Road Of Bones

Against her will, Anuchin began to imagine the next phase of her live dissection. Dry ice, she knew, was the solid form of carbon dioxide. Its normal temperature hovered around -109 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to cause frostbite on contact. Above -70 degrees, it sublimated into frosty-looking gas, the “fog” so often used on movie sets for old-time horror films.

And as a tool of torture, she recognized that it could prove effective. As to whether it was worse than electricity…well, she’d simply have to wait and see.

If she withstood the ghoul’s next round of questions, how would he proceed? With scalpels or a blowtorch? Acid? Could she hope for shock to spare her from the worst of it, or was he skilled enough to revive her with drugs?

Holding her breath accomplished nothing, as she’d quickly learned. Innate survival mechanisms wouldn’t let her suffocate herself. If her hands were free—

The gunshots startled Anuchin from her fantasy of suicide. Her eyes snapped open, saw her captors facing toward the darkness of the cavernous warehouse. The ghoul was shifting nervously from foot to foot, as one of those who’d snatched her from the airport shouted to the long rows of machinery.

“Mikhail? Mikhail!”

No answer from the shadows.

The thought of rescue never entered her mind. Who was there left to help her? No one from the Ministry of Justice that she served. They wished her dead, silenced forever, buried with the secrets she’d uncovered.

As for private parties, Anuchin couldn’t think of one who had the means to find her coupled with an interest in helping her survive. Certainly, she had no friends within the Russian Mafia, denizens of the thieves world that infested every level of Russian society from top to bottom.

With Sergey dead, she had no one.

A quarrel between murderers, then, with Anuchin caught in the middle. Better that than more torture. She could always hope for a stray bullet to release her from her world of pain.

Was that so much to ask?

Helpless and totally exposed, she closed her eyes again and mouthed another silent prayer.

* * *

WHILE ONE OF BOLAN’S targets shouted for Mikhail, others were fanning out to sweep the warehouse, homing in on the echoes of his first gunshots. He saw one man breaking to his left, another to his right, their mouthpiece fading back to crouch behind a bulky gravity wagon.

That left two figures visible beneath the warehouse lights. A naked woman was fastened to a chair with duct tape at her wrists and ankles, plus a loop around her ribs, slumped with her chin on her chest. Beside her, to her left, a tall man in a raincoat stood and goggled at the shadows with protruding eyes. A glint of stainless steel told Bolan that he held a knife.

Completely useless in a gunfight.

From the tall man’s look and his reaction to the shots, Bolan knew he was the inquisitor. Without a second thought, he raised the AKS and stitched the gawker with a rising burst from clavicle to forehead, shattering his face. The guy went down as if someone had cut his strings, and Bolan saw the woman in the chair turn toward him, blink, then look around to find out where the shots had come from.

Wondering if she was next?

The shooter behind the gravity wagon was playing it safe. His cohorts, flanking Bolan, did their best to keep it stealthy, but their style was obviously more attuned to smash-and-grab than creep-and-sneak. They telegraphed their moves with scuffling feet, letting their target track them in the dark.

Bolan fell back from the bright lights and climbed aboard a midsize Caterpillar tractor, crouching with his back against its open cab. He’d let the hunters come to him—the first of them, at least—and see what happened next.

The gunman coming from his left was faster, shuffling toward Bolan from behind a bale wrapper. He didn’t check the high ground, though, intent on peering under things, where shadows pooled. When he had closed the gap to twenty feet, a burst from Bolan’s SMG ripped into him and dropped him, twitching, on his back.

The dead guy’s backup took advantage of the muzzle-flash and banged away at Bolan with a pistol, but the Executioner was already in motion, airborne, dropping to a crouch behind the tractor as incoming rounds cracked through its cab.

The soldier broke to his left, keeping the bulk of the machine and its big engine block between his adversary and himself. When he was near the tractor’s nose, he knelt, then stretched prone and crawled around beneath the radiator grille, careful to keep his weapon’s magazine from scraping concrete as he went.

