Shadow Strike

“Chuck, we’ve got a reading that the damn door is wide open,” a man growled in annoyance. “Check it, and see if that idiot Bobby dropped something in the jamb again, will ya.”

Touching the throat mike, Bolan grunted in reply. Ahead of him a door opened and a man stepped into the corridor, a case of U.S. Army HEAT rounds cradled in his arms.

He gasped at the sight of Bolan and dropped the case to go for a mini-Uzi holstered on his hip. The Executioner stroked the trigger of the Beretta and the weapon fired, the sound suppressor reducing the report to a discreet cough. The man fell back into infinity, his brains splattered across the brick wall.

“The damn door is still open!” the voice said as the radio crackled. “What the fuck are you two morons doing up there?”

Up there, eh? Thanks for the directions, Bolan thought, stepping into the room. It was filled with wall shelves packed solid with cases of Glaser Sure-Kill, Navy SEAL Daisy Cutters, Black Talon cop killers and Army HEAT rounds, all strictly illegal for civilian use. Especially the high-explosive armor-piercing tracers. There was even an empty carrying case for an HK XM-25. Now, that was real trouble.

Pulling a cigarette pack from his jacket pocket, Bolan pulled off the arming strip, then slapped the disguised explosive charge against the middle case of HEAT rounds. Those would do the most damage when the plastic-wrapped wad of C-4 detonated.

Checking the next room, Bolan found it full of crates of U.S. Army M-16 assault rifles, M-79 grenade launchers, and several cases of mixed hand grenades. He primed a second pack of cigarettes.

Taking a couple of HE grenades, Bolan dropped them into a pocket. Turrin had been right, and wrong. This wasn’t just a supply depot for the local Mob, but a major league black-market weapons dealer. Now, Bolan was eager to find Tiffany and discover exactly what had happened that made him increase security to this level.

“If you two assholes are fucking the new girl instead of standing your post, the boss is going to feed your balls into a fucking woodchipper!” the voice on the radio said furiously. “Now, answer me right fucking now, you losers!”

Too late for that, Bolan thought, removing the safety tape from around the handle of a flash-bang stun grenade. He yanked the pin free and tossed the sphere up the corridor toward the strip club. It landed directly on the back of the unconscious guard and rolled into the alcove.

Turning away, Bolan sprinted for distance. A few seconds later there was a thunderous explosion and a blinding flash. Instantly, every fire alarm started to howl, then white foam gushed from sprinklers in the ceiling.

“Red alert,” a woman said calmly over a speaker inside the drop ceiling. “We have an explosion in section 12. Repeat, explosion in 12. Everybody topside clear the club and seal the doors. Allow nobody access. Nobody!”

“Mr. Tiffany, I sent Harry to get a crate of grenades,” a man said over the radio. “The blast might have been him, sir.”

“That old drunk?” another man growled. “If the asshole is still alive, shoot him in the head! Now clear the club and seal the doors! The last thing I want is a bunch of firemen charging in here!”

The voice was low and throaty, almost garbled, and Bolan couldn’t tell if it was from a man, a woman, or computer-generated. But that fit the description of Mike Tiffany.

“No problem, sir!” the man replied promptly.

Satisfied that all the civilians would soon be gone, Bolan sprinted for the end of the corridor. From this point onward, anybody else he encountered should be an employee of the arms dealer, and fair game.

Reaching the end of the corridor, Bolan paused before an elevator, frowned, then stepped through an open doorway that led to a stairwell. Even over the fire alarm, he could hear several people running up the steps. Pulling out another grenade, he left on the safety tape and simply dropped it over the railing. The sphere hit the metal steps below with a ringing crash, then started bouncing along, impelled by gravity and inertia. A few seconds later, the unseen men began shouting curses, then running away fast.

Pulling out a second grenade, Bolan started to remove the safety tape, then heard a sound from behind. Dropping the grenade, he drew the Beretta and pivoted at the hip.

A large man in a yellow raincoat was running down the corridor, working the pump action on a 12-gauge shotgun. Instantly, the Executioner fired twice, the double report lost in the clamor of the alarm.

The shotgun discharged harmlessly into the wall as the first round knocked it aside, then the man jerked backward as the second 9 mm bullet punched a neat black hole in his forehead. Slowly, he crumpled to the floor and lay down as if going to sleep.

