Flight 741 Read online

  The best part of a year was passed in idleness, while Ilich made himself at home in London. He spent the summer months of 1971 in Lebanon, brushing up his skills and learning new ones at a PLO facility outside Beirut, and in the wake of Black September, when the government waged brief, abortive war against the foreign terrorists, he surfaced with the underground in France.

  For two years he served Amal Haddad, the PLO's top gun in Europe, running errands, taking messages, occasionally standing guard at secret conclaves where the fate of Israel was discussed in grim apocalyptic terms. Still young at twenty-four, he was not trusted yet to pull the trigger on a major score, but Julio was slowly rising through the ranks, ingratiating himself with all the right people, waiting for the day when he would finally reach the firing line.

  His opportunity arrived at Easter, 1973, when crack Israeli gunmen — shooters for a hit team dubbed the Wrath of God — at last surprised Haddad at his apartment. He had settled in behind the wheel of his Mercedes when a taxi pinned him at the curb, a second screeching up behind him, cutting off retreat. Converging fire from half a dozen Uzi submachine guns guaranteed that Julio Ramirez would be elevated to the leadership of Amal's European cadre.

  There had been other contenders, but Julio could be persuasive when he tried. A shooting, blamed on the Israelis, had removed his chief competitor; the next, and last, had fallen victim to an ugly accident at home.

  With Ilich at the helm, the underground became at once more active and more profitable. Certainly, revenge for the assassination of Haddad took top priority, but if another group desired assistance on French soil — the Baader-Meinhofs, for example, or the Japanese Red Army — they could count on Julio for full cooperation — at a price. His moment had arrived, and he would make the most of it before it slipped away. If KGB observers were surprised, they took no steps to rein him in. A terrorist was valuable anywhere.

  Ramirez started making headlines in the fall of 1973 — anonymously at first, unrecognized by the authorities, and later as "The Raven," product of a journalist's imagination. Julio didn't mind the name — it was immensely preferable to "The Jackal," one of his competitors — and he began to use it in communications with the media. They ate it up, reporting every threat and hanging on his every word, assuring that his infamy preceded him across the continent. Their stories made him more effective than he ever could have hoped to be without their help. He was reported here and there and everywhere. The Western powers quailed, or so he thought, at mention of his name. And no one knew for certain, anymore, precisely which assassinations he had engineered along the way.

  The Sûreté had linked him positively to the murder of a Jewish businessman — retaliation for Haddad — and to the blasts that killed or wounded thirteen persons in a Parisian sidewalk cafe. When jealousy erupted in the ranks, a rash defector fingered Ilich for the DST — the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire — and agents of the French security service had almost cornered him in a flat on Rue Toullier.

  Almost.

  He had surprised them on the stairway, blasting with an Uzi while their guns were still in holsters, riddling a pair of DST investigators, taking time to finish off the former comrade who was serving as their Judas goat and guide. From that point on, it had been underground or nothing, and his name had surfaced in connection with a string of incidents around the world. No single agency — including the KGB — could say with any certainty that Ilich had participated — or had not — in any given crime.

  He had been linked with the assassination of a Spanish military officer, and with the bombing murder of a British nobleman, allegedly conducted on commission from the IRA. The Red Brigades had used his services in certain bold abductions, and the Baader-Meinhof gang had almost certainly employed him to eliminate a series of informers in the ranks. The Tupemaros knew him well enough to call upon him for assistance with a string of bombings, and he had been seen in the company of ranking spokesmen for the PLO.

  In short, the Raven had been anywhere and everywhere, involved in anything and everything... until he vanished from the scene, abruptly, inexplicably, in 1983. There had been later sightings here and there around the world in intervening months — the Raven had been positively placed in Cuba, Vietnam, the Philipines, and a look-alike had been arrested in Mexico City — but none of them panned out. He was mysteriously and completely gone.