He caught the second shooter scrambling toward the tractor, pistol out in front of him and ready for a hasty shot if he was challenged. What he wasn’t ready for was half a dozen full-metal-jacket rounds slashing through his thighs and pelvis, spinning him into the line of fire and ending it with head shots.

Which left one.

Bolan emerged to find the last man standing with a pistol pressed against the naked woman’s head, half-crouched to use her as a human shield.

The soldier found a vantage point beyond the ring of light and stopped there, took a second to unfold his submachine gun’s stock and raise it to his shoulder. As stubby as it was, the little room-broom hadn’t been designed for sniping, but at forty feet he thought the shot was doable.

His weapon had a flip-up rear sight with a front cylindrical post. Its eight-inch barrel produced a muzzle velocity of 2400 feet per second, slower than the full-size AK-74, but an insignificant difference at what amounted to point-blank range.

While his target shouted, sounding more agitated by the moment, Bolan found his mark and held it—just above the guy’s left eyebrow, with the SMG’s selector set for semiauto fire. One shot, and if he missed it…

Crack!

A crimson halo wreathed the gunman’s head as he slumped over backward. Bolan thought the naked woman gasped but wasn’t sure. He crossed the open floor to reach her, opening a knife in transit. Keeping his eyes averted as he slit the duct tape at her wrists and ankles, he reached around to cut one side along her rib cage.

Finally, he met her eyes and saw the fear behind them. When she asked him something, Bolan couldn’t understand it.

“Slow down or speak English,” he suggested.

“Da. Yes. Who are you?”

“A friend, sent to get you.”

“Friend?” She didn’t seem to recognize the term.

He nodded. “We need to go. Do you have any clothes?”

“Shredded,” she told him, covering herself belatedly as best she could with slender arms. “They thought I wouldn’t need them…after.”

Bolan scanned the killing ground and saw a sport coat draped across a second chair, almost outside the ring of light. He collected it and passed it to the woman while he thought about the rest.

The man who’d used her as a shield was several inches taller than the woman, but he had a narrow waist. She’d have to roll the cuffs up on his slacks, but it could work if she cinched up his belt.

“You mind a pair of hand-me-downs?” he asked, his back turned as he began to strip the corpse.

“What do you…oh. No, those will do for now. My shoes are over here somewhere,” she told him, moving gingerly toward the rim of shadow. “With my bag, I think.”

Bolan kept his head turned as she came to get the slacks. When she was covered, buckling the dead man’s belt, she told him, “Don’t forget their guns.”

CHAPTER TWO

Japan, seven hours earlier

Bolan was in the middle of another operation when the call came. He’d been wreaking havoc on a drug pipeline, tracking the flow of heroin from Yakuza controllers through the Philippines, on to Hawaii, where it spilled into the veins of addicts.

He was up against the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s most prosperous Yakuza Family and one of the world’s largest criminal organizations, with an estimated forty-five thousand oath-bound members and countless other close associates. Aside from heroin, the syndicate made billions annually from gambling, human trafficking and prostitution, internet pornography, extortion, gunrunning, stock fraud and labor racketeering.

It had been five days since he’d taken on the mission, and the Executioner was close to wrapping up his game. He’d taken out the clan’s first and second lieutenants, along with a couple dozen soldiers, and was planning a lethal surprise for the clan leader.

But then he got the call from home.

Drop everything and disengage, for now. We have a Level Four emergency.

Something in Russia, Hal Brognola told him, speaking guardedly despite the scrambled line. There was a job that absolutely couldn’t wait, lives hanging in the balance.

One life in particular.

How fast could he get from Kobe to Yakutsk in Sakha Republic? Bolan ran the calculation on his laptop while he had the big Fed on the line. His destination was located nineteen hundred miles northwest of Kobe, travel time dependent on how soon he booked a flight, the aircraft he obtained and when it could take off.

“Charter a plane ASAP,” Brognola had instructed him. “My dime. Call back when it’s arranged, and you’ll be met by someone from the Company. They’ll have the details and your basic kit. I’m sending through a file right now.”

Bolan opened his email, waited thirty seconds, then said, “Got it.”

“Good. I’m here until you call about the flight.”

