Sudden Death Read online

  Graziano took his place at the wheel. The electric cart accelerated toward a parking lot reserved for airport personnel, a jam-packed space between a repair hangar and the end of the terminal buildings.

  The Mossad men behind Bolan were shouting; they dared not fire because he was between them and the target.

  The Executioner thrust aside the bewildered driver of a tractor hauling a train of baggage cars to the TriStar, uncoupled the machine and set off in pursuit. The chase zigzagged between runway marker lights, stalled ground crew vehicles and decorative palms in concrete troughs, neither of the vehicles capable of much more than twenty miles per hour.

  They were still eighty yards apart when Graziano reached the wire fence dividing the lot from the field. He scrambled onto the hood of the cart and leaped over. He was immediately whisked into a waiting white Mercedes 190, which shot toward the gates with a screech of rubber.

  Bolan vaulted the fence and raced up to a courier who was dismounting from his motorbike. "I'll need that," he snapped. "Check with Aaron Davis." He snatched the machine away from the protesting rider, flung himself across the saddle and began to chase the Mercedes.

  The white sedan raced toward the center of town.

  At the far end of a broad tree-lined avenue, beyond the steel and glass horizontals of modern apartment blocks, the sea lay bleached of color by the midday heat. But soon the Mercedes swerved away from the geometrical perspectives of the twentieth century toward the Arab quarter, the ancient city of Jaffa.

  The bike was a high-geared Suzuki, with a fat-tired rear wheel. On the long, straight stretches it had been easy enough for Bolan to build up enough speed to keep the Mercedes in sight, but once the killer's car began twisting through the narrow, crowded streets of the quarter he found the lack of low-end punch a handicap.

  With its horn blaring, the sedan forged through groups of gesticulating merchants and between kiosks and market stalls. Bolan followed as best he could, wrenching the handlebars right and left, occasionally touching the cobblestones with a steadying foot, in his effort to keep the Suzuki operable as he forced a passage through the throng.

  At last the car drove beneath a Moorish arch at one side of a labyrinth of covered souks where the crowd was even more dense. Before Bolan could make it, tall gates swung shut to block off the courtyard beyond. He saw the killer and two other men leap out of the Mercedes and run for a doorway, and then he was alone with the crowd whose murmurs had become increasingly hostile the more he penetrated the quarter.

  Clearly the Mercedes men were locals — with friends.

  Many of the Arabs at the entrance to the market were dressed in long robes; others, wearing jeans and sweatshirts, looked more militant; some had adopted Western dress beneath the traditional burnoose. They crowded menacingly around as Bolan was forced to brake the bike in front of the tall wooden gates. Hands plucked at the baggage handler's uniform. A foot shot out and kicked the front wheel of the Suzuki.

  Bolan realized this wasn't the best place for a guy wearing the uniform of an Israeli airline to be cornered.

  The murmurs were swelling to a roar. Bolan could see raised-fist salutes and threatening gestures in back of the robed characters surrounding the bike.

  Backed against the gates, he dismounted, drew the Beretta and fired a shot into the air. He had no wish to kill innocent people, however mean their masters' propaganda had made them.

  But he also had no wish to be torn to pieces by an enraged pack under the influence of mob fury. Furthermore, he was determined to stay with Graziano and the men who had rescued him.

  The men in the forefront of the crowd shrank back momentarily as the shot echoed between the market stalls. Then the roar turned to howls of rage. A phalanx of Arabs surged toward the Executioner.

  He glanced upward. Above his head, a lamp hanging from a decorative wrought-iron bracket projected from the stone archway over the gates.

  Drawing a deep breath, he rammed the gun back into its holster, tensed his calf muscles and jumped up, reaching for the bracket. His fingers touched the sun-warmed metal, wrapped around the lowest bar and held. He swung back and then forward, shooting out his legs toward the attackers. His heels thudded against the chests of the two leading aggressors to send them sprawling back against the men behind.

