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  Day of Mourning

  ( The Executioner - 62 )

  Don Pendleton

  Mack Bolan sensed danger when he lost contact with Stony Man Farm. The Phoenix fortress in Virginias Blue Ridge Mountains should be impenetrable. But was it? Bolan returned home to find the Stony strongholds security violated and ace armorer, Andrzej Konzaki, mortally wounded. A web of treachery now enshrouded the Farm, imperiling its existence. In one blood-drenched night, Bolan embarked on an odyssey of revenge. From D.C.s corridors of power to the cathouse depths of sewer city, he pursued an elusive specter who bartered in mens souls. And each time the trail led to a dead end. Who was this faceless enemy?

  Don Pendleton

  Day of Mourning

  The world dies 'twixt every heartbeat, and is born again in each new perception of the mind.

  For each of us, the order of life is to perceive and perish and perceive again, and who can say which is which — for every human experience builds a new world in its own image — and death itself is but an unusual perception.

  Live large that you may experience large and thus, hopefully, die large.

  A soldada's final words.

  Translated from the Spanish for Bolan in Miami Massacre

  1

  In the beginning, it was like any of the other missions in this government-sanctioned new war against world terrorism: Mack Bolan, the Executioner, now known as Colonel John Macklin Phoenix, the stony man of Stony Man, racing toward another confrontation with dark forces....

  The AV-8B Advanced Harrier skimmed the endless expanse of the choppy Atlantic at a snappy 600 mph. Jack Grimaldi was behind the controls of the Vertical Short Takeoff and Landing combat jet, heading on a southeasterly course three hundred miles off the northern coast of Brazil. The Marine Corps' state of the art VSTOL aircraft was equipped with full cannon and missile capability.

  Grimaldi's passenger was a big, icy-eyed man outfitted in scuba gear.

  Mack Bolan, in the seat behind Grimaldi, felt wrapped in the steady low-pitched whine of the jet's engines.

  A gray cloud ceiling melded with the turbulent ocean on the near horizon beyond the Harrier's Plexiglas.

  Bolan jarred forward against his shoulder harness as Grimaldi, a longtime ally in the Executioner's old and new wars, slacked off sharply on the mighty aircraft's forward thrust.

  Grimaldi then brought the Harrier to a stationary hover at fifty feet above the roiling sea.

  The pilot's voice crackled through Bolan's headset.

  "Radar beep, forty-seven miles due south. Right on the money, Striker. Do we hit 'em?"

  "After you patch me through to Stony Man," growled Bolan. "I want a status report on Phoenix Force."

  "Check. Patching you through now," came Grimaldi's voice.

  This Harrier boasted a direct communications linkup to a satellite relay capable of establishing near-instant voice contact with the stateside Stony Man control base.

  Stony Man Farm was a rolling 160-acre estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, three thousand miles away.

  The "farm" was in reality the command center of the Phoenix program, a covert operation unrecorded in official files, headed by Mack Bolan. The facility was the headquarters of the most formidable security force ever assembled, operating with full government support.

  At this moment Hal Brognola, Stony Man's liaison with the White House, and April Rose, the farm's overseer and mission controller, would be monitoring the progress of both Bolan and Grimaldi, and the men of Phoenix Force, who were on their way to rendezvous with the Harrier.

  Upcoming was the Executioner's first deep-sea action.

  Underwater combat had been a part of Bolan's Stony Man training that he had not had to use until now. The warrior in scuba black was ready with the know-how and the best equipment and weaponry for this mission.

  Bolan could not afford to wait for Phoenix Force. The numbers were falling too fast. But at least he would know their ETA, and that could make a difference.

  Bolan noted the lengthy pause from the cockpit.

  "What is it, Jack?"

  "I'm not sure," crackled the pilot's voice. "We seem to have a communications breakdown."

  "Did you try the alternate frequencies?"

  "Both of 'em. All I get is static."

