Terrorist Dispatch

“Still doing business at the same old stand,” Brognola said.

“I’ll leave tonight, after I pick up some equipment.”

“Going to load up at the Farm?” the big Fed inquired. In addition to his Justice Department duties, Brognola was the director of the clandestine Sensitive Operations Group, based at Stony Man Farm, Virginia.

“Nope. But I’ll stock up in Virginia. It keeps things simple.”

“Glory, hallelujah. So, you’re driving up?”

“Three hours, give or take. I’ll be in town by dinnertime.”

“Bon appétit,” Brognola said.

Arlington, Virginia

VIRGINIA WAS ADMIRED or hated for its gun laws, all depending on a person’s point of view. No permit was required to purchase any firearm, or to carry one exposed within a public venue. Permits were required to carry hidden pistols—unless, of course, it was stashed in the glove compartment of a person’s car, in which case it was permissible. Background checks on out-of-state buyers was a measly five dollars, conducted by computer at the time of sale without a pesky waiting period, which made the Old Dominion State a magnet for gangbangers throughout the Northeast.

Bolan had no problem at the gun shop he selected, located in a strip mall on Washington Boulevard. He walked in with cash and a New York driver’s license in the name of Matthew Cooper, who had no arrests, convictions, or outstanding warrants listed with Virginia’s state police or the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Twenty minutes later he walked out with a Colt AR-15 carbine; a Remington Model 700 rifle chambered in .300 Magnum Winchester ammo, mounted with a Leupold Mark 4 LR/T 3.5-10 x 40 mm scope; a Remington Model 870 pump-action shotgun; a Glock 23 pistol chambered in .40 S&W ammo, plus a shoulder holster and enough spare rounds and magazines to start a war.

Which was exactly what he had in mind.

Before he started, though, he needed sustenance and information. For the food, he chose a drive-through burger joint two blocks away from the gun store, bought three cheeseburgers with everything, a chocolate shake and fries. He chowed down in the parking lot, his laptop open on the shotgun seat, and reviewed Brognola’s files, which provided background information on the outfit he was tackling.

First up was Stepan Melnyk in Manhattan’s East Village, a neighborhood known as “Little Ukraine” for its latest influx of expatriates. Melnyk was forty-five, had served time in the old country for armed assault and smuggling contraband, then came to test his mettle in a brave new world. Like most immigrant gangsters, he began by preying on his fellow countrymen, running protection rackets, muscling storeowners to carry smuggled cigarettes and liquor, anything that might have fallen off a truck on any given day. From there, he had expanded into drugs and prostitution, human trafficking, gunrunning—all the staples of an up-and-coming hardman yearning to breathe free.

His number two was thirty-five-year-old Dmytro Levytsky—“Dimo” to his friends—another ex-con from Ukraine who blamed his arrests back home on political persecution. The State Department had been mulling over his petition for asylum for the past four years, which Bolan took as evidence that they were either being paid to let him stay, or else were mentally incompetent—a possibility he couldn’t automatically rule out, based on his personal experience with members of that sage department’s staff.

Opposing Melnyk’s effort to expand was one Alexey Brusilov, lately of Brighton Beach, a Russian enclave at the southern tip of Brooklyn, on the shore of Sheepshead Bay. Most people didn’t know the bay was named for a breed of fish, not a decapitated ruminant. Mack Bolan had acquired that bit of information somewhere and it had risen to the forefront of his mind unbidden.

Brusilov was well established in his Brooklyn fiefdom, had defeated two indictments on assorted federal charges, and was well connected to the Solntsevskaya Bratva outfit based in Moscow, boasting some nine thousand members that the FBI could list by name. He was a stone-cold killer, though no one had ever proved it in a court of law, and had impressed New York’s Five Families enough to forge a treaty of collaboration with them, rather than engaging in a messy, pointless turf war that would be good for nobody. The Russian’s stock in trade was much the same as Stepan Melnyk’s: drugs and guns, women and gambling, neighborhood extortion, smuggling anyone or anything that could be packed into a semi trailer for the long haul.

