Critical Exposure

by Don Pendleton

Realizing that he’d consumed quite a bit of vodka, and that he would need a clear head when his men acted, Ryzkhov stopped drinking and put the partially empty bottle in his desk drawer. It would be time to leave soon. When the deed had been done, surely he could return to finish what he’d begun.

  * * *

  WHEN DEREK SAVITCH arrived in Malko Tarnovo, he realized very little time remained before all of the vehicle rental places closed up shop for the night. If he failed in this one mission, he knew Willham would never trust him with another job. The arrangement he’d made with Wehr to assassinate Quon Ma had failed. Savitch knew he couldn’t allow a repeat performance like that. He wasn’t afraid of Willham as much as he was if he ended up stranded in this godforsaken shit hole without any funds to get out.

  He’d have to worry about the authorities detaining him; sooner or later the Canadian government would get wind of his plight and they would send someone to retrieve him. While his countrymen were much more civilized than most, the fact remained that prison was prison. Savitch couldn’t afford that. Not only did he want a comfortable life, he wanted one where he could get the very best specialists in his country to treat his condition.

  Not that Savitch had much loyalty to Canada anyway. In actuality, he’d been born in Argentina to parents who were missionaries. But because his parents were both Canadian citizens, Savitch had been declared a citizen of Canada despite the actual location of his birth. Not that it mattered, since he’d spent most of the first fifteen years of his life traveling all over the world with his parents, who spent their entire life scraping to get by—sometimes he could remember going a couple of days without much to eat.

  When he’d finally made it into law school, it was the happiest day of the young Derek Savitch’s life. He’d earned his degree in about two-thirds the time it had taken most other students, primarily because while they were out pissing off and not studying, he was hitting the books every spare moment. It had taken time to rise through the ranks until he’d reached the grand and elevated post as an attorney for various government operations.

  Eventually it paid off. But then the disease had struck him and hard. The rapid weight gain caused his wife to leave him, and his savings began to dwindle while he traveled to various countries and sought the help of specialists. They’d given him medication that had kept him from dying, but hadn’t done a damn thing for him insofar as his overall health was concerned. He still had the thyroid disease, and he was willing to work with experimental therapies to attempt to resolve the problem.

  So whatever happened now, he knew he couldn’t screw this up. It would be his last chance to set things straight and get control of his life. He was smarter than all of these people combined, even smarter than Willham. Once the job was done and he had Amocacci’s money, Savitch planned to make sure Willham understood that.

  For when it was over, he planned to kill Hurley Willham with his bare hands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It was nearly 0400 when the chopper crested the Yildiz Mountains and swung low off a peak to descend toward the foothills.

  Jack Grimaldi piloted the Huey YH-40 with the skill and grace that had earned him the premier spot as Stony Man’s chief pilot.

  One of his passengers, the smallest of the pair, was more anxious than the other. In fact, Mack Bolan didn’t feel anxiety—he considered it a stimulus that prepared him for whatever he might encounter. The adrenaline rush made him ready to handle whatever problems the enemy might throw his way. There was nothing to worry about.

  But Alara Serif had never been in this type of situation before, and Bolan had to wonder if he’d made a mistake in his decision to take her along.

  Bolan didn’t let it worry him. If she followed him out of the bird without hesitation, then she’d be fine and would make an able companion. If she froze, Bolan would simply send Grimaldi on his way with her and call for the extraction when appropriate.

  The Executioner double-checked his harness and then tapped the top of his helmet to indicate Serif should prepare to follow him down before he kicked out and away from the Huey.

  Bolan descended the thick, nylon line with the practiced ease of an expert. That’s because he was—he was equally comfortable jumping out of an airplane with a shoot at low altitude, or performing HALO jumps and plummeting at great speeds from heights of thirty-thousand feet. Equally, Bolan could jump from a chopper ten or twenty yards above the ground, just as he did now, and start taking out the enemy on his way down.

