Sudden Death Read online

  Brognola and the Company man sat on each side of a rustic wooden table, sheltered from the summer sun by an arbor outside one of the barns, but the agent had a shrewd idea that he was very soon due to be fed fresh information gleaned through the myriad antennae of that ultrasecret network. And he didn't want to hear it.

  "If the guys responsible for these killings are caught," Brognola said, "what happens? Their buddies hijack another plane, and the lives of several hundred more innocents are bargained against their release… when they will at once start planning more hits."

  "Sure," the CIA man said. "It's a pattern. But I don't see what…"

  "I'll tell you something, Gregson," the Fed said somberly. "It wouldn't take much of an acceleration in terrorist activity to provoke a climate of fear in Europe in which the normal man and woman would think twice before taking a train, visiting an airport, going down the subway or even doing the week's shopping." He sighed. "The situation will get worse until some government over there has the guts to bring back the death penalty for terrorist acts. After all, there isn't much sense hijacking a jetliner and bargaining the lives of the passengers against the return of accomplices if they are already six feet under!"

  "It's getting worse for the Europeans," Gregson said.

  "Sure it is. But you guys at Langley are the last ones to start playing isolationist at this stage of the game. If the social order in Western Europe breaks down — and that's just what we're talking about — you know who's going to move in and take over."

  "Okay, Hal. But what are we supposed to do? Half these crazy bastards are free because the French cling to the idea that they have to make their country an asylum for political refugees. Political refugees, my ass!" Gregson spit in the grass at his feet. "Ninety percent of the world's fanatics are free to come and go in that country. And I won't even mention the arms and explosives filtered through Mideastern embassies in Paris and Rome and Bonn — stuff that the security people can't touch because it's smuggled through in diplomatic pouches!" The man from Langley sounded personally affronted.

  "I'm not arguing," Brognola said mildly. "Let me show you something." From an inside pocket he took a creased cutting torn from a glossy magazine, unfolded it and smoothed the paper on the table. "This was published in Figaro magazine," he said. "It's a satellite photo showing the whole of Paris, street by street. It illustrated a story headlined 'Fifty-five Million French Are Scared,' and a small red star was superimposed on the site of each of the fifty worst terrorist attacks in the past few years. What does the pattern suggest to you?" He pushed the cutting across the table.

  Gregson studied the picture. "The attacks are pretty evenly distributed," he said. "They cover the whole city except the northeast corner. That quarter is completely blank."

  "Exactly That's the area where all the immigrants are concentrated. It's practically a ghetto — and you don't shit on your own doorstep.

  "But that is exactly what I'm saying. That's where they go to ground, the Palestinians and the Iranian…"

  "You have to remember," Brognola cut in, "that if the guys on the international terrorist circuit can pass unnoticed in that part of town, they're mingling with a couple of hundred thousand honest working people who have every right to be there — Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans, immigrants arriving legally from ex-French colonies like Senegal, many of them with French nationality. The government can't throw them all out."

  The Fed fished a fresh cigar from his breast pocket and jammed it into a corner of his mouth without lighting it.

  "So what are we supposed to do?" Gregson asked. "Right now there's nothing we can do. Not officially. Not even officially covertly. We get bad press over there anyway. If there's a strike of workers at the Renault automobile factory, it's been stirred up by the Americans. If fanatics attempt to stage a revolution on some obscure island in the Mediterranean, they've been funded by the CIA. Everything's our fault. The fact remains that we — and the Europeans with us — are at war. It's not a war we can fight openly, nor is it a war where we can even use the same weapons as the enemy. Too many innocents would get killed. But that's what they're trying to goad us into doing — fight it their way."

  "So?" A frown furrowed Gregson's forehead.

  "So until free world governments take a harder stand on the law-and-order question, we play this war a different way — from the inside, because there is a change in this latest wave of terror. Until now the attacks have been orchestrated, as you call it, by the Soviets, via the KGB. It's indirect, of course, with arms and money and free training facilities for urban guerrillas, but the latest intel feeding in to us here suggests a different scenario."

