Sudden Death Read online

  Annotation

  Not since the Jackal has an assassin cast such a shadow of fear over the political elite of Europe. Baraka operates with cold efficiency. He is a man who has been programmed to kill, a man who leaves no footprints and whose tradecraft is untraceable.

  In this tense climate, the President of the United States leaves the U.S.S. Nimitz at Monte Carlo to meet with the leaders of Europe.

  Everyone expects Baraka to be there.

  * * *

  Don Pendleton's

  Prologue

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  Epilogue

  * * *

  Don Pendleton's

  Mack Bolan

  Sudden Death

  Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

  Sir Winston Churchill

  I don't care about a terrorist's motives — money, power, even pleasure — they are the stuff of twisted dreams. My mission is to make sure that their ugly dreams don't come true.

  Mack Bolan

  To all the men and women worldwide, who unstintingly devote their time to the war against terrorism.

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Peter Leslie for his contribution to this work.

  OCR Mysuli: [email protected]

  Prologue

  It was a long shot — almost five hundred yards, the sniper estimated — and the target would be moving. The midday sun was hot. So hot that the rubber shield behind the Bausch & Lomb Balvar 5 telescopic sight on his rifle, pressing into what the French call the arcade of the eye, was causing the skin to sweat. Moisture trickled down the lid, threatening to cloud the cornea.

  From his exposed position on the flat roof of the thirty-eight-story apartment block, the sniper flicked a sideways glance at the rectangular elevator housing. For the tenth time he rehearsed his escape routine: through the housing's open doorway and onto the roof of the car that was blocked on the top floor. Lift the inspection hatch and drop to the interior. At the fifteenth floor stop the car and exit, then follow the corridor to the left. Climb through the window that opened onto the fire escape. Descend, and at the tenth-floor level all he had to do was leap across to the balcony of the adjoining building where a window of an apartment would be standing open. Stash the gun in a closet from which the backup team would remove it before he hit the street. Then down the service stairway, through the entrance lobby and out. Easy.

  Just as long as the damned sun didn't make him sweat so much that it fouled his aim.

  The sniper edged back from the elevated lip of the roof and rested on his haunches. The unbearable heat wafting up from the asphalt blasted his face. Tiny droplets of moisture dewed the backs of his fingers. He wished he could finalize the contract from the shade beneath a striped beach umbrella, as cool as those tourists on the ritzy waterfront four hundred and fifty feet below.

  The assassin caressed the rifle. It was old, handcrafted half a century before by the London gunsmiths Holland & Holland. There were delicate arabesques engraved on the silver plates above the semipistol grip behind the trigger guard. The butt was of satin-smooth rosewood. There was no magazine: the twin twenty-four-inch barrels had to be loaded like a shotgun. But the sniper found that the absence of rapid-fire facility was more than balanced by the deadly accuracy that derived from the length of the barrels. He had removed the original aperture sight, which folded flat against the butt, and had modified the stock to support the Balvar. He had worked on the weapon himself.

  The glare shimmering off the ocean was hurting his eyes. Ideally he would have preferred to wait until the sun had moved around a little more, but he had no control over the target's movements and no idea how long it would remain accessible. The thicker parts of the asphalt roofing were softening in the heat. He decided to get it over with before conditions got worse.

  A lever between the two hammers released locks holding barrel to breech. He slid it aside, tipping forward the barrel assembly so that he could load.

  The brass cartridge cases slipped into place with satisfying ease. There were two more rounds in his pocket, but that was just fail-safe material. If he didn't score with the first couple of .30 caliber softnoses, he might as well go back to the airport.

  The sniper took three wads of tissue from the breast pocket of his tan suit. Unfolding and using each one in turn, he dabbed perspiration from the skin around his left eye socket, carefully dried the eyeshield of the telescopic sight, and wiped the sweat from the fingers and palm of his hands.

  From another pocket he removed a miniature transistor receiver tuned to a local radio station and settled the ultralightweight earphones over his head. Then he snapped the gun shut and moved forward to take up his former position by the coping.

  The voice of the sports commentator came softly over the sniper's earphones. When he was quite comfortable, he lowered his eye to the sight, adjusted the cross hairs fractionally and took up first pressure on the No. 1 trigger.

  * * *

  "Which is it to be, France or Holland?" the commentator breathed into his microphone. "Excitement ripples through the ranks of spectators anxiously seated around this center court of Monte Carlo's championship tennis stadium. The charity match between the prime ministers of these two countries stands at two sets all, and five games each in this final set. How are they going to decide it?"

  The multimillionaire singles star who was umpiring the game wanted to know, too. He called the players up to his raised seat by the net. They played well enough for their age — not up to Forest Hills or Wimbledon standards, of course, but well enough to elicit an occasional gasp from the jet-set crowd who had paid up to a hundred dollars to the cancer research fund for their seats.

  "Gentlemen," he said, "how do you wish to settle this? Do you want to play it out?" He stole a glance at his watch: he wasn't being paid by the hour; he was on a flat fee. "Do you favor a tiebreaker? Or would you prefer sudden death?"

