Blood of the Lion

by Don Pendleton

  Spiraldi decided he might be able to break some ice himself if he posed the right questions to his watchdogs. "You expecting somebody?"

  "Whaddaya mean?" Bear growled.

  Spiraldi closed the door to the stove. He felt the beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead as he stood, a bone cracking in his knee. Noticing that Bear was looking at him as if he'd just been asked a stupid question, Spiraldi felt his nerves stretch taut as piano wire. Bear was suspicious. Spiraldi merely shrugged, trying to make his question sound as if he was only looking for a little conversation.

  "You guys look nervous, that's all. Maybe we've just been holed up here too long."

  "Yeah, sure, that's it," Bear grumbled, setting up the pieces on the backgammon board. "We're edgy. Cabin fever. We're all too close for any comfort."

  Bear, Spiraldi could tell, wasn't going to be led into any give-and-take. Spiraldi decided to cut the bullshit.

  "Look, I'm not going to dance around with you," he said, taking a step toward Bear and Red, smoke curling out of his nose. "If there's something you two know that I don't, something that I should know, I want to hear it."

  Bear and Red looked at Spiraldi for a long moment, then glanced at each other.

  "Like what?" Bear asked.

  "Well, let me put it to you like this. I've never worked with either of you before Belém. There's not exactly a bond of trust here. I know you're part of the DEA's new division, which means you're unofficial agents"

  "So what?" Red rasped, then fired up a cigarette.

  "The 'so what' is that I'm picking up very strange vibes here. One of you acts like time is killing him, the other like somebody important's going to arrive any minute."

  "Someone is," Bear said. "We've been ordered by your boss at SOD to sit on you until this VIP gets here, and then we turn you over to him."

  Spiraldi felt his gaze narrow as the hairs stiffened at the back of his neck. The son of a bitch was hiding something. Bear was just too quick to answer, as if he'd run all the possible questions that could be asked of him through his mind already and was waiting with what he assumed were logical answers. Bear's logic was just a little too evasive for Spiraldi's liking. A man with some experience in the world, a man whose mind is always working and searching for solutions to immediate problems, can let a lie roll right off his tongue without blinking. In any situation, Spiraldi figured, a man would cover his own ass first. When a career, or a life, or even money was on the nne, he would lie and make himself believe that he'd lied out of self-preservation. Anthony Spiraldi was nobody's fool, and he'd earned enough experience in the world to be able to see through any smoke screen.

  Spiraldi knew his next question could be the bait that reeled the fish in. "Who is this VIP?"

  A flicker in Bear's eyes. Hesitation. Then, "How the hell should I know? I was hopin' maybe you could tell me."

  "If I knew, then I wouldn't be pacing around here as nervous as a nun in a whorehouse," Spiraldi said, figuring he'd just traded off one lie against another.

  "Can't you come up with somethin' more original than that, pal? You been readin' those dime novels all week, you oughta be just ready to burst with wit and insight," Red said, then smiled at Bear as if looking for some kind of verbal reinforcement to his barb.

  It was time to get to the point.

  "What are you hiding?" Spiraldi asked.

  Bear heaved a sigh. Anger burning into his eyes, he looked at Spiraldi. "Just what the fuck would we be hiding?"

  Spiraldi drew on his cigarette, exhaled, aiming a line of smoke directly over Bear's head. "You tell me."

  "I'll tell you this, pal," Bear growled, "you're startin' to get on my nerves. It was your people who hired us in the first place, as part of their campaign against the pushers and druglords. You DEA guys can't even go down to Colombia or Bolivia or even friggin' Brazil without practically announcing you're there to bag some of this cocaine-peddling vermin. You stand out Like Lady Godiva and wonder why you can't make any busts. The rest of the time it looks like you're stumblin' around with your heads up your butts trying to make a score on an undercover operation. Some of your people got themselves wasted down in Brazil and you're actin' like one of us is supposed to take the heat.

  "What I'm saying is that you guys are too clean-cut. I don't see no mileage, no scars on your faces. You wanted somebody who can handle the creeps down there and show you the copes, so you decided to hire some outside muscle. I don't particularly like baby-sitting and holding your hand, either."

  "But why you two? Why not have two of my own people here with me?"

  "Look, friend," Red chipped in, "we've been wonderin' about that ourselves. It stinks to us, too. It could be your own people have decided not to play ball with us anymore. Maybe this is some kind of check on us. Maybe a shakedown is coming. And, if it is that, I don't like it, don't have to like it, and won't sit still for any shit."