  "How different?"

  "The thugs carrying out the hijacks and the killings are the same — Iranian splinter groups stoked up with hate by the mad ayatollahs, Palestinian extremists, spinoffs from the IRA. But the guys pulling the strings are different. As far as we know, the KGB have a clean sheet on this one. Somebody else is writing the script."

  "Okay, surprise me. Who's the guilty party — according to your superintelligent computers?"

  Brognola shook his head. "No idea. Zero indications. That's why we have to put in a ferret."

  "A ferret?"

  "To smell out the new masterminds, to force them into the open. A ferret with a license to kill."

  "You mean you're asking me to brief one of our…"

  "I'm asking you nothing."

  "I don't get it," Gregson said. "I figured you would want the Company…"

  "I want the Company to do nothing," the Fed cut in once more. "Exactly that. Not to lift a finger."

  "Meaning?"

  "My ferret's on your hit list. I want him taken off it. I want you guys looking the other way when he goes into action."

  "Who is it?"

  Brognola removed the cigar from his mouth and leaned forward, mere inches away from Gregson's face. "Mack Bolan," he said.

  "Bolan! But he…"

  "Happens to be the best goddamn infiltration agent and combat specialist this country has ever produced."

  "I'm familiar with Bolan's reputation," Gregson said stiffly.

  "Yeah, and official intelligence organizations hate free-lancers because initiative louses up the bureaucracy." Brognola sat up very straight and stabbed the cigar toward the CIA man. "But this time you lay off. Understood?"

  Gregson spread his hands in a gesture of resignation. For the first time since his arrival he looked almost happy. He wasn't being asked to sign anything, spend Company money or get involved in any kind of operation. And turning a blind eye to the activities of a professional was at least better than being fucked around by the amateurs on the National Security Planning Group.

  "It says someplace in the Bible," Brognola observed, "that the meek shall inherit the earth. Obviously the guy who wrote that had never heard of Khadaffi or Khomeini. So long as there's no summary execution for terrorists caught in the act, the meek are going to go on being shit-scared. Until the silent majority in all countries stand up and shake their fists and insist on that legal reform, Mack Bolan will remain the terrorists' death penalty."

  2

  A hot wind blew spirals of dust across the concrete apron in front of Tel Aviv's airport terminal. The sunlight, blazing down out of a sky the color of beaten brass, sparkled off the Plexiglas canopy above the flight deck of an El Al Boeing refueling outside Satellite Number Five.

  Mack Bolan rode the third car in a string of baggage carts being tractored out to the plane from the security check beneath the departure lounges. Crouched behind the stack of valises, suitcases in expensive leather and plain vinyl luggage, he looked as anonymous as any of the other baggage handlers loading the jetliner's cargo hold. It was only when he uncoiled his six-foot-plus frame and stood upright in the shade beneath the wing that his physical power became evident. Bolan weighed in at two hundred pounds, all of it steel-cored muscle, and it was clear from the grim set of his jaw and the determination in his ice-
blue eyes that he was a man who meant business.

  Wrists and ankles protruding from the ill-fitting, borrowed El Al uniform, Bolan glanced warily left and right among the ground crew servicing the giant jet. Although the man was a disguise expert, there were some structural factors it was impossible to alter, and none of these men was the right shape or build to be the terrorist Bolan was looking for.

  Extraspecial precautions were being taken on this flight because Isaac Goldschmidt, a big wheel in the Knesset, would be among the first-class passengers, on his way to address a plenary session of the Euro-Parliament in Geneva. All baggage, hold as well as cabin, had been passed through scanners, and travelers checking in were obliged to unpack each case entirely in front of hawk-eyed customs and security officials.

  Tossing the suitcases up to a handler standing in the open hatch beneath the plane's belly, the Executioner was nevertheless unhappy — a gut reaction had set the hairs on his nape standing upright.