  Fortunately there was no enemy here to engage him, so Bolan could concentrate fully on ensuring Serif got down in one piece.

  The young woman had a faltering moment coming out of the chopper, but once she got clear she descended at just the right speed and tilt. Of course, Bolan was on the belay line the entire time and could have stopped her in a moment if she encountered trouble. Still, she performed admirably for it being her first time with very little chance to practice.

  When her feet were on the ground, Bolan disconnected her carabiner and then flashed a blue laser light twice at the cockpit. The chopper lifted away, and soon the only sound was the wind whipping down the hills. The breeze had definitely picked up some but it was more than bearable. They were in the peak of the summer months but at this elevation there was still a chill to the predawn air.

  Bolan got Serif’s harness disconnected, then the pair set off down the rocky, uneven terrain. They had to proceed at a snail’s pace while they waited for their eyes to adjust. As they progressed, they got more comfortable, and the Executioner started to pick up speed. They were still a good distance away. Bolan had predicted that all the players in the game would arrive by the time they reached the makeshift fortress; then he could take out the entire retinue in one fell swoop.

  As they traversed the tricky ground of the foothills, Bolan kept turning it over in his mind. He knew there would be resistance, but he had no idea what those numbers looked like. Certainly he would expect Quon Ma to have a decent-sized force of his specially trained MSS agents in place. Amocacci wouldn’t bring anyone, since he wasn’t intelligent enough to think that this meeting was for anything other than the purpose of reuniting the group in its goals of disrupting U.S. military intelligence. Finally, Willham would probably put Savitch to work for him in some way, if for nothing else than to provide a fast way out of any situation that went wrong.

  As to the rest, Bolan could not predict. Especially since he didn’t know who “the rest” were or their capabilities and resources. As was typically the game, he would simply have to play it by ear and hope for the best.

  “Hope for the best?” Serif had said when he’d voice his concerns.

  “You can’t plan for all eventualities in a scenario like this,” Bolan had told her. “In fact, it’s impossible to predict where things will go in any situation. Sometimes you just have to toss caution to the wind. Being adaptable to change and improvising when the situation doesn’t go your way are two of the techniques I’ve used on more than one occasion.”

  Serif hadn’t looked convinced, but then, it didn’t matter—Bolan didn’t have to sell her on his plan. All he had to do was to convince her he had the situation well in hand. That wasn’t hard to convey since it was the truth.

  * * *

  THE SUN HADN’T even risen over the peaks of the Strandzha when the last of the attendees arrived. That turned out to be Lev Penzak, and when he stepped off the elevator he was dressed in very odd clothes.

  “Good morning, Penzak,” Ryzkhov said. “You’re dressed in traveling clothes. Are you taking a trip?”

  “Good morning, Comrade General.” Penzak sat and said, “I have disturbing news. I’ve been recalled to Jerusalem. I’m leaving by midday.”

  “That is most disturbing,” Ryzkhov said.

  “Did Mossad give any reason for this sudden change?”

 
Penzak shrugged. “I don’t know. The director is usually not forthcoming about the reasons for a recall until the agent returns.”

  “What do you think it means?” Willham asked.

  “It varies from agent to agent, and situation to situation,” Penzak said. “In some cases I’ve seen agents relieved and they take...early retirement. Other times, they’ve merely been reassigned. I cannot possibly know until I get back. I suspect I’m probably being reassigned.”

  “Well, it should not matter after today,” Amocacci said. “Now that you’re all present, shall we begin?”

  “Yes,” Ma said. “I would be most anxious to get to the heart of this matter you called so urgent.”

  “I think I speak for all of us, Quon, when I say how very glad I am to see you alive.” When Ma sat in stony silence with only a curt nod as acknowledgment, Amocacci decided it was better to move forward. “As I told each of you, I suspect that we’ve all been manipulated by an outsider. This particular individual has penetrated our group in a very insidious way.