  "Is it us?"

  "Negative. Other channels are loud and clear. I can pick up any frequency from anywhere with this baby. But no Stony Man."

  "That radar beep. Is it stationary?"

  "Affirmative. The coordinates are right. We're too damn far out for fishing. Anything else would be moving."

  "Anything else on the screen?"

  "Nothing within range. That doesn't mean our target won't have backup. It would sure help to have Phoenix Force along."

  "You know the numbers, Jack. There's no time. Close in on the target."

  "We thunder it?"

  "Affirmative," growled Bolan. "Do it now."

  Grimaldi punched the Harrier's afterburners. Another jolt and the jet shot forward, again at full throttle. The ocean below became a sleek blur like dark glass.

  Bolan was concerned about the communications failure. But he was trying not to let it affect his combat consciousness as he prepared for the impending confrontation in a watery hellground.

  Bolan could not remember Stony Man Farm ever having a communications-system malfunction.

  The Executioner and his Stony Man combat units, Able Team and Phoenix Force, were supported by an intel and communications linkup masterminded and run by Aaron "The Bear" Kurtzman. He was a perfectionist. Nothing Kurtzman touched at Stony Man had ever gone wrong.

  Yet here were Bolan and Grimaldi jetting into hot contact with the enemy, and communications were blacked out.

  Bolan was used to working on his own. He preferred it that way. Give him at most one or two allies, and this warrior felt confident in tackling any mission.

  Many times during his war against terrorism, and that former life of warring against the Mafia, the Executioner had pulled off his most stunning victories with just his weapons. Bolan sometimes missed those days; more and more often lately, it seemed. He knew that it was not absolutely necessary for him to have a communications link with Stony Man at this time.

  Nevertheless the unexpected breakdown did concern him.

  What's wrong at Stony Man? he wondered.

  The flight from Central America had gone off without a hitch. The mission had been a tough, violent one. Colonel Phoenix and Grimaldi had been heading home when Brognola contacted Bolan in flight.

  The big guy's senses had leveled into a postcombat cool. He could feel weariness pestering to be acknowledged. His soul felt tired, and so did his body. That changed when he and Grimaldi had listened to Brognola's descrambled message.

  "We may already be too late, Striker." Brognola had sounded harried. "A terrorist coalition has bankrolled purchase of a top-secret nuclear device from an as yet undetermined European source. A hell bomb the size of a goddamn suitcase was shipped on a Liberian freighter, but the ship went down in a storm. Precautions were taken, and there's a fifty-fifty chance the nuclear device is still intact in a waterproof container."

  "Do we have coordinates on the site?"

  "We do. The ship's radioman was in touch with the terrorists before radio contact was broken and the ship went down. We were fed the information by a mole in one of the terrorist groups."

  "What's the official status on the sinking?"

  "Maritime SOP hasn't turned up a thing," said Hal. "The terrorist group already has a salvage operation under way. A Soviet-trained frogman crew set out from Belem on the Brazilian coast yesterday afternoon. We learned of all this only a few minutes ago. The terrorists have t
heir whole network trip-wired for this thing, and the intel came to us secondhand. That's why it took so long for the news to travel. The CIA has lost contact with two of their people inside the coalition. They've already written them off as having been terminated."

  Brognola had then given the coordinates to Bolan and Grimaldi.

  The Stony warrior and his pilot had briefly touched down at a secret U.S. military air base in Honduras for refueling, equipment and ordnance. Then this fast flight southeast.

  It was Brognola's idea to have Phoenix Force flown in to back up the Executioner and Grimaldi.

  Grimaldi's voice crackled again.

  "Here we go, Striker. Get ready."

  Bolan saw the target at that instant: a 100-foot commercial deep-sea fishing vessel, bobbing on the gray Atlantic.

  The Harrier lanced in with its specially mounted machine guns yammering away.