Suddenly, the soldier heard the sound of people running up the stairs again. This time, Bolan pulled the pin on an HE grenade, counted to three, then dropped the bomb over the railing. The metallic sphere hit the stairs with a hard metallic ring, and somebody cursed.

“Grenade!” a man yelled.

“Ignore it!” another countered gruffly. “That last one wasn’t even live!”

A split-second later, a violent explosion filled the stairwell, and fiery chunks of human remains vomited into view. A smoking hand still holding a gun smacked into the concrete wall, and a tattered shoe arched over the railing to land in the corridor.

Quickly starting down the stairs, Bolan hopped over the grisly remains of the guards and kept moving. Unfortunately, he could feel the stairs swaying, and cursed the fact that the builder had merely attached them to the wall with pinions and wires, instead of anchoring them properly to the masonry with thick steel bolts. Now there was a chance that the staircase would tumble to the bottom level with him on it. However, the elevator was a guaranteed death trap, so he had no choice.

Increasing his speed, Bolan holstered the Beretta, using both hands to steady his hasty progress down the shuddering stairs. Pinions were ripping free from the wall moorings, the support cables lashing about like insane snakes, hissing as they whipped through the air. He was hit twice in the back, his life saved by the Threat Level IV body armor under his jacket. Then he caught a cable across the face. The sharp pain blurred his vision for a moment, and he tasted blood, but kept moving. Speed was his only defense now.

As he neared bottom, the last flight of stairs gave a low groan and twisted sideways, closely followed by a horrible crashing sound that steadily built in volume and power.

Jumping the last eight feet, Bolan hit the floor in a crouch and dived at the exit. The fire door resisted for a second, and just for a moment the soldier thought this was the end. Then the portal crashed open and he half fell onto soft carpeting. A split second later, a deafening avalanche of stairs, cables, stays and corpses arrived, blocking the doorway completely as it formed a ghastly pile of debris.

As Bolan started to rise, a dozen armed men charged into view from around a corner. Drawing the Beretta 93-R, the soldier emptied the magazine into the group. Faces disappeared, and hot blood splashed the wall as the chests of the guards were torn open under the barrage.

Dropping the magazine, Bolan slammed a fresh one home as a second group of gunners appeared. But these men were carrying M-16 assault rifles and wearing body armor.

As the guards paused at the sight of the carnage, Bolan threw himself to the floor and quickly shifted targets. Firing 9 mm rounds across their exposed knees, he brought them down screaming and cursing, white bones and gore erupting from the hideous wounds.

Rolling to a new position, Bolan drew the Desert Eagle and stroked the trigger. The big bore handcannon boomed louder than doomsday in the enclosed confines of the hall, the muzzle-flame extending for almost a foot from the pitted maw of the oversize weapon.

The head of the first man simply broke apart, his life gone in a microsecond of high-powered annihilation. Then the nose of the second man vanished, just before the back of his head exploded, the men behind him caught in the spray of bones and brains.

Temporarily blinded by the gory material, the other guards rubbed at their faces and fired back randomly, mostly hitting the floors and ceiling, and occasionally one another.

Constantly moving and shooting, Bolan continued to ruthlessly exterminate each of them, one after another, until the corridor was again empty.

Swiftly reloading both his weapons, Bolan took this opportunity to press the button on the remote detonator clipped to his shoulder holster, then toss the device away.

Moving onward, the soldier stayed low and close to the walls, gunning down everybody he saw carrying a weapon, as well as every security camera that came into view.

Pausing at an intersection, he fired the Desert Eagle into the ceiling, dislodging several foam acoustical tiles to expose raw concrete and several thick power cables. He grunted at the sight. Those would lead either directly to the power room or to Tiffany. A fifty-fifty chance. He went to the right.

Sure enough, at the far end of the corridor, Bolan saw a group of men with military weapons clustered around an unmarked door. As they turned, Bolan shot the two men in front, then dived to the side. Caught by surprise, the guards took a moment to fire back, their assault rifles sending a fiery maelstrom of steel-jacketed lead along the corridor. But Bolan was already safely behind the corner, and unwrapping a grenade.

“Surrender or die!” he yelled, yanking out the arming pin and releasing the safety lever.

“Fuck you, cop!” somebody snarled in reply. “Come and get us!”

As the guards cut loose with another barrage, much longer this time, Bolan threw the military sphere as hard as he could at the opposite wall. It bounced off the bricks and went around the corner.