  “Frankly, when this man first approached me anonymously I was convinced that he was an agent planted by subterfuge to penetrate the organization. It was only after I looked into his credentials that I thought he might become a significant resource. As such, I enlisted him in our plans to not only provide security for our group but to assist in our plans for the operation in America.”

  “Yes, yes, Gastone,” Ryzkhov said, looking at his watch. “We know all that. Tell us the part we don’t know. For example, the identity of this anonymous entity that was clever enough to fool all of us and to manipulate us into thinking that Quon Ma had committed a breach of trust.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ma asked. “Don’t you already know who he is?”

  “No,” Ryzkhov said, looking at his watch again. “Why would you think I should know?”

  Willham blinked. “Because you said Gastone gave you the name of this man.”

  “I never said anything of the sort,” Ma replied slowly. Then he looked at Willham and added, “Except to you. You were the only one I told, and you told me that you’d not spoken with the others. So apparently you lied to me.”

  Willham looked like the cat caught with the canary at first, but he quickly recovered. “That’s a ridiculous accusation!”

  “Not ridiculous. It’s the truth and you know it to be so. The fact is Gastone never gave me any name. I planted the idea in your mind because I wanted to see if when we gathered anybody else would make that claim. But they have not. And do you know why, you scum-sucking bottom feeder?” Ma’s face reddened and veins started to bulge visibly in his neck. “Because they are not murderous traitors like you! You ordered this outsider to have me killed. But the difference between what you did and what I do now, the difference between us really on any level, is that you have failed and I will succeed!”

  Quon Ma jumped to his feet and withdrew a concealed pistol, leveled it on Willham’s chest and squeezed the trigger twice. Both rounds from the 9 mm pistol smashed through Willham’s chest wall and exploded his heart and lungs. Ma finished the execution with a single shot to the head. The echoes died out in the room even as Willham’s body slumped out of the chair with enough force to tip it onto its side and send both crashing to the ground.

  The others sat stunned but nobody made an aggressive move. Ma’s eyes moved to lock glances with each of them, the smoking pistol still held firmly in his grasp. It seemed abundantly clear that Ma was considering his next option and whether it was better to just kill all of them rather than take his chances one of them might come back to try again for him later.

  Amocacci knew what Ma was thinking. The guy could not be sure if all of them hadn’t colluded in the assassination attempt. There was little reason he had to trust any of them, frankly, since they had all been complicit in the affair on one level or another. But Amocacci hoped that maybe Ma’s thirst for vengeance was satiated and they could get back to the job at hand, the thing they had all worked so long that it would be a shame not to see it through to its epic conclusion.

  “Justice has been done,” Amocacci said. “And now, if you would please sit down, I can explain the rest of the story.”

  “I’m not sure that we have time to hear it,” Penzak said. “And even if we did, I don’t know that it would matter at this point. Willham is dead and therefore no longer a threat.”

  “I would tend to agree,” Ryzkhov said. “With Willham gone, the rest of this doesn’t matter.”

  “But I think it does matter to Quon Ma,” Amocacci replied.

  As Ma slowly took his seat, keeping his pistol close at hand in case anyone decided to try something foolish, he said, “Don’t pretend to know me, Gastone. I’m still not sure you didn’t have something to do with the attempt on me, too.”

  “I did, Quon,” Amocacci replied, putting the deepest and gravest tone of regret possible in his voice. “But unfortunately, it was because I was manipulated in much the same way that Willham manipulated you. The man who ordered the actual assassination goes by the name of Derek Savitch. He apparently has something to do with Canadian intelligence, and he was assigned to oversee the contract to assassinate you. Fortunately, the assassin did not succeed and I was approached by an agent in the NSA who Savitch attempted to recruit. That man saved my organization, uncovered the plot to make it look as if you, Quon, had sent men to retaliate against my business interests. He was also the one who suggested we have this meeting to resolve the entire misunderstanding.”