Brusilov’s most able second in command was Georgy Vize, a young enforcer who was said to favor blades but didn’t mind a good old-fashioned gunfight if the odds were on his side. He was a person of interest in three unsolved murders, but willing witnesses in Brighton Beach were an endangered species. Raised from birth to mistrust the police at home, they’d had no better luck with New York’s finest on arrival in the Big Apple and mostly kept their stories to themselves.

Why stick your neck out, when the mobsters only killed each other, anyway?

And if they iced one of your neighbors by mistake, that was life.

Bolan saw opportunity in the uneasiness between Melnyk and Brusilov. It was the kind of rift that he could work with, maybe widen and exploit with careful handling, playing one side off against the other. War was bad for business in the underworld, but it was good for Bolan, just as long as he could keep the blood from slopping over onto innocents.

And that could be a problem, sure, since neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians were known for their discrimination when the bullets started to fly. Where an older generation of the Mob had certain basic rules, albeit often honored more in the breach than in the observance, Baltic gangs had more in common with outlaws from south of the border. They were full-bore savages, respecters of no one and nothing, as likely to wipe out a family as to bide their time and take down one offending member on his own.

So Bolan had his work cut out for him, and that was nothing new.

He finished off his last burger and hit the road.

Northbound on Interstate 95

THE MAIN DRAG from Washington, DC, to New York City was the I-95, a more or less straight shot for 225 miles, four hours’ steady driving at the posted legal speed.

Bolan used the travel time to think and plan, which were not necessarily the same thing. Planning was a kind of thinking, sure, but it required at least some basic information on terrain, opposing personnel, police proximity and average response time. Even weather factored in. A wild-ass warrior pulling raids with nothing in his head but hope and good intentions might as well eliminate the middleman and simply shoot himself.

Bolan’s rented Mazda CX-5 had a full tank when he started rolling north from Washington, meaning he wouldn’t have to stop along the way. He wore the Glock and had his long guns on the floor behind the driver’s seat, concealed inside a cheap golf bag he’d bought in Arlington, midway between the gun shop and the burger joint. The small crossover SUV had GPS and cruise control, two less things for him to think about while he was looking forward to the shitstorm in New York.

Brognola’s digital files included various addresses and phone numbers, both for Melnyk’s gang and Brusilov’s, along with photos of the major players on both sides. Bolan could find their homes and hangouts when he needed to, plot them on Google Maps and make his final recon when he reached the target sites, to maximize results and minimize civilian risks. An app on Bolan’s smartphone had the city’s precinct houses plotted for easy reference and made him wonder, as he always did, how seventy-seven patrol districts wound up being numbered 1 through 123.

Go figure.

He had certain basic limitations, going in. Bolan’s weapon selection in Virginia covered close assaults and sniping from a distance, but he’d had no access to explosives or Class III weapons: full-auto, suppressors and so on. He could absolutely work with what he had and make it count, but tools dictated tactics on the battlefield, as much as the terrain and numbers on the opposition’s side.

The good news: Bolan had a built-in conflict he could work with, Russians and Ukrainians reflecting the eternal strife between their homelands. They had lit the fuse already. Bolan’s challenge was to keep it sizzling, fan the flames and do his utmost to direct the final blast so that it damaged only those deserving retribution.

Making things more difficult, while waging war on two fronts, was the fact that Bolan also had to gather intel on Stepan Melnyk’s connection to the massacre in Washington. If the man had supplied the tools, as Hal suspected, was it strictly business, a labor of love, or a mixture of both?

Behind that question lurked a larger one. The conflict in Ukraine had been confused from the beginning, talking heads on television squabbling over whether Russia planned the whole thing as a power play or simply took advantage of a split within its former subject country. On the ground inside Ukraine and in Crimea, both sides longed for US intervention to assist in the destruction of their enemies, but military aid had been withheld so far, as much because of gridlock in DC as obvious concern about the right or wrong of it.

Could the attack in Washington have been a false flag operation? Viewed from one perspective, it made sense: unleash a handful of Ukrainian fanatics in the US capital, to swing the people and the government against their side. Whether America weighed in against the rebels overseas with military force or simply closed its eyes to Russia’s not-so-covert moves against them, the result would be identical, handing the independence movement yet another grim defeat.

