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  "Certainly, but I repeat, there was an explosion. It got into the news all over Europe. It will add to the general air of demoralization."

  "That's three hits flunked in as many days," Senator Shell Pettifer observed. "Velasquez. The Iberia office. And now this."

  "So what? Flunked is a relative term." Nasruddin paced up and down between the desk and the filing cabinets in the office at the Maginot fortress. "Listen. Velasquez personally means nothing to us. His removal wouldn't benefit us one way or the other. Codorneau and the Italian were another matter, but this guy was no more than a gesture — one more prominent man out of the way, one step higher up the panic scale. Look at it objectively, in the light of the plan as a whole, and you'll see that it's not really important that he escaped."

  "It was a failure just the same," Pettifer said stubbornly.

  "Okay, okay. Bolan screwed up the hit. Don't ask me how. But the fact that it was made got us as much publicity as if it had succeeded. Don't you see? It's the same thing with the girl and the Iberia bomb. The mysterious tip-off… our fearless police force… disaster narrowly averted. All that shit. It's a natural for the media."

  "But you lost the Corsican. And Olga Kurtz is in jail," Mahdi al-Jaafari objected.

  Nasruddin waved a hand. "They were expendable. So was the man in Liege. They're all expendable. That's why we use pros. There's always another in need of ready cash."

  He sat down behind the desk. "You've seen the Liege video. It was shot from a parked cab just down the hill from the Kennedy. Pretty spectacular, don't you think? Even if it wasn't the tower block?"

  "I thought it was supposed to be the Culture Center," Mahdi al-Jaafari remarked, fingering the yellow rose in his buttonhole.

  "The target was switched at the last minute. For a reason. It told us something we wanted to know… because Bolan went to the Culture Center first. It's all on the tape."

  "I think Max is right," the tall American with crimped hair put in. "We're forgetting something here. The entire Liege operation was planned with a single aim in mind — to get Bolan there. Whether or not he fouled up the bomb arrangements was of secondary importance. We'd lost him after the fiasco here with the night guards. We wanted him where we could tail him again."

  He paused, looking at the three other men. "Well, we got him, didn't we?" he said. "In my view anything extra in the way of explosions or newspaper stories about them are a bonus."

  "I guess you're right, Al," Pettifer said. "Anything to keep the man in the street screaming blue murder… and his wife saying she's too scared to fly or even go to the supermarket anymore."

  "She'll be even more scared after today," Nasruddin said.

  * * *

  The supermarket was three miles out of town on the road to Limoges — a vast, single-story, hangarlike structure with forty-six checkout desks and open-air parking for thirty-five hundred cars. Most of them seemed to be there on the afternoon of the thirty-first. Certainly the section of the vast hall devoted to sports and camping gear was unusually crowded.

  At first the people examining kayak skirts and Windsurfing equipment took the two men in camouflage fatigues and face masks to be part of some demonstration or sales promotion.

  The men were sitting side by side on a porch swing with a striped awning overhead. Even when they unzippered their fatigue tunics to produce mini-Uzi submachine guns, nobody paid them any mind.

  Then, quite calmly, the taller man fired a short burst into a group of customers checking out the assembly of a camp stove.

  A man in knee-length shorts died instantly. A child of seven threw herself screaming across a fallen mother who was pumping blood from her mouth. A bearded youth stared unbelievingly at his shattered arm. The noise of the volley was deafening.

  At the same time the second man leaped onto a stack of crated scuba suits and fired at the long wall of bottles in the liquor department.

  Uproar.

  After the instant of total silence that follows any catastrophe, before the echoes of the SMGs died away in the girdered ceiling, panic flooded the vast hall. Shouts, sobs and a stampede of feet as men and women fought to make the exits mixed with the sound of several hundred people dropping to the floor and the lone screech of a hysterical woman.

  In the liquor department glass erupted, liquid splashed and showered and wood splintered as the hail of lead swept along the rows of shelved bottles.