A man cursed, another screamed, then the antipersonnel grenade detonated in the air, sending out a hellish corona of stainless-steel fléchettes. Just for a second, Bolan heard the hiss of their trajectory, then there was only silence.

Pulling a mirrored dental probe from his inside pocket, he glanced around the corner to check the damage. There were tattered bodies in sight, but none remotely resembled human beings anymore, just piles of ground meat in cheap suits. Then he spotted a disembodied arm holding an XM-15. Bolan scooped it up and slung the deadly weapon across his back.

Stepping over the ragged corpses, the soldier heard one of the mutilated men give a low groan, and he quickly fired a mercy round from the Beretta to end the torment. Just then, the overhead lights went out, casting the corridor in near absolute blackness.

Cracking open a chemical glow stick, Bolan tossed it onto the bodies, then blew off the lock to the office door with a single booming round from the .50 Desert Eagle. The thundering rip of an auto-shotgun answered, a dozen cartridges discharged in a single, continuous volley.

Even before it stopped, Bolan tossed in an unprimed grenade. The bomb hit the carpet and rolled out of sight. He heard a man curse vehemently, and swung around the jamb.

Standing behind a huge wooden desk was a short bald man, a tailored silk shirt almost unable to contain his amazingly muscular frame. He appeared to be made out of nothing but bulging muscles and scar tissue. On the brick wall were several certificates from local charities, and a framed picture of the short man standing with his arm around the recently elected congressman who was rumored to be in the pockets of organized crime. Tiffany was clean-shaved, and had a puckered scar across his throat where a Jamaican drug lord had tried to behead him and failed. That was what gave the arms dealer his characteristic growl for a voice.

“What the fuck…a fake!” Tiffany snarled, dropping the spent drum of the Atchisson and reaching for another from a pile on the desk.

“Don’t do it, Mike,” Bolan said softly.

Tiffany froze with his hand less than an inch from the ammunition drum. Slowly, he looked up to squint into the darkness.

A long moment passed, then he curled his lips into a snarl and tossed away the Atchisson. It landed with a clatter on the carpeting, right next to the smoking ruin of a computer. The cover was off, and an electric stun gun was resting inside the complex wiring, molten plastic dribbling from the hard drive onto the floor.

“Okay, you got me, feeb,” Tiffany growled, raising both hands. “But you took too long, and my computer has bizarrely crashed.” He grinned as if he had just won the battle. “Now, read me my rights and call me a fucking lawyer.”

“Okay, you’re a fucking lawyer.”

Tiffany scowled. “What was that?”

“I’m not with the FBI,” Bolan stated, cracking alive another glow stick while advancing. “And I’m not here for your records, or to arrest anybody.”

“That so?” Tiffany muttered. “Well, you sure aren’t here to zap me, or else you would have tossed in a live grenade.”

Biding his time, Bolan said nothing, letting the arms dealer work out the details for himself. Interrogation was an art, not a science.

“You don’t really think I’m going to rat out my contacts for a shorter jail sentence?” Tiffany barked in a cold laugh.

“Mad Mike, the Brooklyn Terror? That possibility never even entered my mind,” Bolan stated honestly, pressing the hot barrel of the Colt against the man’s cheek.

The skin sizzled at the contact, but aside from a slight furrowing of his brow, Tiffany gave no indication that he felt anything. Finally, Bolan removed the weapon.

“Okay, now that you’ve had fun, what the fuck do you want?” the dealer demanded, rubbing the spot with his fingertips. “Money? I can get you that. More than you can spend in a dozen lifetimes!”

“Wrong again, Michael,” Bolan whispered, making the other man strain to hear the words. This was an old interrogation technique that almost always worked.

“Weapons?” Tiffany snorted in disdain. “You didn’t have to ace half my staff to cut a deal for some guns! What do ya want? Stinger missiles, C-4 satchel charges? I can even get you a PEP laser, if you give me a week.”

Bolan had started to speak when he saw Tiffany’s eyes widen in delight. Instantly, the soldier’s combat instincts flared and he spun out of the way with both guns blazing.

A big man stood in the doorway, aiming an M-16 assault rifle. He stumbled backward from the triphammer impact of the .50-caliber round from the Desert Eagle ricocheting off his chest, the shirt tearing to reveal body armor. Then the triburst of 9 mm rounds from the Beretta walked across the man, tearing away more cloth, then punching through flesh and bone.