That wasn’t Bolan’s problem, on the face of it. He couldn’t solve the troubles in Ukraine that dated back to sixteen-hundred-something, any more than he could cure the common cold. Bolan was not a diplomat, much less a peacekeeper. He was a man of war—The Executioner—and he had a specific job to do, first in New York, then following the bloody bread crumbs eastward, settling accounts as he proceeded.

By the time Bolan got to Newark, he had a sequence of events in mind. It was a plan of sorts, but flexible, bearing in mind that things would start to shift and change the moment that he squeezed a trigger for the first time. Nothing would be static, much less guaranteed. The battle would unfold, and Bolan would be swept along with it, correcting course whenever he could manage to, otherwise going with the flow until it crested and the losers drowned in blood.

It was familiar territory. Names and faces changed, but otherwise it felt like coming home.

2

East Village, Manhattan

The hub of Ukrainian culture in New York City—known for decades as “Little Ukraine”—was located in the neighborhood of East Village. An estimated sixty thousand immigrants inhabited the area immediately after World War II, and while that population dispersed throughout Manhattan’s five boroughs over time, two-thirds of the city’s eighty thousand ethnic Ukrainians still remained in the old neighborhood, with its familiar markets, restaurants and shops, dwelling in the shadows cast by All Saints Ukrainian Orthodox Church and St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Like any other group of new arrivals, from the first European colonists to the latest Hispanic and Afro-Caribbean waves, the vast majority of Ukrainian immigrants were hardworking, law-abiding individuals with nothing on their minds except adapting to the land of opportunity. And just as certainly, a small minority were criminals at home, maintaining that tradition in the country they had adopted.

Mack Bolan had his sights fixed on that clique, as he launched his campaign in Little Ukraine on a crisp autumn evening, around the dinner hour.

His target, chosen from the list Hal Brognola had provided, was a restaurant on East Sixth Street, halfway down toward Avenue B. The place was called The Hungry Wolf, known as a favored hangout for the thugs who served Stepan Melnyk. Bolan’s drive-by recon had revealed that the restaurant was closed to walk-in diners for a private party. Two men on the door guaranteed that no tourists wandered in by accident.

Was it a celebration of the carnage in DC? Some kind of session called to lay out future strategy? Or did the outfit gather periodically to let off steam after a hard week of extortion in the neighborhood?

No matter. They were in for a surprise, regardless of the reason for their banquet.

Bolan perched atop a seven-story office building opposite The Hungry Wolf, with a clear view inside the restaurant through two large plate-glass windows. Peering through the Leupold sight mounted on his Remington bolt-action rifle, he felt almost like a guest invited to the party, moving in among the four-and six-man tables, touching-close but unseen by the men whose night he meant to spoil.

For some, it would be their last night on Earth.

The Model 700 was not designed with war in mind, though Remington did sell a special “Entry Package” model for urban police departments, and the US Army had adopted an altered version, dubbed the M24 Sniper Weapon System in military speak, for long-range use in combat. Bolan’s civilian version held four .300 Winchester Magnum rounds, one in the chamber and three in a round-hinged floorplate magazine. Its barrel measured twenty-four inches and could send a 220-grain bullet downrange at a velocity of 2,850 feet per second, striking with 3,908 foot-pounds of cataclysmic energy.

All good news for a sniper on the go.

Bolan had been in place awhile, spotting the restaurant’s arrivals as they entered, scanning faces already seated at tables when he took his post. Stepan Melnyk was nowhere to be seen, but Dmytro Levytsky was making the rounds, slapping shoulders and laughing at jokes from his soldiers, here and there bending to whisper in ears. A maître d’ in a tuxedo loitered on the sidelines, muttering to waiters as they passed, dispersing drinks and appetizers. No one on the staff looked happy to be there, but they were working quietly, efficiently, focused entirely on the task at hand, avoiding eye contact with any of their customers.

Bolan did not plan a sustained attack, his first time out, but he had four spare cartridges lined up beside him on the rooftop for a quick reload if time allowed. The shooting would be loud, and there’d be no mistaking it for anything mundane, such as a vehicle’s backfire in the street. Once he began, there’d be no stopping until Bolan disengaged and fled the scene, hopefully well ahead of any armed pursuit.