  The rumors multiplied and fed upon themselves. The Raven was retired and living like a king in Libya... or was it Lebanon? He had been terminated by Khaddafi on a whim, or tagged by the Israelis in a border strike, his body spirited away by fedayeen. He had been surgically remodeled, head to toe, and was relaxing on the Riviera or in Rio, in Miami or Las Vegas.

  But no one knew for sure.

  Until he surfaced on Flight 741.

  Until he was eliminated by Carl Lyons in Durango.

  Until the men of Phoenix Force surprised him at a meet in Mittenwald.

  And no one man could cover that much ground, that quickly. No man could resurrect himself in Germany the morning after he was killed in Mexico.

  Which meant it wasn't just the Raven anymore. Perhaps it never had been. But if there was more than one...

  Then everything they said about the bastard could be true, and more. He could be everywhere at once, and there was precious little anyone could do to stop him.

  Until they tracked the several Ravens down and killed them all.

  Mack Bolan was already on the scent, but there was no way he could possibly anticipate the danger, weigh the odds against him. If he scored a single kill, he would be lulled by false security, made vulnerable to reprisal from the rest.

  The Executioner was on his own.

  Again.

  As always.

  Chapter Sixteen

  By night, Toronto's waterfront looked much like any other in the world. The freighters ranged along her docks, the great warehouses jammed with produce, textiles and machinery, might have been lifted from New York or San Francisco, Liverpool or Tokyo. The major difference was olfactory, since Lake Ontario did not possess the salty aroma of the open sea; instead, it smelled like fish and diesel oil.

  Mack Bolan took the exit from the Gardiner Expressway toward the water, searching for the warehouse owned by Viking International. A phone-booth pit stop had confirmed the address given him by Tommy Noonan, and a street map brought him to the water's edge with only one false start. He left the rental's headlights on and kept his speed up, scanning left and right as ranks of carbon-copy holding barns slid past on either side. He had the pier, all right. It shouldn't cost him too much time to find...

  And up ahead the logo caught his headlights, shimmered briefly, slipping past to starboard, fading in the rearview mirror. Viking International. Still rolling, he killed the lights, already looking for a place to stash the rental while he made his probe. Some fifty yards along, he pulled into the shadow of an empty warehouse, parked against the loading dock — beneath a sign that read For Lease — and killed the engine.

  There should be no watchman on an empty, but he wasn't taking any chances. He could not afford to lose the car or the gear inside it out of carelessness. A moment's searching in the darkness turned up a bottle, and Bolan weighed it in his hand, considering his options and his targets, finally letting it fly. His missile hit the wall, rebounded with a hollow clink and shattered on the loading dock.

  He waited, counting down the numbers, giving anyone inside a chance to register the sound. Five minutes, and he gave it up. The empty barn was silent as a tomb.

  He spent another moment rigging up for combat, buckling the web belt, shrugging on the harness, daubing the cosmetic camouflage across his forehead, underneath his eyes, along his cheeks and nose. The sleek Beretta 93-R nestled underneath his arm in custom leather, and the silver AutoMag, Big Thunder, rode his hip on military webbing. Canvas pouches circling his waist held extra magazines for both, and pockets in the midnight skinsuit carried other gear; stilettos and garrotes
, a pencil flash and lock-pick set.

  The soldier was prepared for war... and hoped he wouldn't have to fire a shot. The probe would be a soft one if he had his choice, a stealthy in-and-out with none the wiser when he left. A simple look around — except that simple sometimes turned to life and death without a heartbeat's warning. A trick alarm, a roving watchman, anything at all could blow his plans sky-high and leave him out there on the firing line. A savvy soldier always girded up for war...and thanked the universe if it turned out that his preparations were unnecessary.

  He glanced both ways and crossed the narrow blacktop in a sprint, his form a gliding shadow in the moonlight. Forty yards flat-out, and he was huddled in against the loading dock at Viking International, the Beretta in his fist, alert for any sign of danger from within the warehouse.

  Silence.

