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  "Not until Señor Rostand or his partner are here," someone yelled in a Spanish accent. Bolan thought the voice came from the small boat. "That was the arrangement."

  There was an angry reply from the pier but the wind snatched the words away.

  "For cryin' out loud!" A Southern drawl. "Why won't they land the goddamn stuff?"

  "I tell you no. We have a deal; we keep it." The accent again.

  A chorus of complaints, pleading from the men on the pier.

  "I warn: soon it shall be too late."

  "Come off it, Sanchez!"

  "Where the fuck…"

  The hood behind Bolan was shooting again. Heavy-caliber revolver stuff, by the sound. He felt the wind of one of the slugs on his cheek. Out on the pier a powerful flashlight beam lanced through the dark.

  The light swept over Bolan as he ran.

  "Policía! I saw the uniform. We are not prepared…"

  "Don't be a damned fool."

  Abruptly a submachine gun chattered from somewhere above the whitecaps. Bolan threw himself flat. Behind him he heard a shrill cry. There were no more shots from the mobster.

  An outboard burst to life with a clattering roar. The small boat wheeled away from the pier and headed out into the Gulf, leaving a phosphorescent wake curving among the foam-tipped waves.

  Bolan could hear the men on the pier more clearly now. For a moment the wind had dropped. It was clearly an angry council of war.

  "The stupid fools. There was no need to…"

  "What can you expect of Mexicans?"

  "To refuse to land the shipment just because…"

  "Rostand's laxity is unpardonable. It is not just the consignment; we were supposed also to collect his market reports and send them to Ischia."

  "What do we do now? Go on up the house?" The flashlight beam swung this way and that. The green signal lamp was extinguished.

  "We leave." An authoritative voice, used to being obeyed. "There may still be gunmen out there, and we don't know who they are. Without Rostand's assurance…"

  "They could still be Hugo's boys." The Southern drawl. "But there was a cop, all right. I saw him. Shouldn't we…"

  "I said we leave. From the hotel we telephone. If all is well, we return later by road."

  "What about the stuff? Will Sanchez return later?"

  "We shall see."

  The speaker stepped down into the launch, followed by his two companions. There was a deep-throated, burbling drone as the rakish craft knifed away through the rising waves.

  Facedown in the grass, Mack Bolan let out his breath in a long whistle of astonishment.

  The three men in the launch had been speaking in Russian!

  And the leader — revealed for a brief instant in the flashlight beam as it swept past — was Sakol.

  Bolan even knew him.

  Piotr Anatolevitch Sakol, of the infamous KGB's First Chief Directorate. To be precise, a high official of that organization's S subdirectorate, which was responsible for the planting of illegals and the recruitment of sleepers in foreign countries.

  Smiling to himself, Bolan ran onto the pier, stripped the covers from one of the powerboats and headed back to Pretty Bay.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The commuters in Washington, D.C. were working late. Capitol Hill was still jammed bumper to bumper long after dark. Bolan impatiently drummed his fingers on the steering wheel of the Thunderbird, wondering how long it would be before he got out of the traffic snarl.

  He saw Jason Mettner first at Columbus Circle, the lean, pale face and the inevitable dangling cigarette unmistakable in the greenish light reflected from the dashboard of an Olds sedan. Before Bolan could signal, the line moved forward a few yards and a panel truck cut in between the two cars. By the time he had maneuvered the T-bird around it, the Olds was no longer in view.

  They drifted together again going around DuPont.

  Mettner's face was blue. Then Bolan watched it change from orange to red to yellow in the colored lights illuminating the fountain in the center of the circle.

  This time he called out. Mettner glanced sideways through his open window. "Hi, there!" he cried across the low-slung hood of some foreign sportster. "What brings you to the land of the free?"

  "Freedom," Bolan replied.

  "That's good to hear. I figured you might be in the market for thermonuclear waste. Half-life only fifty years. Buy while stocks last."

  Bolan grinned. "You keep it," he said. "You might need it to heat up one of your stories."