  “You mean there is another outsider who knows about the Council?” Penzak demanded, climbing to his feet. “You’re a damned old fool! I’m leaving!”

  The doors that led from Amocacci’s residence to the meeting room opened and a single man burst into the room. He had a pistol in his hand and he exchanged glances with each of the men in turn before his eyes finally came to settle on the deceased form of his boss.

  Ma raised the pistol. “I assume you are Derek Savitch?”

  “I...I don’t know what’s happen—”

  Ma’s aim was so accurate that his first round ended up going through the mouth of Derek Savitch and blowing his brains out the back of his head. His entire body snap-jerked with the impact and his finger coiled reflexively on the trigger of the pistol he’d been holding. The round ended up striking Ma in the chest and the Chinese MSS agent shouted with a mixture of surprise and pain. He looked down and saw the hole in his chest, clearly surprised by its appearance but not really acting as if he was in pain. Then blood began to spread out from the hole to soak his clothes and his breathing became erratic. A moment later the pistol fell from his grasp and he collapsed face-first to the floor.

  “I’m afraid that this has not ended as I’d hoped,” Amocacci said in a quavering voice.

  “I’m leaving!” Penzak said with a curse. “Allying myself with any of you was the worst mistake of my career.”

  “It may well be the last,” Ryzkhov muttered.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “At any moment my men will be coming through those doors.” He pointed to the entrance Savitch had used. “There won’t be any discussion. Their orders are to shoot anyone who is left alive that’s not me.”

  “That’s just great. So you have doomed us all!”

  Amocacci put his head in his hands as he sat at the table. It had all gone so terribly wrong and he knew he had nobody to blame. The Council of Luminárii had dissolved itself by its own acts of avarice and self-indulgence. All he’d built up to work to his advantage now seemed to be unraveling at the seams like a ratty garment. Amocacci knew without a doubt, even as he heard the first reports from autofire somewhere above, that he’d once more let someone manipulate and betray him.

  * * *

  AS SOON AS Mack Bolan saw the uniformed men in commando dress, he went into a
ction. There were perhaps half a dozen of them and they were moving in staggered formation toward the entrance to the main house of Amocacci’s estate.

  Bolan got behind the largest rock he could find, engaged the burst-mode of the selector switch on his M-4 and sighted the first target. The night-vision device lit up the several figures that approached the house on a very direct course, not as if they were moving in to protect the place but more like an assault team. Their movements were precise and calculated, and Bolan realized where he’d seen that kind of formation before.

  It was as if he were watching ghosts from his past. Those were Spetsnaz tactics if he’d ever seen them! Bolan reacquired the sight picture and squeezed the trigger. The weapon kicked twice as both rounds rocked on their ballistic trajectory with deadly accurate results. The rounds smashed open the man’s skull and twisted his body at a gross angle. A moment later he toppled to the hard, unyielding ground.

  A similar fate awaited the second commando, this one dropped by a double-tap to the chest that left a pair of holes in his chest and pummeled open the air-filled pockets of the chest cavity and chest wall. Ribs cracked, lungs collapsed and blood spewed from the man’s mouth. He crumpled to the ground in very similar fashion to his partner who had preceded him in death.

  Realizing they were taking fire from a sniper of considerable marksmanship, the squad leader ordered his surviving team members to spread out and find cover. Before they could do whatever grisly task they’d been sent to accomplish, they would have to fight Bolan in a battle to the death.

  Unfortunately it became suddenly apparent that Bolan wasn’t their only problem.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A screaming horde suddenly appeared from the copse that stood between the foothills and the house, running parallel to Bolan and Serif’s position among the rocks. They were armed with a variety of automatic weapons, some machine pistols but a larger number of full-assault rifles. Bolan could no longer determine if the new arrivals were house staff assigned to protect the estate or perhaps a different faction brought in to represent one of the other council leaders. In any case, it didn’t matter because all of the entities joined in the battle begun by Bolan.