He scoped the two hardmen on the entrance first, decided not to kill them yet, and let the Leupold scope take him inside The Hungry Wolf. He felt like one himself, at times, when it was time to thin the herd of savages who preyed on so-called civilized society. He wasn’t bloodthirsty and hadn’t killed out of anger since the first strike that avenged his family, many years ago, but there was no denying that eliminating vicious predators lifted a weight from Bolan’s soul, if only temporarily.

So many goons, so little time.

He chose a laughing face at random, framed it with the Leupold’s reticle, inhaled and let half of the breath escape as he began the trigger squeeze.

* * *

AT FIRST, DIMO LEVYTSKY thought some stupid tweaker high on meth had lost his mind and tossed a rock or something through the broad front window of The Hungry Wolf. It took another second for his brain to wrap around the fact that Trofim Kulik’s bald head had exploded, spraying blood and brains in all directions as he toppled forward, headless, into his eggplant mezhivo.

Even as the others at his table were recoiling, reaching for their sidearms, Levytsky saw a second bullet crack the window, this one bringing down a goodly portion of the clean plate glass. Round two drilled Marko Shestov’s pudgy neck and almost took his head off, severing the arteries and loosing crimson jets that might have made Levytsky laugh in other circumstances, thinking of a whacked-out Rain Bird sprinkler.

But Levytsky wasn’t laughing as he hit the carpet, reaching up to push over his table, which gave him at least some flimsy cover, while his free hand fumbled for the Colt .380 Mustang XSP pistol he carried tucked beneath his belt, around in back. It wasn’t easy, going for a quick draw with his right arm underneath him, as he was scared to rise and make a target of himself.

The rifle’s third shot—it could only be a sniper, the Ukrainian had concluded—made a wet sound slapping into flesh, as more voices raised in snarls and curses from the restaurant around him. He could hear somebody puking, hoped it was a waiter or the maître d’ and not one of his soldiers publicly embarrassing himself.

Levytsky had no idea where the sniper was firing from, but since his lookouts on the street weren’t firing back, he took for granted that it had to be someplace high up and out of pistol range. Or maybe his two spotters, skinny Sasha and fat Illia, had already split, fleeing to save themselves. It was a damned pain in the ass finding decent help these days.

Levytsky gave up on the Colt, useless for any kind of long-range work, and fished out his cell phone instead. Job one was to inform his boss of what was happening, in case the rifleman was part of something bigger, threatening the brotherhood. He hit speed dial and waited while a fourth shot took out half the second street-side window, drilling someone who began to howl in agony, as if a real-life hungry wolf was gnawing on his leg.

It rang once at the other end, then twice, three times, and someone picked up midway through the fourth ring, growling, “Yeah?” Levytsky knew he should have recognized the voice but couldn’t place it with the world collapsing all around him.

“Put the boss on!” he commanded.

“Who is this?”

“Dimo, you dumb shit! Go get him! Now!”

“Okay.”

Levytsky thought the shooting might have stopped—maybe the sniper figured out he ought to cut and run—but then a fifth shot came, just as a deep, familiar voice came on the line, asking him, “Dimo? What the hell?”

“They’re killing us down here!” he said. “You hear this?”

Levytsky raised his cell phone aloft, above the capsized table, actually praying for a sixth shot now, so that Stepan Melnyk wouldn’t mistake him for a drunken ass. The shot came, answering his silent prayer, but not as he had expected.

When the phone exploded in his hand, it sent a hard jolt all the way to the Ukrainian’s shoulder, as if some big ape had struck his forearm with a baseball bat. He yelped and yanked his arm back, half expecting that his wrist would be a bloody stump, but all five fingers wiggled at him when he tried them. Nothing broken, no blood on his hand or sleeve.

It was a freaking miracle—or damned good shooting on the sniper’s part.

Huddled on the floor behind his fragile barricade, Levytsky asked himself, who was this guy?