  "Why don't we leave the pack and go hunt a martini on our own?" the newspaperman suggested. "There's no emission control on alcohol."

  They drank at the Federal City Club. Such an august administration haunt, Bolan felt, would be the least likely place he'd be noticed by anyone who knew he was on the Wanted list in twenty-one states.

  "What can I do for you, squire?" Mettner asked when they were comfortably installed in deep chairs with tall glasses. "I'm not actually in the freedom business, but if there's anything…"

  "You may be," Bolan said soberly. "In this kind. Again, it's something I'd like you to find out for me."

  Mettner stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette. "What's in it for me?"

  "A story. It could be a very big one… if the stuff you come up with is twenty-four carat."

  "Okay, shoot."

  And Bolan couldn't help but smile at Mettner's choice of words.

  "A comrade. Apparently outposted in this country. Piotr Anatolevitch Sakol. Member of the KGB First Chief Directorate, Subdirectorate S."

  "That's the department dealing with illegals, right?" Mettner was scribbling on the back of an envelope he had taken from his pocket.

  "Right. At one time he was seconded to Department V, the wet affairs, executive action team. I want to know what he's doing here now. If you have counterintelligence or FBI contacts, or any in to their computer linkups, I'm in the market for intel on his present cover in the U.S. And of course any educated guesses or newspaper gossip on the real reason."

  Mettner nodded. "Can do. But it may take a little time. I'll have to make a few calls. You want to meet me tomorrow, or can you wait?"

  "I'll wait," Bolan said.

  The newspaperman shook a cigarette halfway out of his pack and put it between his lips. He rose to his feet. "I'll have the same again," he said, then walked out of the bar and into the lobby.

  While he was away, Bolan ran over in his mind the disparate elements of the puzzle he was trying to solve. He was on the brink, he felt certain, of killing some particularly dirty underworld operation. But there were still too many unconnected pieces in the puzzle. It was more like one of those carved ivory balls the Chinese craftsmen made. If you looked through the gaps in the lacy carving you could see that there was a second ball inside, another one inside that, and so on.

  Rinaldi, Ononu, Vanderlee, Reinbecker, Rostand… each evil plot had revealed an even more sinister one behind it.

  Then he corrected himself. Instead of Chinese balls, make that Russian dolls.

  Because now it seemed that the mastermind behind it all was not Mafia but KGB.

  Bolan had foiled Soviet plans to make use of the Mob worldwide before, and if Sakol's dramatic appearance late in the game added an unexpected new dimension, it was not a dimension that refused to fit in with the rest of the conspiracy.

  The various layers the Executioner had stripped away were each connected with the provision of money for the financing of terrorist activity. So it was not unreasonable to find the KGB at the center, because the destabilization of Western society was one of that evil organization's primary aims.

  What was much less understandable was the big business involvement that seemed to surface with bewildering regularity. For that was the sector of society most likely to suffer if the plan succeeded.

  There was Ononu's manic interest in the acquisition of the mines in Montenegria, when his profits from the drug industry must have been immeasurably
higher.

  There were mines, too, around Baarmbeek.

  Vanderlee, Bolan recalled, had said to the mercenary, Eddie Hanson, that the Executioner must be eliminated because his activity threatened "years of exploitation" by private individuals heavily into "gold, diamonds, heavy industry."

  The fathers of the kidnapped girls had all been industrialists.

  Finally here was Hugo Rostand, an ex-Mafia capo and launderer of syndicate money, deeply involved in the Dow Jones index and recent trading on Wall Street, the Bourse in Paris and the London Stock Exchange. For there was little doubt that the market reports Sakol had needed were those connected with the file Bolan had snatched from the mobster's desk before he, Bolan, had fled.

  He had it with him now. Sipping his drink, he opened the manila envelope and prepared to go through the contents again.

  Market reports, underlined and annotated in various colors. Tables and graphs from The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Le Monde, accompanied by digests encapsulating the movements illustrated. A sheaf of typed documents evaluating and forecasting trends. Most of the in-depth analyses concerned the market in gold and certain industrial metals. There was no material on industrial stock or shares in non-mining companies.