  For a second there was confusion. Then knives flashed, and the attackers reformed and rushed again, trying to claw him down. But the respite was enough to allow Bolan to swing himself up and hook one heel over the tiles crowning the arch.

  An instant later, as the mob screamed their frustration, he had hauled his whole body up. With a quick glance at the empty Mercedes and the deserted courtyard, he dropped from their sight.

  He landed like a jungle cat on the cobblestones. Beyond the car, a fountain bubbled beneath an orange tree. The blank white walls of the flat-roofed buildings enclosing the yard were pierced by three arched doorways. With the Beretta unleathered again, Bolan ran for the one on the right, the one through which Graziano and his companions had fled.

  Flattening himself against the sidewall, the Beretta seeking targets at arm's length, he slid around into the passage beyond.

  No movement. No shots. They had left no lookout to try to stop Bolan or to warn them. He ran to the far end of the passage. There, to his right, was a door. Another corridor twisted away to the left.

  He hesitated for a heartbeat, then tried the latch on the door. It wasn't locked. Behind it he could hear men's voices; they were speaking in Arabic.

  Bolan kicked the door open and leaped, following the Beretta into the room beyond.

  He saw two elderly bearded men reclining on oriental mats, one on either side of a low table set with small porcelain cups and a copper pan from which rose the steaming fragrance of coffee. Mouths agape, the men started up in astonishment and anger.

  "Sorry," Bolan said hastily.

  He backed out and turned to race down the twisting passageway, ignoring the cries of outrage behind.

  It lead to another courtyard, a shadowed thirty-foot rectangle slashed by a single bar of sunlight halfway up one wall. Two Arab children were bouncing a ball in the shade. They were about five years old. Two doors led out of the yard, one straight ahead, one in the sunlit wall. "Which way did my friends go?" the Executioner asked. The children stopped playing and stared at him.

  "My friends," he repeated more urgently, gesticulating this time as he realized they couldn't understand English.

  One of the children started to cry. Bolan realized he was still holding the gun and hurriedly holstered it. The other child, eyes still wide, pointed wordlessly to the door straight ahead.

  Bolan ran to it, listened, heard nothing. He opened the door.

  He saw a tiled corridor leading into what seemed to be some kind of apartment house. There were doors on either side and a stone stairway curling upward at the far end. Voices, muted and indistinguishable, could be heard all around. A woman laughed shrilly. From somewhere above the quavering tones of Arab music rose and fell.

  Bolan paused halfway along the hallway. Were those footsteps he could hear above? He ran to the stairs and bounded up two at a time, keeping to the inner wall.

  Empty.

  Another corridor. More doors. But here one side of the building opened out onto a balustraded patio at a higher level. Red and blue flowers grew in profusion in a row of huge pottery jars, and there was another, larger fountain gushing into a stone basin. Beside a ruined wall on the far side of the patio, steps rose crazily among ancient brickwork to an alley that climbed again between the old houses.

  Bolan ran toward the steps. He didn't believe the killer would have gone to ground in this warren so near to his failed hit; it was more likely that he was using it as a blind, being escorted through by local associates to pick up another car on the far side.

  The hunch was confirmed more quickly than he expected.

  His ears registered the crack of a pistol a millisecond after a round smashed into
the brickwork only inches from his left shoulder. He flung himself flat on the stairway.

  In open ground beneath the sunny stonework, he let loose an exploratory round in the general direction of the ambusher. The ricochet whined skyward, but he must have been fairly close because he heard a scrambling movement among the rubble. A stone dropped and clattered down the steps.

  Then Graziano's accomplices made their mistake. They were deployed on either side of the steps, hoping that when Bolan dived out of range of the first gunner, he would automatically put himself in the sights of the second.

  But the number two man forgot, when he rose from behind a crumbling wall to draw a bead on his target, that the sun was behind him.

  His shadow jerked onto the stairway and then undulated down toward Bolan.

  Rolling over onto his back with the Beretta in single-shot mode and held in two hands over his head, the soldier triggered the 93-R three times in lightning succession before the Arab could fire.