  The deck crew never knew what hit them as the Harrier flashed by overhead like a giant firebreathing bird skimming the water surface for food. The pounding machine guns strafed every inch of the deck, filling the air with splintering wood and shreds of tumbling bodies and blood as blistering lead killed every living thing.

  Then the Harrier banked in a smooth curve. Grimaldi eased the warplane back to a stationary hover off the port bow of the boat.

  Nothing moved down there. Lifeless bodies were sprawled all over the pulverized deck. The boat rode the rolling crests of the waves like a ghost ship.

  "Here we are, Striker," crackled Grimaldi.

  "Hold it right here, Jack."

  The Harrier maintained stationary hold.

  The hellbringer in the passenger seat slid back the Plexiglas cowling, then stood to begin a final equipment check.

  Brognola's intel was that the Liberian freighter had touched bottom in five hundred feet of water.

  Conventional scuba-diving gear would not be practical below three hundred feet, so the Executioner was snugly togged in a Deep Diving System suit, courtesy of a Marine Corps scuba unit in Honduras.

  The space-age scuba suit worn by Bolan was made of a special neoprene with an alloy helmet featuring a closed-circuit rebreather unit that eliminated telltale air bubbles from the helmet and adjusted the pressure not only within the suit, but within the sinuses and other internal air spaces within the diver's body. The suit's safety depth: twelve hundred feet.

  But this scuba suit did have its shortcomings. It was designed for staying down no more than forty minutes, and Bolan would need to spend time in a decompression chamber when he came up.

  Bolan activated the DOS and adjusted the harness on his air tanks.

  He was armed with a sheathed knife at his left hip and a specially designed shark gun. At one end of the underwater weapon was a rod capable of sending off a six-thousand-volt electrical charge. The gun also fired 41.8mm bullets propelled by carbon dioxide through a barrel above the shock rod. The bullets were designed to explode on contact.

  Bolan climbed onto a wing of the Harrier and moved cautiously away from the fuselage, avoiding the jet engines to either side of the cockpit.

  "Last chance to change your mind," warned Grimaldi.

  "You know better, Jack," replied the blitzer on the wing. "Keep trying to raise Stony Man. Black out communications with me once I'm under. Try to intercept any signals from down below. That's the enemy. We still don't know if they have backup standing by."

  "And you come up in forty minutes."

  "Precisely forty minutes."

  "And if you don't make it up in forty?"

  "Then I won't be making it," Bolan replied in a matter-of-fact tone.

  "We've had no goddamn recon of what's waiting for you down there," Grimaldi said suddenly. "I don't like it, Striker."

  "Neither do I. What's that have to do with anything?'' was Bolan's parting shot.

  He adjusted his fins. He was ready.

  Bolan again felt a twitch of concern at the communications breakdown with Stony Man Farm. And where the hell was Phoenix Force?

  He knew a nuclear bomb in the hands of terrorists was unthinkable in the already bloody arena of Central and South American political terror that was advancing year by year toward America's border.

  He put those thoughts aside. It was time for action.

  "Good luck, soldier," said Grimaldi.

  The Executioner gave a clenched fist and thumbs-up sign to the pilot, then stepped off the Harrier's wing.

  Bolan plummeted a fast twenty feet into the frigid, turbulent depths of the sea, disappearing from Grimaldi's sight.

  2

  Bolan sliced smoothly into the dark underwater void. The raging turbulence of the ocean's surface and the whine of the Harrier faded to throbbing rumbles, then to nothing.

  The instant he was submerged, Bolan executed a forward semiroll and dived straight down, swimming with arms close to his sides, pedaling hard with both fins. He did not switch on his diving light.

  As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he detected a faint, wavering illumination from the sky.

  Below, he could vaguely make out patterns of pinpoint lights moving about like fireflies on a summer night in Massachusetts.

  Bolan swam deeper and deeper away from the filtering rays of the sun. The gloom reached out as if to smother him and increasing pressure tightened around his body.