As the riddled man fell, the M-16 cut loose a wild hellstorm of 5.56 mm cartridges, then the M-23 grenade launcher shoved beneath the barrel boomed, the 40 mm shell shooting harmlessly down the hallway.

Before the concussion stopped, Bolan spun and fired the Desert Eagle again.

Caught with his hand in a drawer, Tiffany shrieked in pain as the top of the desk exploded into splinters. He jerked back his arm, his wrist bristling with slivers. “Son of a bitch!” he snarled.

Kicking aside a chair, Bolan went around the desk and yanked open the drawer. Inside was a sleek, black Glock machine pistol and several ammunition clips.

“Now, I thought we had an understanding, Michael,” Bolan said, dropping the magazine of the Desert Eagle to slam in a fresh one.

Watching the magazine fall to floor, Tiffany went pale. “Okay, okay! Sure, no problem, we got a deal!” he replied, backing away until he was flat against the wall. “Ask away. Whatever you want. I’ll tell you everything!”

Bolan stood perfectly still and said nothing. Then he slowly raised the Desert Eagle and took aim.

“Sweet Jesus, what the fuck do you want to know?” Tiffany yelled, a touch of fear in his voice at last. “I’ll talk already! Just tell me what you want to know!”

Unfortunately, Bolan had no idea exactly what he wanted to know. So there was only one way to play this, cold and hard. “Tell me about what happened a few days ago,” he demanded, leveling the Beretta.

After inhaling deeply, Tiffany let his breath out slowly. “Oh…that. I should have known. Well, I’ll be fucking delighted to roll over on those assholes. They paid half a mil in advance, but when I delivered the goods, they released mustard gas and took everything…and killed fifty of my best men. Fifty! Even the fucking rats in the rafters were dead before the air was clear enough for me to get back inside the warehouse!”

“The warehouse on the wharf outside?”

“Yeah, bunch of locals also bought the farm. Some bums, a few gangbangers and two of my cooks.”

Civilians had died; that upped the ante. “Sorry for your loss,” Bolan said in a graveyard voice. “Keep to the important details.”

“Yeah, sure.” Slowly reaching for a wall switch, Tiffany turned on the lights. He blinked as they came on. Bolan didn’t.

“There were twenty or so of them, but one guy was in charge,” Tiffany said, sitting down in a plush leather chair. Wisely, he kept his hands in plain sight. “A foreign guy, nice dresser, platinum Rolex and such.”

“Name?”

“Mr. Loki.”

Now, that was a new one. “More,” Bolan said.

“Loki spoke really good English, but with a weird accent, like nothing I’ve ever heard before,” Tiffany said with a shrug. “Know what I mean? Not Israeli, German, French or anything normal like that. Something else.”

Which left most of the world’s population. “What did he purchase?” the soldier demanded impatiently.

“Junk.”

Bolan scowled. “Drugs?”

“No, I mean real junk,” Tiffany repeated. “Tons and tons of it. The oldest, cheapest crap I had in storage. I was figuring on dumping it all on some third world warlord who didn’t know napalm from orange juice, who didn’t know a revolver from a cruise missile, but this guy had cash in hand, bags and bags of euros. He wanted all of it, but didn’t have quite enough cash. So we cut a deal and—”

“And he used gas and took all of it.”

“Every fucking thing in the warehouse! Let me tell you, there is no honor among thieves anymore.”

“There never was. Define junk, Michael.”

“Antiques, man. Cold War stuff. AK-47 assault rifles, and some World War II bazookas. Honest, freaking bazookas!” He paused, and a shadow briefly crossed his face.

“Don’t lie to me now,” Bolan warned, thumbing back the hammer on the Desert Eagle.

Tiffany shrugged in resignation. “Okay, they stole the guns. They had arranged to buy just a couple hundred land mines.”

“What kind of land mines?”

Reaching down to the ruined desktop, Tiffany pushed away some papers to reveal a wooden box. He flipped the top and took out a slim cigar. “Not land mines, underwater mines,” he stated, biting off the end and spitting it onto the floor. “You know, the sort of things Britain used to chain to concrete blocks and line the Channel with to stop Nazi U-boats. Mines, man.”