  The first round, blasting up from below, drilled the soft flesh beneath the gunman's jawbone, pierced tongue and palate and cored the frontal lobes of the brain.

  For a moment the man was pinned against the sky. The second and third 9 mm parabellums, smashing up into the rib cage and slicing through one shoulder, held him there for a timeless instant. Then he toppled forward and down onto the steps with the blood forming a crimson cascade as it frothed from beneath him.

  The Tokarev he had been holding bounced and slid after him. Bolan reached for it and coiled himself for the next move.

  His fighter's instinct, honed razor sharp by years of combat in the killing zone, urged him to act now, fast.

  The remaining gunner, the one who had fired first, knowing precisely where Bolan was, would expect him to move now, to seek fresh cover, perhaps to slide back down around the corner at the foot of the stairway. He would be moving himself, ready to cash in on that belief.

  Bolan decided to do exactly the opposite. Pushing himself upright in a single lithe movement, he leaped to the center of the flight and sprang up several steps, a gun in each hand.

  It was a hell of a chance to take, but it paid off.

  Flitting between a fallen column and another section of the broken wall, the hardman, on his way to enfilade the Executioner, was caught in the open.

  He gasped, raising his gun arm as he hurled himself back. His finger tightened on the trigger of his automatic. But Bolan beat his reaction time. The steely muscles of Bolan's forearms were already shuddering with the recoil as the two weapons in his hands spewed death toward the column.

  The gunman's chest was already split open, the flesh between his shoulder blades parting to let through a mess of blood and bone splinters and fragments of heart and lung tissue before the first slug exploded from the barrel of his weapon.

  The shot went high. Bolan's rounds slammed the killer back against the gore-spattered column. He slid to the ground, twitched once and lay still.

  Bolan cleared the rest of the stairway, leaped over the body and ran on. But the alleys of the Arab quarter, heavy with the stench of refuse and rotting fruit, deserted in the scorching noonday heat, curved away left and right with no hint of the direction Graziano had taken.

  This time, at the cost of his companions' lives, the terrorist had gotten away.

  Bolan stripped off the airline uniform in a doorway and made his way back down stepped lanes of ancient cobblestones to the market. In normal civilian clothes, he passed inconspicuously through the jabbering throng, past booths of silversmiths and leatherworkers and stalls where sweetmeats were roasted beside stacks of rugs from Ispahan, until finally he emerged into the wider streets of a residential quarter beyond which was the seafront. Eventually he found a taxi to take him back to the airport.

  3

  "Thanks to you we found and defused the bombs," Aaron Davis said when Bolan had made his report. "We'll get Graziano another time. Right now there's someone waiting to see you in the VIP lounge."

  Davis accompanied Bolan to the lounge, and even from a distance Bolan had no trouble recognizing his longtime friend, Hal Brognola.

  "Good to see you, Striker," Brognola said.

  "Same here, Hal. But whatever it is that brought you all this way must be very important."

  "You don't know the half of it, guy. There's this terrorist campaign, this scheme to eliminate the top men in each country. It started with Olaf Palme in Sweden in '86 — they never did find out who was responsible for that, or why — and you know how far it's gone now. If it hadn't been for you and Aaron Davis, there would have been a seventh chalked up today, along with another planeload of innocents."

  "And there are more planned for the future," Bolan said. "Is that what you're saying, Hal?"

  Brognola nodded. "A very specific, a very special plan," he said soberly. "But we don't know yet exactly what's behind the plan. Or who's behind it. Oh, sure…" he raised a hand as Bolan was about to interrupt "…we know the idea is to create a panic situation in general. But for whose benefit?"

  "You say not the Russians?"

  "The Russians are happy to benefit from any panic situation. They're happy to supply arms and advice to any revolutionary organization, whatever its aims. Armenians, Basques, Corsican nationalists, Shiites, the IRA, they can all rely on a helping hand from Moscow. But the Russkies don't gun for heads of state." He shook his head, "It's not their style. The brains behind this one don't do their thinking in offices above Dzerzhinsky Square, that's for sure."