The soldier cut the link and checked his watch. Eight-fifteen on a Saturday night in Kobe meant that it was 6:15 a.m. on Friday morning in Washington, D.C., thanks to the international date line. Brognola was a day and fourteen hours behind, but would be tracking the Russian event in real time.

Whatever it was.

Bolan booked his flight before reading the file. A charter company at Kobe Airport could put him aboard a Learjet 60 in two hours, if he had five grand and change to spare. Confirming that, Bolan was told the flight should take about four hours, which would put him on the ground in Yakutsk somewhere in the neighborhood of two-thirty to three o’clock on Sunday morning.

Fair enough.

He skimmed the file then, hitting the essentials, knowing there’d be ample time to study all its details in the air. Two agents of the FSB—Russia’s Federal Security Service, successor to the infamous KGB—had been collaborating with the CIA and Interpol to blow the whistle on a network of corruption that involved the upper echelons of government and commerce in the Russian Federation. The specifics weren’t provided, being strictly need-to-know, but Bolan got the picture.

There had always been corruption in the Soviet “worker’s paradise” under one-party rule, but the floodgates had opened with Communism’s collapse in 1991. Overnight, the world’s largest state-controlled economy was jostled into line with what some pundits liked to call the “Washington consensus,” adopting the alien concepts of liberalization and privatization.

The net result was economic chaos.

Liberalization meant eliminating price controls, which sparked hyperinflation and near-bankruptcy of Russian industry under President Boris Yeltsin. While Russia’s elderly and others living on fixed incomes watched their lifestyle go to hell, shady entrepreneurs and black marketeers spawned under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika restructuring movement of 1985-90 rose to the top of the heap like scum on a stagnating pond. The Russian Mafia, formerly an underground network of thugs and swindlers, went public—then global—in an orgy of bribery, extortion and violence.

The result, inevitably, was a backlash of opposition, translated into widespread support for antireform candidates. Yeltsin’s campaign to Westernize Russia by fiat, including dissolution of Parliament in September 1993, sparked open rebellion in Moscow. While Spetsnaz troops stormed Parliament, killing 187 dissidents and wounding more than four hundred, separatists in the Chechen Republic were charting a course toward civil war and a new age of domestic terrorism.

Meanwhile, a handful of wealthy oligarchs secured a stranglehold on Russian banking, industry and the mass media, throwing their weight behind Yeltsin’s reelection campaign in exchange for sweeping concessions. Public dissatisfaction with flagrant corruption and the endless war in Chechnya propelled the ex-FSB chief to the presidency in 2000—but what had really changed?

Only the names of those in charge, as far as Bolan could tell. The president ran with the oligarchs as the previous one had, while using his office and their widespread power to muffle dissent. The watchdog agency Human Rights Watch branded the man a “brutal” and “repressive” leader on par with the dictators in Pakistan and Zimbabwe. Rumor linked his backers to the assassinations of several investigative journalists, while Scotland Yard suspected Russian intelligence agents of murdering an ex-FSB whistle-blower in London.

Now, if Brognola’s information was correct, another Russian agent’s life was on the line for trying to expose corruption at the top. Bolan wasn’t sure what he could do to help, but he would try—without expecting any radical reform of a society that had been steeped in mayhem, graft and privilege since Grand Duchy of Moscow was established in the fifteenth century.

And do his best, damn right.

The Yamaguchi-gumi would be waiting when he finished up in Russia. If he finished. If he lived.

And after that?

Another pipeline would take up the slack, of course. No victory was ever final in the hellgrounds. Only those who fell were out of action. Their intent and motivation would survive.

Raw greed and malice never died.

As long as Bolan lived, there would be more work for the Executioner.

But at the moment, here and now, he had a plane to catch.

* * *

BY THE TIME Bolan arrived at Kobe Airport with a small suitcase and laptop in a carry-on, the Learjet 60 was already fueled and waiting. Its two pilots were wrapping up their preflight checklist, while a young receptionist—bright-eyed and fresh-looking despite the hour—signed Bolan in and ran his credit card.