Yes, Bolan knew all about underwater mines. North Korea used them by the thousands to blockade their own harbor to prevent NATO or South Korea from invading. Underwater mines were one of the deadliest defensive weapons in existence. But why did Loki want so many of them?

“I need more,” Bolan prodded.

Lighting the cigar tip, Tiffany inhaled deeply, then exhaled dark smoke. “Sure, sure, no problem. They were Iranian mines, M-39s.”

“Any idea what he wanted the mines for?”

“I don’t stay in business by asking questions,” Tiffany told him, touching his wounded arm.

Fair enough. “How many mines?”

“All of them, couple hundred.”

“Exactly how many, Michael?”

“Okay, okay, six hundred and fifty.”

Six hundred underwater mines…that was enough to blockade the entire city of New York. “What did they use to haul them away, trucks or a freighter?”

“A Hercules transport. Big-ass seaplane.”

Interesting. “Describe the buyers.”

“Two men and a woman. She was pretty, and had the biggest tits I’ve ever seen.”

Considering that he ran the strip club overhead, that was quite a statement. “And the men?”

“Loki was tall, good-looking, like George Hamilton, the actor. Old, but classy.”

“And the other?”

“Just a mook. Street muscle. Skinny, with cold eyes, like there was nothing inside but hate and hunger.”

A trigger man. Possibly a bodyguard. “Anything else?”

Tiffany hesitated. “Not all of my guys were dead when I arrived. One of them managed to whisper that he heard the fuckers talk about bringing a squall to the world.”

“Interesting. Did he say a storm or a squall?”

“Squall. Now, in my business, that is both a sudden summer storm and an incredibly expensive piece of Russian navy hardware. It’s a kind of underwater missile, a rocket-powered torpedo.”

Tiffany paused as if waiting for Bolan to deny that such a thing could possibly exist. When that didn’t happen, he added, “I don’t carry any of those. Don’t know anybody who does! The damn things malfunction half the time. They’ve killed more Russians than anybody else. Still…” He shrugged.

Bolan felt as if an important piece of a puzzle had just clicked into place. North Korean mines and Russian torpedoes. Somehow those two were connected. Was Loki going to declare war on the rest of the world? That made no sense whatsoever. Something very odd was going on here, and Bolan had a bad feeling that a lot more innocent civilians were going to die if he didn’t figure this out fast.

“Okay, we’re done,” he said, holstering the Beretta. “I leave, and you go out of business, because if we ever meet again…” He didn’t finish the promise and saw in the other man’s eyes that it was not necessary.

“Yeah, sure, no problem.” Tiffany sighed, crushing out the cigar in a glass ashtray. “Always wanted to retire to…ah…Florida?”

“Mike, I don’t care where, just leave tonight,” Bolan stated, walking backward out of the room. “Leave tonight.”

Staying in the chair for several minutes, Tiffany plucked splinters from his aching arm while debating his options. Standing, he started to reach for the Glock in the drawer, then abruptly changed his mind and turned to move the picture of the congressman and reveal a small wall safe. Twirling the dial, he opened the door and began stuffing packets of cash into his pockets.

“Smart move,” Bolan whispered from the darkness outside.

Trying not to shiver, Tiffany emptied the safe, then headed directly for the nearest emergency exit. First a bunch of foreigners wipe out his dock crew, and then some hardcase blows open his Brooklyn operation like he was the wrath of God. It was obviously time for him to find a nice tropical island someplace where the rum flowed freely and the native girls wore only smiles and sunshine.

Keeping his expression neutral, Tiffany waited for the elevator doors to sigh shut before finally allowing himself a brief smile. At least he had been able to bluff that big son of a bitch about one thing. Loki hadn’t stolen a couple hundred of the North Korean mines, but four thousand! Enough to blow the city of New York out of the water, or sink a dozen battleships.

But that was his problem now, Tiffany smugly thought, rearranging the packets of cash stuffed into his clothing.

Suddenly, a figure in the darkness blocked his way. “Half a mil in advance would mean a cool million dollars for a couple hundred underwater mines that sell legally for a grand apiece,” Bolan said from the shadows. “Not even you overcharge that much, Michael. What else did they get?”

His elation melting away, Tiffany felt a cold fury well within him, and he made a desperate grab for the Glock. There was a bright flash of light, a brief pain, and he fell forward into an inky blackness that seemed to extend forever.