* * *

BOLAN LEFT HIS brass behind when he departed from the rooftop, one shell anchoring a slip of paper to prevent a breeze from snatching it away before somebody found the sniper’s nest. That done, the Remington tucked more or less beneath the knee-length raincoat he wore, the Executioner cleared the rooftop access door and hurried down the service stairs to reach the back entrance to the ground floor.

Two minutes later, he was back inside the Mazda CX-5, left waiting for him in the alley behind the office block, and rolling out of there. Bolan turned away from Sixth Street without passing by The Hungry Wolf to judge the impact of his rifle fire. He’d killed five men and used one round to spook Levytsky when he’d raised a cell phone from behind his upturned table, either snapping photos on the fly or letting someone on the line hear Bolan’s shots to make a point. The raised sleeve of the underboss’s sky blue jacket had been unmistakable.

One target down, a stone tossed into Stepan Melnyk’s pond, and Bolan knew the ripples would be spreading even now. His next mark, chosen at the same time he had picked The Hungry Wolf, was the Flame, a nightclub that advertised Ukrainian cuisine, a wide range of flavored vodkas and a waitstaff dressed in traditional peasant garb. The Flame’s backroom casino was not advertised in any guidebook, telephone directory or tourist flyer, but the players tracked it down by word of mouth. It was, of course, illegal in Manhattan, but it stayed in operation somehow, almost certainly because police were greased to look the other way.

Bolan did a quick recon on the place and found its two back doors: one for deliveries of various supplies, the other for a hasty exit from the gaming room, in case a miracle occurred and law-enforcement agents came to raid the joint. Both doors were locked from the inside, of course, but that was no impediment.

For this job, Bolan switched out Remingtons, taking the 12-gauge with its 7-round magazine and an eighth round in the chamber, three deer slugs to start with, and the other five double-aught buck. It was a guaranteed door-buster and man-stopper. He had the Glock for backup, in a shoulder rig, and three spare magazines.

He wore a baseball cap and kept his head down for the camera out back, as there was no point in giving anything away this early in the game. Bolan took out the raid door’s hinges first, two one-ounce chunks of rifled lead shearing through masonry and metal. By the time he blew the dead bolt out, the door was ready to collapse, and all he had to do was stand aside.

The shotgun blasts had sparked a panic in the Flame’s casino, setting off a stampede toward the main saloon and dining room. That suited Bolan perfectly. He didn’t want civilians in the line of fire, if there were Melnyk soldiers on the premises.

He crossed the threshold in a rush, through gun smoke, following the shotgun’s lead. A handful of the nightspot’s well-dressed gamblers were jammed together at the normal exit, those who had preceded them causing a hubbub in the main part of the club as they ran through, men babbling, women squealing out of fright. Behind them, shepherding the stragglers, stood two thugs with pistols in their hands.

Security.

The man on Bolan’s left noticed him first and raised his shiny automatic pistol, hoping he’d have time to aim. The Remington was faster, perforating the goon with buckshot from a range of forty feet. The guy was airborne in a millisecond, hurtling backward, slamming hard against a wall and sliming it with blood as he went down.

His partner broke for cover, squeezing off a hasty shot that wound up somewhere in the ceiling, diving for the roulette table. Bolan dropped and met him with another charge of buckshot as he landed on the carpet, firing through the open space between the table’s heavy, ornate legs.

Bad move.

Counting the seconds in his head, waiting for other shooters to appear, Bolan spotted a satchel underneath the dice table immediately to his right. He checked it—empty—and began collecting wads of cash the panicked players had abandoned in their flight. A second table added to the haul. Not great. That made it something like eleven grand, but it would help as stage-setting and added to Bolan’s war chest.

He was all about sustainable campaigns.

No slip of paper was left behind this time. He didn’t want to overdo it, and he was swiftly running out of time. Out front, somebody would be on the phone, likely to Stepan Melnyk rather than the cops, and syndicate response time might top that of the police.

A moment later he was out, jogging to reach his car and get away from there, seeking the next stop on his list.

* * *

“SAY WHAT, AGAIN?”

Stepan Melnyk could not believe his ears. He had to hear Dimo Levytsky say it one more time.

“The guy left a note, up on the roof he shot from, across the street. Our blue friend let me see it.”