  "Well, of course we could play it out," the Frenchman began dubiously, "but we've had no service breaks in this set, and it could go to thirteen-eleven or even nineteen-seventeen…"

  "Oh, sudden death," said the Dutch premier, whose turn it was to serve. "We don't want the champagne in the bar to warm up!"

  The star nodded. The players changed ends for the final game.

  The Dutchman tossed the ball into the air. The racket flashed, the ball sped toward the far side of the net… and the server dropped to the court with a hole between the eyes, hitting the ground before the ball.

  A gasp erupted from a thousand throats. A woman screamed. The star half rose from his chair, his mouth open. The Frenchman gaped too, allowing the ball to bounce past him. Then, his face a mask of consternation, he dropped his own racket and sprinted forward, leaping over the net in an attempt to aid his stricken opponent.

  In midair he appeared to catch his foot and trip on the tape along the top of the net. He fell flat on his face on the red hard court.

  This time it was a fifteen-year-old ballboy, running out and then seeing that the surface beneath the prime minister's b
ody was a darker red, who screamed.

  A fist-sized hole had been blasted through the Frenchman's white shirt between his shoulder blades.

  The echo of the second shot was lost in the concerted cry of horror from the crowd.

  * * *

  A week later, three hundred and seventy miles northeast and again at midday, Otto Jaecklin, president of the Zuricher Industrial Bank and member of a Swiss cantonal assembly, was being chauffeured through the Taunus Mountains in West Germany on his way to a European summit in Bonn.

  Halfway up a steep hill, below the schloss in the old town of Kronberg, a young woman pushing a baby carriage stepped out from a medieval alley and started to cross the road without looking right or left.

  She was directly in front of Jaecklin's car, only a few yards away. The chauffeur swore as he stomped on the brake pedal. The big Mercedes sedan shuddered to a halt with its rear end slewed across the cobbled street.

  Two bikers, anonymous in black leather and vizored helmets, stopped on either side of the sedan. Glass imploded as two silenced Skorpion VZ-61 machine pistols pumped a hail of lead at Jaecklin and his driver.

  Both men crumpled in their seats as blood and bone splinters sprayed the custom-built beige leather interior of the Mercedes. The woman let go of the baby carriage, which carried nothing but empty bottles hidden beneath a pink blanket. She ran to the larger of the motorcycles and leaped astride the saddle behind the rider. Both bikers then wheeled their mounts around and roared off downhill in the direction of Frankfurt.

  The baby carriage rolled after them, glancing off the fender of the stalled Mercedes, and continued on with increasing speed until it crashed through the window of a hardware store.

  * * *

  "That's a beautiful gun," the Unione Corso organizer said admiringly. "Originally a sporting rifle?"

  "It still is," the sniper replied. "You know — big game."

  "A pity there is no magazine, even if there are two barrels. It must be a nuisance, constantly having to reload."

  "I've never had to use more than two shots," the sniper said stiffly.

  They were crouched on a ledge halfway down a two-hundred-foot cliff of rose-pink granite, overlooking the bay of Girolata on the western coast of Corsica. The rockbound citadel of Calvi, perched above the neat rectangles of a new vacationers' marina, was sixteen miles to the north. In front of them two small sailboats cruised toward a crescent of sand on the bay. Immediately below, a powered vessel gleaming with brass and polished mahogany lay at anchor on the improbable blue of the sea.

  On the foredeck was sprawled a topless brunette, her tanned breasts glistening with suntan oil. Her companion was line fishing from the cockpit — a heavyset man of fifty with a crew cut and iron-gray hair curling on his chest.

  A second powerboat nosed around the headland from the direction of Calvi. It was a French-built Arcoa 900 — a five-berth speedster with a fiberglass hull and twin 125-horsepower Couach diesels. A sailor in a striped jersey stood at the wheel, but his passengers — there were four or five of them — seemed to shun the heat, preferring to remain behind the double-glazed windows of the saloon.

  The sniper was also in the shade this time: a granite outcrop sheltered him and his mafioso companion from the sun, and the irregular stripes of shadow thrown across the weathered cliff face effectively hid them from the people aboard the boats. The sniper was focusing a pair of Zeiss binoculars. "That the guy?" he asked, jerking his head toward the man fishing from the cockpit.

  The Corsican nodded. "Commissaire Georges Codorneau himself — big-time boss of the Paris antigang squad," he said derisively. "Officially here on vacation, but in fact seconded to the local law in Ajaccio with a briefing to put the bite on the Families and squash these separatist bastards blowing up tourists' cars with plastique."

  "Too bad he never got the chance to finish the job!" the sniper said. He raised the twin-barreled rifle, leaned his elbows on a shelf of rock and peered through the Balvar sight.

  The crack of the shot echoed around the bay from cliff to cliff and sent seabirds screaming into the cloudless sky, where the contrails of a jetliner heading for North Africa mirrored the white brushstrokes of the Arcoa's wake.