It was a limitless Visa, embossed with the name of “Matthew Cooper,” which matched Bolan’s passport of the moment, and his California driver’s license. In fact, the alias aside, his credit card was perfectly legitimate. Whatever bills he managed to accumulate from month to month were paid in full from Stony Man Farm, in Virginia.

When all the paperwork was done, the receptionist thanked Mr. Cooper for his business and directed him outside to board his flight. Bolan hadn’t booked a return flight, since he’d have to judge the situation on the ground once he arrived. Returning to Japan might not be feasible. Indeed, he wasn’t sure that any airport service would be open to him once he’d managed to collect his package from the kidnappers who presently had custody. There were too many ifs for him to plan that far ahead.

If he was met, as planned, at Yakutsk Airport.

If the contact he had never met before provided proper gear and workable directions to his target.

If he found the agent he was on his way to save still breathing, fit to travel.

If he managed to extract the subject without getting either of them killed.

Then he could think about the quickest, safest way to put Yakutsk behind them and get out of Russia with their skins intact. And in the meantime, if Brognola’s fears proved accurate, they’d be running from a dragnet that included both official hunters and whatever private thugs the FSB was able to enlist through its connections to the Russian underworld.

A cakewalk, right.

As if.

They were northbound over the Sea of Japan when Bolan reopened Brognola’s file on his laptop. According to what he’d received, there’d been two FSB whistle-blowers. Lieutenant Sergey Dollezhal had fourteen years in harness, starting with the Federal Counterintelligence Service, or FSK, which had become the FSB in 1995. He was a legacy, in fact, the son of a former KGB colonel.

Make that had been, since his fatal shooting at the Yakutsk Airport several hours earlier.

Dollezhal’s partner and accomplice in rattling the powers that be was Sergeant Tatyana Anuchin, nine years on the job and partnered with Dollezhal for the past six. Brognola had no details on the cases they had worked, nor was it relevant. Somewhere along the line, they had grown disaffected against the corrupt shenanigans they’d witnessed on a daily basis and had reached out cautiously to Interpol.

Dramatic works of fiction commonly portrayed Interpol—the International Criminal Police Organization—as a gung-ho group of global crime fighters. In fact, from its inception back in 1923, the group has served a single purpose: to facilitate communication and cooperation between law-enforcement agencies of different nations. Its agents didn’t make arrests, nor did they prosecute suspected felons. They had no police powers at all.

But they liaised, and so it was that Interpol put Dollezhal in touch with someone from the CIA, who shared his information with the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE. A deal was struck, including terms of sanctuary in exchange for information leading to indictments and eventual testimony at trial.

It was a risky bargain overall, considering the countless possibilities of weak links in the chain. As recently as June 2010, a former president of Interpol had been convicted in South Africa on charges of accepting six-figure bribes from drug traffickers. That case wasn’t unique, and there was also leak potential with the CIA, the FBI and ICE.

But Dollezhal and Anuchin had taken the chance. For thirteen months they’d smuggled evidence and information out of Russia—files and photographs, transcripts of conversations, various financial records—all their handlers needed for indictments, though it likely wouldn’t stand in court without corroborating testimony from the two agents themselves.

Which brought them to the final phase: escape.

And it had failed.

Somehow, somewhere, they’d been exposed. A hit team had surprised them, literally at their exit flight’s departure gate with minutes left till takeoff. Dollezhal had gone down fighting in the terminal men’s room; his partner had been carried off to who knew where.

Well, someone knew.

The screws were tightened, bribes were likely offered and the information was secured. An address in Yakutsk, if it wasn’t too late by now.

But who would intervene?

The FBI and ICE were too far out of bounds, would never get cooperation from Russian authorities if those authorities had been responsible for murder and kidnapping. That left Langley, but the Company still had to work with leaders of the FSB, at least in theory, so its chief had passed the buck.

To Stony Man.

Which put Bolan on the red-eye out of Kobe, winging toward Siberia. At least it wasn’t winter, but that wouldn’t matter if he failed.

Regardless of geography, all graves were cold.

Yakutsk

YAKUTSK WAS LOCATED 280 miles south of the Arctic Circle. It had some 212,000 inhabitants, but Bolan was only looking for one as he stepped off the plane from Kobe.