  "Where do they do it?"

  "I wish to hell we knew," Brognola said. "They work out of offices in Damascus and Teheran and Tripoli, as far as the tacticians — the guys who plan each individual hit — are concerned. But they no longer use their own units to make the hits. They put out contracts and pay professionals to do it. And as for the strategists who tell the guys in Damascus and Teheran and wherever what the score has to be…" He shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. Because neither they nor the tacticians nor the soldiers in the field can be tied in directly with a single killing. They've all got iron-clad alibis. We need your help on this one, Striker."

  Bolan remained silent for a moment, a look of intense concentration on his face.

  "If it's that serious," he finally said, "I could run up against operatives from the Company. They could be following up…"

  "The guys from Langley, just this once, will be looking the other way. The French are too busy trying to guess which of their politicians don't take graft from the sheikhs. The only other team you might run up against would be the Circus, from London — and right now they're busy looking after Ireland."

  "Okay," Bolan said. "Lay it on me, every detail."

  Brognola recapped the conversation he had initiated at Stony Man Farm with Gregson of the CIA and added more intel shaped since then by the base's computer complex. "You'll understand why we can't do anything officially on this one," he said when he was through. "But personally I guarantee full cooperation, one hundred percent. You'll take it on, guy, won't you?"

  The gruff voice had softened suddenly on a pleading note. Bolan favored him with a crooked smile. "If they can penetrate us, we can penetrate them, whoever they are. Sure, I'll try to sniff out a lead and go wherever it takes me."

  It would, he thought, be a pleasure — and something like poetic justice if he made it. It was through a penetration agent, a mole in the White House, that the Executioner had found himself an outlaw for the second time in his life.

  The guy had been a KGB plant. And it had been through him that an attack on Stony Man Farm had taken the life of Bolan's woman. Grief and fury had led Bolan to bypass the law and kill the mole with his own hands in front of the President, actually in the Oval Office. That was a lapse the administration couldn't forgive. And the security bosses, too, had been mad, because they would have preferred to keep the deep-cover sleeper in place and use him as a convenient channel of disinformation.

  So the Executioner had contin
ued his personal war out in the cold; he had quit the Stony Man operation.

  "Do you have any idea where to start, Striker?" Brognola asked. "Do you figure there could be a lead if you reconnected with the bomber who escaped you today?"

  "Uh-huh," Bolan said. "I know where to start all right. It's where I go afterward that could be tricky." He grinned. "But first up, I'll need your help. I want a ride on something fast from the Sixth Fleet. And then I want a navy chopper to land me secretly at night on the outskirts of Algiers."

  * * *

  Sean Riordan, opposition leader in the Irish Dáil, had a hangover. He had flown in to New York from Dublin the day before, been feted by the local branch of the Irish police federation, wined and dined by an Irish-American Friendship society and acted as cohost with the ambassador at a late-night embassy reception.

  Apart from the hangover, there was also the question of jet lag.

  Now he had to stand in for a sick foreign affairs spokesman at a meeting of the UN Security Council where the participation of the Irish army in yet another Mideastern peacekeeping force was to be discussed.

  Riordan was a florid, heavy man, and he found the humidity in New York trying. Perhaps, he thought, if he took a brisk walk and breathed in enough fresh air, it would clear the buzzing in his head enough for him to think clearly. There were a number of tough points he had to make to the Council, and he prided himself on referring very seldom to his notes. He left his hotel, walked to the far side of Central Park and took a cab to the UN building from there.

  A small dark Hispanic-looking man who had traversed the park eighty yards behind Riordan slid a miniature transceiver from his pocket, extended a short aerial and spoke rapidly for twenty seconds. The white Cadillac Eldorado that he flagged down a few minutes later deposited him at the United Nations half a block behind the Irishman's taxi.