall of the morgue devoted to body storage shook as if a train had crashed into the building. The hatches that contained the bombs were torn off of their hinges. One of them pulverized Belkin as it rocketed off, powered by the force of the explosive mine. The concussion wave bleeding off the wall hurled bodies to the floor, both the living and the dead. Bolan and his charge had been lifted off their feet by the heaving wall, but the soldier twisted so that the morgue attendant was cushioned by his body.

The storage drawers had done their job perfectly. Despite the wreckage wrought by their blasted hatches and a few fluttering pieces of burning paperwork that had been stored too close to the wall, the murderous power of the bombs had been smothered.

Bolan helped the woman to her feet, one hand under the back of her head to keep her stable. “Are you all right?”

“I’m Annette Brideshead,” she answered, large brown eyes blurry and unfocused. “I’m the medical examiner in charge of this shift.”

Bolan supported her, sliding his arm under her shoulder to keep her upright. Obviously she was mentally disconnected, not answering the question offered. “Can you walk?”

Brideshead’s unfocused eyes danced across Bolan’s face. He knew that her head would be wobbly atop her neck if he hadn’t been holding her. “I’m forty-five years old. I’ve been walking most of…Oh, dear.”

Bolan turned and saw that the leader of the cleanup crew was sandwiched between a storage hatch and the twisted wreckage of an autopsy table. At least Bolan assumed it was the leader. The ragged, bloody stump of a neck was all that remained above the shoulders. “Sorry for the mess, Annette.”

“The doors…You said those were bombs. Poison gas doesn’t act like that when it’s released, does it?” Brideshead inquired.

“Not gas, not like you thought. But it was good that you shut down the negative air pressure in the drawers,” Bolan replied. He didn’t want to think of the destruction that would have occurred if the aerosolized fuel had spread to the ventilation system, sucked up by the intake valves.

A policeman, the one Bolan had joked with only moments before, entered. He had a Glock 17 in hand and was ready for action. The bobby relaxed upon seeing Bolan ministering to Brideshead. “I thought you were only kidding about rocket launchers.”

Bolan looked around the corpse-strewed, blast-shaken morgue. He sat Brideshead down and folded his jacket to cushion her head. “Someone didn’t want me looking at the bodies stored here.”

“Haven’t these chaps heard of court orders?” the bobby asked as he holstered his pistol.

“That’s not the way these people operate,” Bolan replied. “Are there paramedics on the way?”

“Yes. Was that you that gave me mate a straw in the neck?” the officer asked.

“Headless over there crushed his trachea. He all right?” Bolan asked.

“Well, he was already laying down when the building bounced. He’s mighty thankful to you, Agent Cooper,” the cop said. Looking around at the mess, he sighed. “And for saving the rest of us from a right nasty bump, I’m adding my thanks, too.”

Bolan nodded in appreciation. “The sad thing is, I’m not done here.”

The British cop chuckled. “If it’s all the same, I won’t go running to any Russian restaurants for a while, Mr. Mafiya task force member.”

Bolan managed a weak smile for the officer. He patted the notebook in his pocket, unable to keep such a promise.

I T HAD TAKEN HOURS for Bolan to be cleared after the battle of the morgue. It took that long for the London Metropolitan police to be convinced of the order of events, especially the slicing open of the windpipe of a fellow officer, even with a crushed trachea. It also took that much time for the lawmen to return Bolan’s Desert Eagle, not that the Executioner hadn’t had spares stored back at his safehouse.

At least Bolan got a couple of mugs of coffee out of the interview process, which he followed up with an order of fish and chips to fill his empty stomach. Bolan tossed a French fry out the car window and picked up his PDA, dialing the Farm.

“Talked your way out of another mess, Striker?” Hal Brognola’s voice came over the line. Brognola was the director of the Sensitive Operations Group, based at Stony Man Farm, Virginia.

“Can’t go running to Daddy every time I stub my toe. I handled it,” Bolan replied. “I suppose Aaron let you in on my progress so far.”