Brognola’s file had named his contact as Yuri Fedchenko, age twenty-seven, a CIA contract employee presumably unknown to the authorities. He would be waiting with a car for Bolan, rented legally in Matthew Cooper’s name, together with some tools that might be useful in extracting Tatyana Anuchin from her life-or-death predicament.

And this was where the plan could fail, before Bolan had walked a dozen yards on Russian soil. There could be shooters waiting, either licensed by the state or hired to do a bit of wet work on the side, and that would be the end of it.

The end of him.

But Bolan didn’t step into an ambush when he left the plane. The only person waiting for him was his contact, not quite smiling as he reached for the soldier’s hand and pumped it once. Fedchenko’s English took some getting used to, but he managed to communicate.

There was a warehouse on the river. He supplied the address and a map of Yakutsk with the shortest route marked with a crimson felt-tipped pen. The car he’d brought for Bolan was a GAZ-31105 Volga four-door with a full tank of gas. In its trunk, examined once the Japanese pilots had made their way into the terminal, the Executioner found hardware waiting for the next phase of his task.

Bolan checked the gear, confirmed as best he could that all of it was functional, the magazines fully loaded. He couldn’t test the flash-bangs without wasting them and raising hell outside the airport terminal, but that was life.

Or death, if any of the hardware let him down.

“How many men are guarding her?” he asked Fedchenko.

“Four were seen at the airport. Whether they have more at the warehouse, I can’t say.”

“What are they? Do you know?”

The Russian looked confused. “Sorry, please?” he said.

“The crew,” Bolan said. “Are they FSB? FSO? Mafiya?”

Fedchenko shrugged and said, “It could be anyone.”

“Where can I drop you?” Bolan asked as they climbed into the sedan, Bolan behind the steering wheel.

Fedchenko named an all-night coffee shop along the route marked on his map, and Bolan reached it seven minutes later, thanked the man and then continued on his way alone.

The next potential ambush site would be the warehouse. Bolan hadn’t smelled a setup yet, but caution kept him breathing. He had known Yuri Fedchenko less than half an hour, hadn’t met the men behind him who had dealt with Brognola, and trust could only stretch so far.

There’d been a time when Bolan and Brognola both had faith in Langley, but a brutal act of treachery had changed all that. Today, the big Fed kept the Company at arm’s length when he could and triple-checked their information prior to putting agents in the field, if time allowed.

This night, there was no time to spare. No room for judgment by committee. It was either take the job and run with it, or leave a brave agent to die.

Some people Bolan knew would probably have let her go without a second thought. Why help a Russian agent, even if her information might jail felons in the States and drag some of her homeland’s dirty laundry into daylight? Russia and the U.S. had been rivals for the best part of a century, with only slight improvement under glasnost, perestroika and the rest of it. One less Russki was good, no matter how you sliced it.

Bolan disagreed.

He honored courage, sacrifice and good intentions—though it was a fact they often paved the road to hell. If he could save Tatyana Anuchin’s life and put her on a witness stand back home to land some spies and mobsters in a prison cell, Bolan felt bound to try.

But recognizing sacrifice didn’t mean that he planned to offer up himself as one. Bolan had never been a kamikaze warrior prone to suicide. He weighed the odds on every move he made, once battle had been joined, and if some of those moves seemed suicidal to the uninitiated, that was an illusion. He was thinking all the time, six moves ahead.

He did his best, anticipating what an enemy might do in any given situation, but he couldn’t know exactly what would happen. Not until he pulled a trigger and sent death streaking downrange. At that point, Bolan knew that flesh and blood had to yield to firepower.

His own included, sure.

And if he failed, that was the end of it. There’d be no time for Brognola to find another operative, get him in the air to Yakutsk before Anuchin broke or simply died under interrogation. It was now or never, all or nothing.

He drove along the waterfront, the Lena River on his right and flowing northward toward the Arctic Ocean. On its far side lay the Lena Highway, accessed during spring and summer via ferry, or across the frozen river’s ice in winter.