  A school of fish fled at his approach.

  He continued angling toward the waving lights in the uneven depths.

  A sixth sense alerted him to approaching danger from above and to his left. He rolled sideways as a massive presence glided ominously past him, missing him by inches.

  He would have to risk switching on his helmet dive light. He hoped that it would not distract the distant salvage crew from their work around the jumbled shadows of the sunken Liberian freighter.

  He activated the light just in time to see the great white shark turn around in a graceful curve before coming at him again.

  Bolan rolled and kicked. He registered a momentary impression of the razor-sharp serrated teeth ringing the shark's big mouth.

  Then the killer beast was past a second time.

  Bolan floated, immobile.

  The shark banked again at a distance of some twenty-five meters, then came in for another head-on swipe at this unexpected meal.

  Bolan did not want to use the shark gun's bullets to stop the creature. He would need the underwater rounds when he confronted the terrorist frogmen below.

  He triggered the gun's electrical mode when the great white was a half meter off, its long, ugly head homing in on Bolan's midsection.

  The high-voltage charge stunned the massive beast. It became twenty-eight feet of senseless meat.

  Bolan moved in and finished the job with his knife.

  This man-eater could not be left around to recover and screw up the mission later on. And the shark's corpse would distract others of the species who could be infesting the vicinity.

  Hoping like hell that he had seen the last of deep-sea predators, the Executioner flicked off his helmet light and resumed his descent, moving toward the activity below.

  Bolan was gaining on the movement of busy lights when he came across the first ring of the terrorists' defense. Two sentries in full scuba gear, armed with weapons that looked similar to Bolan's shark gun, were drifting slowly. He saw divers stationed as sentries in either direction, barely discernible in the distance.

  The leader had established a classic perimeter: evenly spaced teams of divers around the salvage operation. These divers would be in radio contact.

  Suddenly Bolan's headset crackled with voices conversing in Spanish. He grinned.

  Grimaldi had homed in on the terrorists' frequency and patched it to Bolan.

  Bolan's rudimentary grasp of the language told him that either the sentries had no idea of his presence or they were laying a very skillful trap for him.

  He took out the two-man team closest to him, swimming up behind one guard and severing the ju
gular with one knife swipe.

  Bolan released the corpse.

  The man's body floated upward, trailing the inky cloud spreading into the darkness overhead.

  The other guard sensed the commotion and spun around, bringing up his weapon in Bolan's direction.

  Bolan stroked the shark gun's trigger and another six-thousand-volt charge zapped living flesh.

  The terrorist's body executed a restrained shudder as his hands released the shark gun. Stunned, the diver curled into a fetal position.

  The Executioner swam in and finished him with the knife, releasing the body to float upward.

  Another sentry team saw the activity and reacted instantly. These two divers split up, tracking their own weapons on Bolan. But they were not fast enough for The Executioner.

  Bolan flicked the shark gun to kill mode and triggered a round at the diver on the right before he could warn the others.

  Globs of matter shot in all directions as the man's head and helmet exploded.

  The guard on Bolan's left brought his weapon to bear and triggered off a round.

  But he was not fast enough. The retarding effect of the surrounding water gave Bolan the time he needed.

  Bolan kicked himself into a sideways roll.

  The bullet missed.

  Bolan triggered another round that sent the diver to a watery grave.

  Two murky black clouds hung suspended.

  Bolan swam in a wide arc, angling well away from the underwater encounter.

  There was no way for the rest of the frogman force to accurately detect the source of the exchange between Bolan and the sentries.

  Voices in Spanish chattered across the frequency Bolan was monitoring. Then the frequency went blank except for static. That, too, died as Grimaldi realized what had happened and patched Bolan out of their tac net.

  The terrorist frogteam was operating under a blanket of radio silence, or they had switched to another frequency.

  Bolan realized the team boss would dispatch divers to double-check all the guard points while the salvage operation continued.