  The two gunmen were acting crazy. The sound of shots ripped through the pandemonium engulfing the supermarket. A container bottle of camping gas exploded, and the flames set fire to the material covering poolside chairs and sun umbrellas. Within seconds that corner of the building was a holocaust of flame.

  The killers sprinted from alley to alley, hosing death and destruction as they ran. They fired at anything that moved, anything that caught their eye, anything that stirred their drug-crazed minds to hatred.

  The tall terrorist continued shooting when his companion had exhausted his thirty-two-round box magazine, then slammed in a fresh clip himself when the other had reloaded and opened fire again.

  More terror-stricken customers fell. A huge pyramid of canned dog food disintegrated, and the cans rolled and clattered for dozens of yards in every direction.

  Then at last the slaughter was over. The junkie murderers backed out and ran from the screams and the flames and the blood. They were giggling as they piled into a Land Rover and careered out of the parking lot.

  The toll was forty-two dead and more than seventy injured.

  * * *

  Swissair's Flight SR759 took off as scheduled from Nice airport at 7:40 p.m., destination Geneva. The jetliner, a DC-9, flew out over the Mediterranean, turned when it was halfway to Corsica and returned on the international airlane that passed over Bordighera and the Italian Alps when it reached its operational height of thirty-three thousand feet. It was due to land at Geneva fifty minutes later.

  The plane never arrived.

  Seventeen minutes after takeoff, when the dusk was gathering in steep-sided valleys between the still-snowcapped peaks far below, a slender man with a crew cut and pale, flat, expressionless eyes stood up to reach for a case in the overhead locker compartment above his seat.

  The plastic-bodied Heckler & Koch caseless assault rifle that he produced had been smuggled in by an accomplice working with the baggage handlers in Nice. The woman sitting next to him, a retired schoolteacher from Milan, didn't initially recognize the weapon for what it was: the H&K G-11, with its smooth, longitudinally grooved polystyrene exterior and sniperscope carrying handle, could be a modernistic musical instrument case or some kind of precision optical device.

  The man walked clumsily to the rear of the cabin. Despite the fact that the summer evening was warm, he was wearing a raincoat that flapped around his legs. Standing by the curtain that divided the toilets from the seating accommodation, he raised the gun to his shoulder.

  The first indication the majority of passengers had that something was wrong was the sound of gunfire — three separate shots cracked loudly over the drone of the Pratt & Whitney jet engines. A hoarse shout from a bearded fat man and a scream from the schoolteacher were swamped in the tinkling clatter of breaking glass.

  Three flight attendants — one man and two women — serving drinks from a trolley at the far end of the cabin slumped lifeless to the aisle between the rows of seats.

  The outcry that swelled down the length of the cabin was drowned by a fourth shot as the terrorist gunned down the first officer, who had appeared in the doorway of the first-class cabin up front.

  Then he reached into the pocket of his raincoat and drew out an egg-shaped plastic hand grenade. He extracted the pin. "Here, catch!" he called to a young man sitting by a window at the far end of the cabin.

  He drew back his arm and pitched the grenade accurately over the heads of the other passengers. Involuntarily the young man raised his hands, though whether this was in automatic obedience to the direct command or simply
to ward off danger, nobody knew.

  The grenade — a 70 mm, 150-gram nonfragmentation HE killer developed by Omnipol in Prague — exploded as it reached him, reducing the upper half of his body to a gory pulp and smashing a seven-foot hole in the stressed skin of the DC-9's fuselage.

  Air from the pressurized cabin of the jetliner blasted out into the rarefied atmosphere high above the mountains, sucking with it several dozen of the tourist-class passengers, hand baggage, bottles, the drinks trolley and the four dead aircrew.

  At the same time the hurricane disturbance created an implosion between the cabin floor and the non-pressurized cargo hold beneath, buckling the airframe and shearing hydraulic feeders and control conduits that led from the flight deck to the tail group.