“Two gun battles in less than twenty-four hours. He couldn’t keep me out of the loop after that. I’m sorry, Striker, but as much as you want to keep this away from government interference, this has become an issue of national security,” the big Fed told him.

“What have you picked up on this thing?” Bolan inquired.

“The two faces you sent Aaron belong to Spetsnaz troopers reported killed in action by the Russian Department of Defense,” Brognola stated. “Officially, you didn’t kill anyone.”

“So I’m fighting the Special Forces of the living dead?” Bolan asked. He couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “I knew the trend in horror movies was for smarter and faster walking dead, but they’re as much corpses as I am, Hal.”

“Now they really are dead.” Brognola sighed. “Of course, you remember your friends in Russian Intelligence.”

“Friends for real, Hal?” Bolan asked. “I’m a little too tired for wordplay.”

“No. Real friends,” Brognola emphasized. “A Russian Intel operative named Kaya Laserka just avoided being killed by a couple of thugs.”

“Laserka? She was Alexandronin’s trainee and partner. Did she get an e-mail from Vitaly?”

“Apparently so. She reported the incident and a friendly operator to Stony Man gave the report to us,” Brognola said. “She couldn’t get directly involved, and I don’t want to compromise her identity.”

“A friendly Russian agent?” Bolan asked. That lifted his mood some. “And a woman, so that really doesn’t narrow things down. Where is she?”

“Well, she’s holed up in her apartment for now. She was given a quick ‘how-to’ on going to ground. Barb gave her the lesson.”

“Barb” was Barbara Price, mission controller at Stony Man.

“And my description, so she doesn’t put a bullet in my head?” Bolan asked.

“Yes. I’ve got a flight for you leaving in two hours,” Brognola said.

“Get me one around midnight, Hal,” Bolan requested. “I’ve got one or two more stops to make here in London.”

“Damn it, Striker. What now?” Brognola complained.

“One of the men who was sent to kill Vitaly got away last night,” Bolan said. “He’s the only living witness that I have to what’s going on. I need some answers.”

“And you can’t let a guilty party stroll away from a murder attempt on a friend,” Brognola added.

“If I can’t protect the people who I care about, I can at least make certain that those who meant them harm get the punishment they deserve,” Bolan said.

“Does it quiet the ghosts?” Brognola asked.

“It placates my guilt,” Bolan answered. “Some.”

“All right. The plane will wait as long as it takes for you to show up, Striker. It’s a private charter, so he can delay for you,” Brognola told him. “Good hunting.”

“Thanks, Hal,” Bolan said. He closed the PDA, fired up the engine and drove toward the next battle in his War Everlasting.

K AYA L ASERKA PUT the phone down after the call from the woman named Barbara. She had arranged for a hotel room, quietly, and informed Laserka to expect to meet with a man who went by the identity of FBI Agent Matt Cooper. The Russian woman didn’t like that idea. “There was one man, several years ago. His name was Belasko.”

“You’ll find that Cooper is everything you’re expecting from Belasko,” Price told her.

“Everything?” Laserka inquired. “I doubt that anyone could match the man I knew. All right, what does Cooper look like?”

“Six three, black hair, powerful build,” Price rattled off.

“And cold blue eyes?” Laserka asked.

“Exactly.”

Laserka smiled, recognizing the general appearance of the man she had known as Belasko. “He’ll do fine, then.”

“I’m glad we understand each other,” Price replied. “Don’t worry. Help is on the way.”

Laserka packed a bag, slipping her Makarov back onto her belt’s inside-the-waistband holster. She draped her sweater over the handgun’s butt to conceal it, then she tucked another weapon, a tiny Glock 26, into her purse. She added two spare 15-shot magazines originally designed for the slightly larger Glock 19. Technically, the tiny Austrian pistol was considered a better design than her trusted old Makarov, smaller in length and height, chambered for a more powerful cartridge, and holding eleven shots. Still, the Russian Mak was flat, and its butt had room for all of her fingers on its comfortable grip. It just felt nicer than the teeny Glock. The 9 mm Mak had never let her down. Laserka knew sentimentality toward a tool meant to keep her alive was considered foolish, but she had an attachment that translated into comfort and superior skill.