  Behind these papers were press clippings, many of them dealing with unexpected fluctuations in the world price of silver, zinc, titanium and manganese, along with expert appraisal of the relation between these and various government decisions on space research, and on the defense budget's effect on the armaments industry.

  A cutting from the London Daily Telegraph was headlined: London Metal Exchange Members Call for Tin Market Closure. The story forecast the total collapse of trading in this metal, in which dealings had already been suspended for two weeks. A feature from Kuala Lumpur in Der Spiegel reported that the number of Chinese working in gravel-pump tin mines, scouring quarry faces with powerful jets of water, had been cut by more than fifty-percent. The London Times headlined a story: Tin Crisis into Third Month.

  The last group of papers were also press clippings, but they dated back over a couple of years and they all dealt with terrorist activity. Bolan saw stories relating to the explosion that destroyed an Air India jumbo over the Atlantic, bomb attacks that killed Christmas shoppers at Harrod's in London and two major department stores in Paris, the sabotage of a French high-speed train and the carnage resulting from bombing of railroad stations in Bologna and Marseille.

  There were pieces on the Lod airport massacre, the suicide-bomber attack that cost 240 American Marine Corps lives in Beirut, several different skyjacks, and the machine-gunning of women and children at the airports of Rome and Vienna during a recent Christmas. Bolan found no reference to the Entebbe skyjack, in which the terrorists were annihilated by an Israeli commando force.

  There was nothing about drugs in any of the extracts, but Bolan had little doubt that this was just a selection of atrocities, claimed by a variety of murderous fanatic organizations, which had in fact been financed with money from the chain he was following through.

  As he closed the file a small, crumpled slip of paper fell out. It was the fragment torn from Reinbecker's notepad on which he had jotted down Rostand's name and address.

  It had already been half covered by doodles and scrawls in the South African's spidery hand. Bolan had not bothered to examine them before, but a single word caught his eye now and he smoothed out the paper and scrutinized the phrases.

  Some were readable enough: Cassiterite (tin) assoc. + alluvial copper… Sphalerite isomorphs inc. gallium, indium… semiconduct. transistors, telecom detectors.

  At the foot of the page, in smaller, neater handwriting, he read: Malaysia — 1000 tin mines red. 458 today: 360 g-pump, 51 open-cast, 38 dredged, only 19 underground. The last phrase had been underscored.

  Bolan folded the paper and replaced it carefully in the file. An idea was beginning to take shape in his mind, though as yet it had no structure. It was as though he saw the leaves and twigs and branches of a tree appear, with no trunk connecting them with solid earth. But it was something; it filled what had previously been a blank space.

  Why then did the word Ischia keep recurring in his mind?

  The file he was holding. Sakol had said, "We were supposed also to collect his market reports and send them to Ischia."

  Why Ischia? What did it have to do with the KGB? Was there yet another boss behind them? And why did the name of the place echo? Somewhere along the line he had heard it mentioned before. Where? What was the connection? He knew there was one, like a half-remembered name it kept floating almost to the surface of his memory… then submerging again before he could grasp it.

  He was still struggling to remember when Mettner returned.

  "Pay dirt," the newspaperman announced. "Your man Sakol is seconded to a Russian trade delegation — at present in this country for import-export negotiations with chambers of commerce in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, Tampa and New Orleans."

  "I'll bet!" Bolan said. "And the real reasons?"

  "That's the screwy part. According to the bureau and the NSA spooks, there is no evidence of recruiting or any attempt to place — or even trace — illegals. The guy seems to be genuinely on a commercial kick, following the markets and all."

  "Any special interests there?"

  "Funny you should ask. Yep — it seems he's very hot on metals, especially gold."

  "That figures. Where does this trade delegation hang out?" Bolan asked. "When it's not selling vodka, caviar and sets of Russian dolls to the natives, I mean."

  "Georgetown. One of the mansions leased to the Soviet embassy. Sakol himself is based in another Russian outpost, on O Street."