  The captain, who had only just had time to radio a skyjack alert, was halfway through the international Mayday sign when the bomb blew a hole in the DC-9's fuselage and sent it plummeting toward the earth.

  The terrorist had been ready for the whirlwind that sucked half the contents of the cabin out into the void. He had dropped down and clung to the bulkhead, which he knew was attached to one of the main fuselage formers, as soon as the grenade had left his hand.

  Now he rose unsteadily to his feet and fought his way out of the shrieking horror in the cabin, past the galley and the toilets to the rear entrance and exit hatch. Pushing up the steel safety bars on the door, he forced it open against the pressure of the wind and allowed it to be whipped away by the howling slipstream.

  He ripped off the raincoat — and suddenly the reason for its cumbersome size was revealed: beneath it he was strapped into the harness of a parachute rig. He forced himself to the open doorway and stepped out into space, allowing himself to fall several thousand feet before he pulled the rip cord.

  It seemed a long while later that he saw the dull flash some miles to the east when the stricken DC-9 plunged into a rocky escarpment on the slopes of Mont Blanc.

  26

  Mack Bolan regained consciousness underneath a bush. The bush was one of a clump growing below a line of trees. The trees crowned an eighty-foot bluff, partially covered by wild grasses and scrub, that bordered a wide river. Beyond a curve in the river, he could see the roofs, spires and factory chimneys of a large town.

  Bolan sat up. Apart from that fraction of a second immediately following the bomb blast, everything that had happened in Liege and in the days preceding his arrival there returned to him totally and in a single flash of awareness.

  He felt fine. No headache, no apparent injuries, the guns still holstered, each in its special rig. He took them out. Still loaded — exactly as they had been when he had come to outside the Friedekinde clinic near Neuchatel.

  He touched his cheek and chin. They had even shaved him! He wondered how long he had been held this time, how much, and precisely what, had been programmed into him without his knowledge.

  He wondered where he was.

  Undulating pastureland stretched as far as the eye could see on the other side of the river. Long shadows beneath the trees faded as the sun sank below a cloud bank low in the western sky.

  He got to his feet and walked away from the river and through the belt of trees.

  Soon he came to a country road. He turned left and strode in the direction of the town. Approaching scattered houses on the outskirts a mile farther on, he was passed by a pickup loaded with crates of live chickens. Glancing at the rear license plate, he saw three numerals followed by three letters, red on a white background. And the white plate itself was rimmed with red.

  Bolan frowned. Red on white?

  And then, rounding a corner and seeing ahead of him a roadside sign announcing the name of the town, he halted in midstride.

  The license plate was Belgian. The name of the town was Namur.

  Bolan started walking again, more slowly this time. That meant the river must be the Meuse. They had dumped him only thirty miles away from the city where he had been dumb enough to let them surprise him.

  How come?

  Liege to Neuchatel was two hundred and thirty miles in a straight line, more like two hundred and fifty by road; Liege to the Maginot fortress perhaps seventy or eighty less.

  Something wasn't quite right. Bolan went into the first cafe he came to and ordered a beer. In halting French he asked the girl standing behind the zinc coffee urn if there was a newspaper he could look at.

  She smiled and told him she spoke English, then reached beneath the shelves and handed him a copy of the Brussels daily, Le Soir. He glanced at the front page and handed it back. The lead story was about the attempted assassination of Alfonso Velasquez. "No," he said. "Sorry. I meant today's paper."

  "That is today's," the girl said.

  He stared at her, down at the date below the title and then up again. "But it says here the thirty-first."

  She frowned. "Today is the thirty-first."

  Bolan raised his left wrist and looked at the date slot on the face of his watch. She was right of course. The thirty-first.

  But this was crazy.

  He knew nothing of the net into which he had been dropped or the barge that had carried him upriver. What was certain, nevertheless, since the date hadn't changed, was the fact that he had been in the hands of Nasruddin's hoods not days but simply a matter of hours.

  They'd taken him around midday. It was only just after six o'clock now.