  Bolan knew nothing yet of Hal Brognola's meeting with Gregson, but by chance he had himself been on the trail for several weeks of Graziano, the Iranian killer who traveled on fake Italian ID papers. He had no idea if the hit man had been alerted to the fact that he was being tailed, but it was undeniable that Bolan had lost the guy in Rome. And it was right after this that the jet taking off from Fiumicino was sabotaged.

  And now Graziano had shown up in Tel Aviv.

  Bolan knew nothing of the Alitalia stewardess either, but the airport seemed the likeliest place if a hit was to be made.

  One thing he did know now — it had been news to him when he had arrived in Israel — was that Graziano, despite his nationality, didn't belong to a fanatic Jihad group sent out from Iran to spread terror in the capitals of the West. He was, in fact, a professional, a gun for hire. Except that his specialty was explosives rather than firearms.

  Thus Bolan's concentration on the airport.

  The intel had come via a contact of the Executioner's in Mossad, Israel's superefficient intelligence service.

  A Mossad operative in Rome had been alert enough to spot Bolan in the embarkation area at Fiumicino and had radioed ahead, so that a self-effacing individual at Immigration had politely asked the Executioner to follow him.

  Fortunately the official in the security interrogation room had been an old buddy. Aaron Davis was the least Jewish-looking guy it was possible to imagine — a thin, lanky, freckled redhead, with a snub nose and the pale, flat eyes of the northern European. As a Mossad agent, he found the image useful.

  "Okay, Mack," he had said with a friendly smile. "I guess we can cut out the formalities. What brings you here?"

  Bolan had told him.

  "How did you know Graziano was here?"

  Bolan had told him. An underworld tipoff from a gold smuggler whose life he had once saved.

  "You must understand that we can't pretend we don't know you're here. We can't tolerate any lone wolf activity on our territory. But we're grateful for the info. Our people hadn't gotten onto Graziano yet. So if you'd care to work along with us — in a strictly noncom role — maybe between us we can locate him and take action. But any rough stuff must be left to us. Okay?"

  "Understood."

  "Come to my office. We'll get a printout on the guy. But you've actually been tracking him. What can you tell us about him that the computer can't?"

  "Personal stuff? Mediterranean type. Passes for southern Italian. Medium height. Stays in two-star hotels, usually with a restaurant attached. Sometimes wears a mustache, sometimes a beard, sometimes neither. Hair can be cropped or curly. The only thing he can't, or won't, disguise is a limp. He walks with a limp."

  The printout had told them that Graziano's real name was Sadegh Rafsanjani. That he was twenty-seven years old and had once been part of a suicide squad selected by Hussein Montazeri, the successor-designate to Khomeini in Teheran, to destroy targets in Europe. That he had broken away and hired himself out as a free-lancer after following an instruction course organized by the chief of the East German secret police, General Markus Wolff. And it was on that course that he had acquired the limp.

  It was not known whether Teheran had been angered enough by his defection to put out a contract for the contract killer, or whether they had figured it would suit them to leave him on the loose dispensing death right and left. Any kind of destruction was grist to the mad mullahs' mill.

  The final line on the printout had read: "Attention all operatives: this man is extremely, repeat extremely, dangerous."

  Aaron Davis had agreed to let Bolan follow up his hunch and had arranged cover as a baggage handler… on the understanding that he would remain unarmed and communicate with Mossad agents posted around the airport the moment he saw anything suspicious.

  The Executioner had had his own ideas on that.

  Sure, he'd communicate. But for him, unarmed had been completely out of the question. And Davis, being a savvy agent, hadn't needed much convincing by Bolan that he would need firearms. So Davis had provided him with a Beretta 93-R, a carbon copy of the one Bolan usually used.

  Sweating in the dry midday heat, he could feel the comforting weight of the Beretta now, pressed hard against his ribs by the too-tight uniform as he hefted the last of the suitcases to the guy in the belly of the aircraft. No chance of a fast draw here. But in any case it didn't look as though there was going to be any shooting. Neither he nor the handler above him — the nearest of the Mossad men — had observed anything remotely suspicious. They'd be calling the passengers soon; they couldn't hold up the flight any longer.