  Bolan drained his glass and pushed himself upright. "The story will be red-hot," he said, "but you have to work for it."

  "Meaning?"

  "There's a place for a backup man in tonight's break-in," Bolan said. "A house rented to foreigners. Over on O Street."

  * * *

  As neat as books arranged on a library shelf, the colonial houses on O Street allowed only a single break in their semicontinuous facade — a construction site.

  Breaking into the Soviet outpost was not all that difficult — provided you could operate the swing crane whose long arm stretched out far enough to encompass the far side of the street and the houses on either side of the site if it was necessary.

  It was necessary for the Executioner. The house assigned to Piotr Sakol as his private quarters flanked the site. It was unlikely that the place would be protected with the most ultrasophisticated of Soviet security gadgetry — it was, after all, a dormitory site, not an office or an offshoot of the embassy itself. But still there would be a certain amount of electronic alarm equipment and Bolan preferred to bypass it. The roof then seemed to him the best way in, with the crane the obvious way to get there.

  The crane was motorized; when the construction gangs were working the site its arm with the pulleys and grappling hooks was operated mechanically. For Bolan this had to be a silent manual task. Fortunately the counterweight machinery and the huge roller bearings on which the arm pivoted were sensitive enough for him to make it.

  But the timing was vital. Leaving the Thunderbird parked on the tree-lined, lamplit avenue beside the Potomac, he had realized that the gantry was visible from the river — silhouetted against the night sky above the rooftops. And there was an almost continuous police presence on the water.

  Since Georgetown was one of the most burgled areas in the United States, patrol cars also cruised every street between ten and twelve times an hour. So speed was as important as silence.

  The workers had left the pulley halfway along the arm, which was angled toward the rear of the site. Bolan wanted the pulley at the far end of the arm, and the crane swung around until it was directly over the roof of Sakol's house.

  In the dark, it was nerve-racking negotiating the site, which was partly e
xcavated, partly cluttered with stonecrushers, concrete mixers and stacks of lumber. But they made it without mishap and Bolan left Meaner as lookout by a heap of gravel at the base of the crane. Each of them had a long-range walkie-talkie; when the Executioner was ready, he would contact Mettner in time for him to have the car outside as he left the house.

  The newspaperman had already checked that Sakol would be at an official embassy function until after midnight. That left just three male servants — probably all KGB — in the building.

  For Bolan the slowest part was climbing the girdered telescopic pillar on which the crane arm was mounted, freezing each time a car passed or a boat could be heard on the river. At the top he found the lightweight arm moved silently, but the pulley creaked. Very slowly he maneuvered the wire hawsers so that the pulley slid outward and the grappling hooks descended almost to roof level. Only when he was sure the shrill squeaking had alerted nobody did he swing the arm until it was over the house.

  All he had to do then was inch his way out along the slender, narrowing gantry, traversing the void until he was directly above the slates of the roof. Then he lowered himself down the wire, hung for an instant from the hooks, and dropped lightly beside the parapet.

  There were two skylights among the slate ridges, one dark and one lit. Bolan moved warily across to the second. It was a clear, cool night; the roof was dry. Cautiously, he leaned out far enough to see down into the room below.

  Clearly it had once been a servant's attic bedroom. A wide-shouldered man with long arms and a shaved head was sitting at a table covered with pages torn from newspapers, running a pencil down the columns of type — they looked to Bolan like market reports — marking some and making notations in a ledger.

  Apart from the table and chair, the room contained only a bed, a chest of drawers and a shelf bearing a small radio transmitter — short-range local stuff only, Bolan judged from the antenna attached to a nearby chimney stack.

  The Russian wore gray pants and a white vest. His jacket hung with his shoulder rig on a hook behind the door.

  Bolan crept across a flat part of the roof to the dark skylight. It was bolted on the inside. With the same technique he had used outside Vanderlee's office in Johannesburg, he removed one pane, reached in to release the bolt, lifted the hatch and dropped into the unlit room below.