  Commissaire Codorneau folded forward over the transom and slid into the sea, clouding the water with the blood still pumping from his shattered chest. "Better take out the bitch, too," the sniper said, shifting his position as the girl pushed herself upright on the foredeck.

  "Is that really necessary?" the Corsican asked.

  "Of course it's necessary," the sniper said irritably. "She's not his wife, is she? The bodies will be found together. They may think the killer's a jealous lover. There'll be a scandal, and the press will make a fucking meal of it. Anything that undermines public confidence in our marvelous security services is a bonus."

  He fired the second round.

  * * *

  He was an Iranian, but he could have passed for southern Italian. The name on his passport was Graziano, and his birthplace was given as Pescara. He was an expert lover, and the Alitalia stewardess who had spent the night with him thought she had never enjoyed the Rome stopover so much.

  Before she boarded the flight for Oran the next morning, he offered her a gift — a twin-speaker Aiwa 350 FM radio and stereo cassette player. Presents already, the stewardess thought. And this one was expensive, considering all the features and the weight of it. She recalled the no-expense-spared dinner in the Via Veneto and the great night in bed, and decided that she could hardly wait until their next date.

  The bomb in the stereo set exploded as the Boeing 747 began to climb to its operational height over Civitavecchia, decompressing the cabin and tipping the jet into a death dive that the pilot could do nothing to avert.

  Most of the wreckage was strewn over the grounds of an infant school at Santa Marinella, where the stricken plane plunged through a glass roof.

  Among the three hundred and seventeen dead was a first-class passenger named Beniamino Alonzo, a strongman who had just been appointed Minister of Home Security in Italy's new government.

  Five miles offshore, a dark man with thinning hair and a military mustache limped down the companionway of an Arcoa 900 cruiser and switched on the video receiver in the saloon.

  There were four expensively dressed, middle-aged foreigners seated expectantly on the leather divans. After he had showed them the videotape of the Boeing disaster, the dark man ran the tape of the Girolata killings, the Monte Carlo tennis murders and the slaughter of the Swiss official's Mercedes in Kronberg.

  The man who seemed to be the leader of the quartet stood. He was American — a tall, spare sixty-year-old with shell-rimmed glasses and silver hair crimped close to his skull. He wore a cream suit and lizard skin shoes. He raised his glass of champagne toward the display screen.

  "Admirable," he said. "I think we agree, gentlemen, that this will do very well for a start. Now it is up to our… shall we say our colleagues… to perfect plans for the really big ones."

  1

  "It's strictly a no-win situation," Hal Brognola said, sucking fiercely on his unlit cigar. "And it gets worse every day. In Europe terrorist atrocities are on the increase an average of ten percent per year. Since 1981 Paris alone has been hit by more than one hundred, most of them bombings and assassinations in the street. In the past twelve months, five long-distance railroad flyers have been derailed with bombs. They hijacked a whole train in Holland, an ocean liner in Alexandria and heaven knows how many jetliners."

  "Dammit, Hal, tell me something I don't know," John Gregson, the high-ranking CIA operative seated opposite Brognola, protested. "We even know that these attacks are orchestrated. We know who writes the score and who pays the bill."

  "Leaving aside the mass attacks on our own people in Lebanon," Brognola continued imperturbably, "we've seen senseless massacres at four international airports." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Munich, Lod, Rome, Vienna. Then there are the attacks on half
a dozen department stores, not to mention the slaughter at railroad stations in the rush hour at Bologna, Milan and Marseille." He laid down the stogie in an ashtray and leaned forward, a bulky man with a tired city face and a rumpled suit.

  "And now," the gruff voice continued, "the guys writing the score, as you put it, have changed key. Two premiers, a Eurocrat and a couple of top security chiefs in ten days. Not to mention several hundred innocent passengers and the crew of a plane."

  "It's a question of degree," the CIA man began. "We don't read it as an entirely new shift in their…"

  "Bull!" Brognola interrupted. "Gunning for the top brass is a new departure. They've always stayed away from that before — kind of an unwritten law, almost — because they've always been shit-scared we might retaliate in kind, send out hit squads against Khadaffi, Assad, Khomeini or the Palestinian bosses. Now it seems they don't give a goddamn. Plus of course you have this…" He gestured to a copy of the Washington Post that lay beside the ashtray.

  The front page carried a five-column heading: "612 Drowned in Channel Car Ferry Disaster." And beneath this, underlined in red marker, was the subhead: "Bomb in Container Truck Shattered Hull Says British Police Chief."

  The operative moved uneasily in his chair. He didn't like the way the conversation was going, but the man opposite him in the creased suit had the ear of the President — and heads could roll fast in Langley.

  They were on Brognola's home ground, too. He was, in fact, White House liaison for this damned Stony Man Farm complex to which the Agency man had been summoned — the camouflaged 160-acre base in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains from which Uncle Sam's covert and secretly funded antiterrorist campaign operated.

  Beneath the sprawling collection of farm buildings and outhouses, shielded from public view by miles of rolling forest, one of the world's most sophisticated communications systems linked an underground operations center with high-graded and high-tech intel banked in computer installations all over the Western world.