  What the hell would be the point?

  No way could they have transported him to the Maginot fort, transformed him into Baraka, doctored his mind and returned him to Belgium in such a short time, even if they had flown him there in a private plane. No, there would be too much time wasted driving to and from airfields, and a chopper would be too slow, plus the fact that Bolan thought he had read someplace that it often took several hours for psychedelic drugs to take effect.

  And why bring him back to Belgium?

  None of it made any sense at all, not in terms of a visit to the Maginot complex or the clinic.

  Okay, so they hadn't taken him out of the country.

  Whatever happened in those lost six hours must have happened right here in Belgium. That was the only answer that did make sense.

  But — his mind circled back to the same problem — what could they do to a guy, what possible use could they make of an unconscious man during a thirty-mile journey that took six hours?

  Bolan gave up. Like so many other turning points on this damned mission, this one had him well and truly baffled.

  Every time he figured he was getting someplace, a new twist came up and he found himself more puzzled than ever. He had even made the most important objective: he had located and identified Baraka. But despite the fact that he knew now that this programmed killer-to-be was himself, he was no nearer to the why, when and where of "the big one" for which Baraka was supposedly being trained.

  The Executioner felt that he needed help to work on the problem. Maybe Brognola or that shrink of his would have some bright suggestions; maybe, looking at it from a fresh angle, they could dream up a valid reason for a guy to be slugged, retained for six hours and then left unharmed down by the riverside thirty miles away.

  Whatever the answer, Bolan figured there was no point hanging around Namur.

  It would be better to return to Paris and connect with Brognola, so that they could hammer out the possibles and probables together.

  Finishing his beer, Bolan was struck by a sudden thought. He still had his round-trip railroad ticket in his pocket. And he remembered that the express, on its return journey from Cologne, called at Namur at exactly 7:00 p.m.

  He had around fifty minutes to make it. And if he did, he would be in Paris at 9:50 — ten minutes short of ten o'clock. He could be in the embassy cypher room before eleven, dictating distress calls to the big Fed.

  Bolan put down the glass and laid some coins on the counter. "How far is it from here to the central railroad station?" he asked the girl.

  She pursed her lips. "Ma
ybe a mile."

  "Would there be a cab in this neighborhood?"

  She shook her head.

  Bolan thanked her and left the cafe.

  He began to run.

  27

  "I can only think of one reason," Hal Brognola said. "You said it was a maximum of six hours, right?"

  "Right," Bolan said. Outside the window of the interview room, rain splashed on the roofs of traffic stalled along the Avenue Gabriel behind a truck unloading crates of beer between two lines of parked cars.

  "And you're certain they weren't still on your tail when you left Paris for Liege?"

  "They couldn't have been," Bolan said. "Look at the schedule, Hal. I flew to London on the twenty-seventh, as soon as I was briefed on the Velasquez hit. I don't think I was tailed, but I might have been — if they'd known where I was holed up in Strasbourg. In any case, I was recognized two days later by the Marksman after the hit had aborted. But he may have thought I was Baraka, sent to oversee his actions, rather than Bolan determined to foul them up, in which case he might not have reported it. He's a self-important character and he hates interference. Either way we can forget it. Because he vanished after the cop was killed at the end of the car chase. There was nobody left to keep track of me."

  "And you lost him?"

  "Yeah. Then I walked to London airport. I caught the last plane to Paris, but I didn't have a reservation. There was no way they could have known I was even there, let alone on my way back to Paris."

  "Unless they had the Arrivals sections staked out on the other side as a matter of routine."

  "At all the terminals in three different airports?"

  "Maybe not," Brognola conceded. "So you're clean in Paris. You find out from your contact that there's another hit planned in Belgium the next day. You leave on the early train. Any chance they could have picked you up in between?"

  "Uh-uh. I checked in at the big airport hotel, and I never left my room once I'd made that phone call. I had my meals sent up and I left for the railroad station at six o'clock the following morning — by subway."