  Could he have been mistaken? Had his hunch been wrong?

  It was always possible. But why else would the hit man have come into the hotbed of anti-Muslim activity? No other VIP flight was planned in the immediate future.

  They had covered everything, hadn't they?

  The cleanup crew from the maintenance unit… the hand baggage… the stuff in the hold and the few freight containers… the passengers themselves and their effects… the crew… the bins for duty-free goods and in-flight magazines — a favorite hiding place for arms stowed ahead of takeoff by the ground crew accomplices. The Boeing itself had practically been taken apart by Mossad experts. Yeah, they'd covered everything that could be…

  Suddenly Bolan's eye registered something. His muscles tensed, his pulses racing.

  Not everything.

  Not the one last-minute operation that was always delayed until the passengers trooped aboard.

  The loading of the food containers. It was a midday flight: the cabin crew would be serving prepacked airline lunches.

  The first of the aluminum containers, shelved with dozens of cellophaned trays, was being forklifted up to the forward hatch at the other end of the airplane at that very moment.

  Bolan saw the feet of the white-jacketed attendant from the airport commissary between the small wheels on the far side of the second trolley.

  The Executioner raised himself on tiptoe. He saw a tall, thin guy with a hooked nose.

  The third was fat and balding.

  The man wheeling out the fifth trolley was in the open, in the full glare of the sun, thin, stooped, a little older than the others. He looked as though the heat were too much for him. Only the man with the fourth remained completely hidden by the container.

  Bolan jumped up onto the rail of the baggage cart, steadying himself with one hand on the lip of the open hatchway above. He craned to see over the top of the trolley.

  A man of nondescript height. Bolan placed both hands on the hatchway rim and flexed his arms, drawing himself up a few extra inches.

  He saw dark hair, a bulbous nose, a Zapata mustache. Above the nose he saw gold-rimmed glasses.

  But the man's head bobbed in an unusual fashion with each step he took. It could only mean one thing. A limp!

  Bolan exploded into action. His hand darted into the coverall and unleathered the 93-R as he leaped to the ground. "Search the trays!" he yelled to the Moss
ad man above him. And then he hurled himself toward the line of aluminum containers.

  Bolan berated himself for not thinking of it before: if he could talk his way in as a baggage handler, a man with unlimited funds — and maybe associates inside — could as easily take a one-time job with the cafeteria service.

  The Executioner would later learn that fifteen of the lunch tray pies carried wadded plastic explosive with wristwatch timers beneath their crust — fifteen small explosions blasting off within seconds of each other, enough to rip off the nose and flight deck and send the Boeing hurtling to its doom.

  The killer saw him coming and took off. He ducked beneath the tailgate of a refueling tanker, ran around the Boeing's nosewheel and dashed across the apron toward a TriStar boarding at another satellite.

  Seeing him momentarily out in the open, with no cover, Bolan stopped, sank into a combat crouch and raised the Beretta in a two-handed shooting position, ready to drop him.

  But in the instant the Executioner sighted the 93-R, Graziano dipped his hand into his pocket, whirled and shot his arm out.

  Bolan recognized the egg-shaped RGD-5 as it arced his way. He knew the Soviet-made antipersonnel grenade was lethal up to a radius of twenty yards. The concrete of the apron was hard, and the thing would roll.

  It was no time for heroics.

  He leaped sideways, dived for the cover of the nosewheel and rolled, twisting frantically away from the deadly explosive, his arms shielding his head, neck and face.

  The concussion drummed his feet against the ground and the blast seared his body from heel to head. But the fragments scythed through the air above his prone frame, and apart from a deep scratch across the back of one hand, he was unscathed.

  By the time he was on his feet once more, Graziano had produced a Tokarev pistol and had shot the driver of a low-slung maintenance cart designed to slide beneath the wings of executive jets. The guy lay on his back on the tarmac with a lacework of blood webbing out from beneath him.