  Bolan holstered the 93-R and scrambled topside, crouching on the dock and running down the numbers in his mind once more, aware of every night sound in his own immediate vicinity.

  He bypassed giant roller doors, his full attention centered on an entrance marked Employees Only. It was locked, but after scanning for a moment with the pencil flash, he satisfied himself that it was not connected to a burglar alarm. Vachon was confident or careless.

  Bolan crouched before the lock with tension wrench and diamond pick in hand. The wrench was nothing more than slender, tempered steel; the pick so named because its tip was diamond-shaped. With agile fingers, Bolan slipped the wrench inside the lock and twisted to the right, creating tension on the plug — a small cylinder that turns with the key to operate a lock. Probing with the pick, he felt for the tumblers, five pins of different lengths, housed in hollow shafts inside the cylinder. If he could raise them all together, as a key's serrated edge would do, he would defeat the lock. The tension wrench was meant to turn the plug a thousandth of an inch, and thereby keep the tumblers from falling back in place once he had lifted each in turn.

  Three minutes. Four. The lock was not a simple one, but neither was it burglarproof. He had it now, the door already swinging open into semidarkness, with a nightlight shining from the far end of a narrow corridor. He waited for the sound of a surprise alarm, ready for a confrontation, but ringing silence mocked him. Bolan slipped inside, allowed the door to close and lock itself behind him while he felt along the jamb for wiring, anything to indicate a silent burglar alarm.

  Nothing.

  If Vachon had dogs, they would be homing on him now like hungry guided missiles — trained, perhaps, to strike without a warning bark. Bolan waited for another moment, finally satisfied that he was alone at Viking International.

  He cleared the forty feet of corridor, emerging into the warehouse proper at the other end, confronting ranks of wooden crates and cardboard boxes piled from floor to ceiling, stretching out one hundred feet and more in the direction of the lake. Confronted with the wilderness of crates, he realized that he had no idea of where to start, or even what he might be looking for.

  An office. There would be one somewhere on the premises, no doubt, with files and ledgers — a directory, perhaps, of those in charge at Viking International. A pointer to the individual he still knew only as Vachon.

  He scanned the room, picking out employee rest rooms — his and hers — without discovering an office. It would be closer to the water, certainly, for the convenience of loading crews and captains dropping cargo on the pier. He chose an aisle at random, navigating by the single row of dim fluorescents overhead, and moved between the stacks of crates.

  No time for opening the crates and cartons, searching aimlessly for weapons now. An army could have spent the weekend digging here, and still have missed an arsenal.

  He had run out of aisle, confronting giant roller doors identical to those that faced the street behind him. To his left, a pair of forklifts sat like dozing dinosaurs, their rusty tusks directed toward the giant roller doors and Lake Ontario. The office was an eight-foot cubicle of glass and plywood, planted in a corner by the lakeside doors, a single naked light bulb burning there, illuminating desk and chairs, a telephone and IBM Selectric, filing cabinets.

  He heard the sound of distant voices, footsteps ringing on the concrete floor behind him, and he realized that he was out of time. Above him the fluorescents sputtered briefly, winking into life and bringing instant daylight to the warehouse floor.

  It was do-or-die, and Bolan knew that he could never hope to win a game of hide-and-seek inside the warehouse. Not if he remained at ground level, anyway.

  The nearest crates were labeled Farm Machinery and built of sturdy wood, arranged in something of a pyramid with smaller crates on top. He scrambled to the nearest forklift's driver's seat and leaped up to find a handhold on the packing crates. He reached the apex and levered over, flattening himself along the topmost crate and peering down to watch the nearest aisle.

  He discerned three figures clopping toward him between the walls of cartons, one gesticulating, speaking rapidly. Unless the soldier missed his guess, the guide would be Vachon. The other two consisted of a man and woman, keeping pace and listening attentively to every word.

  Despite the awkward angle, Bolan recognized them both.

  He knew the man, from photographs as Gerold Axelrod, American, a mouthpiece for the new survivalist-cum-neofascist underground. Except that many of them were above ground now, recruiting followers among the homeless and the unemployed, harassing immigrants and ethnic groups, assassinating journalists and sniping law-enforcement officers in the performance of their duties.

  It was all familiar, sure. And fifty years before, in war-torn Germany, it had been much the same. Inflation, unemployment, racial bigotry — the diverse symptoms merging, giving shaky credence to the Nazi movement, elevating a pathetic madman to the status of a god.

  It couldn't happen here, and yet...

  Within a span of eighteen months, the FBI and local agencies had fingered neo-Nazi activists in robberies, assassinations, arson, transportation of explosives, shoot-outs with police in several states. The raving right had training camps where "patriots" could learn guerrilla warfare tactics — for a price — and they were beaming mock-religious diatribes to several million homes by radio and television.

  A segment of America was listening, remembering the message with its easy answers to a host of complicated problems. Lost your farm? It was the Christless Jewish bankers in New York, Miami, Tel Aviv. Health failing? Blame the federal government for poisoning your water and your food. Unemployed? Why, look no further than the niggers, gooks and spics who took the white man's jobs away... or were they just intent on eating up your taxes through the welfare rolls?

  Among the latest crop of neofascists, Georgia's Gerold Axelrod was something of a figurehead. He had escaped indictment in the several crimes committed by his followers, and would deny that he led anybody into anything, but he was guilty, sure. Of peddling hate in homes and schools and churches coast-to-coast. Of arming idiots who didn't have the sense to understand the modern world, and setting them against their neighbors in a kind of grass-roots holy war. Within the law, his manicured hands were clean so far, but Bolan saw them dripping with the blood of innocents.

  The Executioner was not surprised to find a neo-Nazi in the company of someone like Vachon. Illegal weapons dealers were uniquely apolitical, concerned exclusively with cash. If Vachon had peddled weapons to the Raven yesterday, he would not shrink from dealing with the Raven's enemies today. His weapons were a mere commodity, like soybeans or cotton, except that soybeans had never slaughtered anybody on a 747, dammit.

  So, Axelrod was no surprise, and if it came down to an opportunity for Bolan to remove him, there would be no hesitation on the soldier's part.

  It was the woman who surprised Mack Bolan, her appearance setting off a tremor in the warrior's memory, the moment that he recognized her face.

  Toby Ranger.

  Goddamn it.

  There could be a thousand different reasons for the lady f
ed tagging after Axelrod — or was she with Vachon? No matter. Either angle — arms or private armies — fit the bill for her role with SOG.

  Toby had been working on the Mafia when Bolan first met her, so many lifetimes ago in Vegas, and he hadn't heard of Sensitive Operations yet. His old friend Hal Brognola was an adversary in those days, and duty-bound to drop the Executioner in his tracks. Toby and her Ranger Girls were on the federal payroll, keeping tabs on Mob infiltration of show business while burning up the charts as one of the hottest female song-and-dance acts in the country.

  The sight of Toby took him back, however briefly, to the times and turmoil they had shared in Vegas, in Detroit, Hawaii and New York. There were no Ranger Girls today, of course. Georgette Chebleu had died in Michigan, a screaming turkey mutilated by the syndicate's "physicians." The others — Toby, Smiley Dublin, Sally Palmer — went their separate ways, though all remained in federal service, working undercover on the Mob, on terrorists, wherever cannibals convened to dine upon the innocent.

  He pushed the memories away and concentrated on the individuals below him now, observing Toby as she kept pace with the men, attentive to Vachon and everything he said but watching Axelrod with dark, proprietary eyes. Without a word she reached out, slipped her hand inside the bend of Axelrod's arm and moved in closer to him.

  It told the warrior everything he had to know. Her presence here was no more than mere coincidence, perhaps, and unrelated to his quest. If he could tag the dealer privately, it need not interfere with her assignment.