  Spiraldi felt a chill sweep through his chest and tighten his guts. Red was being defensive, and Spiraldi would swear the guy was covering up. But Red had a point. Why was SOD still parading these two around as part of the operation? Sure they'd made some tracks easier for the division in Brazil. They knew people down there through their merc dealings, knew how to pull and even jerk the right strings at the right time. Big deal. By making the Brazilian trackdown of Alchupa easier the SOD had left the back door wide open for a double agent to play both ends against the middle, which made these two goons that much more dangerous.

  "Look, pal," Red suggested, "if you don't trust us, why don't you just say so? One of us can take a trip into town and make a call and be removed by tomorrow."

  "Did I say I don't trust you?"

  "Shit, you don't have to," Bear growled. "Lemme tell ya, one thing I fuckin' hate is a guy makin' accusations and innuendos when he doesn't know what the hell's goin' on himself. You readin' me, partner?"

  "All right, if it'll make you feel better, no, I don't trust you. I can't afford to trust anyone at this point. My ass is on the line."

  "It's not just your ass, friend," Red reminded Spiraldi. "Don't forget, we're in this thing for the duration, too."

  "Sure you are."

  "Look, you're really startin' to get on my nerves. Why don't you just shut up and sit down and read one of your Westerns?"

  Making damn good and sure he was wearing his best poker face, Spiraldi looked at Red and Bear for several moments. He had measured them, and he was receiving seismic readings of anxiety, maybe even fear, ready to shake the cabin's walls down. Bear and Red knew something. But what? Time, Spiraldi knew, would weed out their secrets. Time, and the Iceman.

  Spiraldi decided to take a seat on the couch and let his watchdogs go back to their backgammon game. He started to pick up a paperback but froze when he thought he heard a noise outside. Spiraldi crushed out his cigarette in an ashtray overflowing with butts.

  "What's that?"

  "What's what?" Bear asked Spiraldi, rolling dice across the backgammon board. "I didn't hear nothin'."

  You wouldn't, Spiraldi thought, and stood. The front and back doors were bolted shut. But locks wouldn't stop a shotgun blast or a well-placed kick from a big, strong man.

  Then Spiraldi heard it again. A faint rustle, a scraping noise along the outside of the north wall of the cabin.

  Spiraldi gave Bear a hard look. "That."

  "Relax. It's probably just a deer."

  "You want to take that chance?" Spiraldi asked. "When was the last time either one of you got off your ass and took a look outside anyway, huh?"

  Bear muttered a curse. Unleathering his Magnum, he stood, scraping chair legs back over the rough wooden floor. When Bear unfolded to his full six foot eight, he looked as if he could stop a Greyhound bus by just standing in the middle of the road.

  "If someone was stalkin' this place, they sure as hell wouldn't make all that racket," Red told Spiraldi as Bear unlocked the front door.

  Slowly Bear opened the creaking door. A wave of co
ld air swept through the cabin. Just inside the doorway, half-hidden by the frame, Bear crouched, gun in hand, peering into the pitch blackness.

  Spiraldi suddenly felt naked without a weapon. SOD had left these two bozos with guns, but a bona fide agent under "house observation" couldn't even touch a bottle opener.

  "I don't see nothin'."

  "You have to go outside and take a look."

  Bear leathered his Magnum and stood. "Fuck it. It's too cold."

  Bear started to close the door.

  And a figure in black seemed to descend straight out of the night sky like a bolt of lightning. The invader's heels thudded into Bear's chest.

  "Jesus Christ!" Red bellowed, clawing at his holster and springing from his seat as Bear crashed to the floor.

  "Don't!" Spiraldi yelled at Red.

  But it was too late. Red was drawing on the intruder, drawing target acquisition on the big man in black in the doorway. For a split second Spiraldi looked into the invader's ice-blue eyes, eyes that had seen plenty of death. Spiraldi knew Red had just made the worst mistake of his life.

  Red was drawing on Mack Bolan.

  The Beretta 93-R seemed to have a life of its own as it streaked away from Bolan's shoulder holster.

  The Iceman had arrived.

  4

  The drop zone rushed up at Mohammed al-Rhabin. The Syrian was no expert parachutist by any means, but he had been dropped behind enemy lines along the Israel-Lebanon border often enough to know the basics of parachuting without breaking a leg. Chin on chest, back rounded, hands on risers, elbows forward — those were the fundamentals for even an amateur parachutist. Break one rule, and you might just break yourself in half.

  The five-hundred-foot assault jump into the valley threatened the Syrian with disaster before he even touched down. As be dropped at fourteen feet per second, al-Rhabin planed to the right, angling away from a grove of cedar trees. Knees bent slightly, he pointed the balls of his feet groundward. A heartbeat later be felt the outside of his right calf scrape across a boulder jutting up out of the snow. The edge of the rock ripped at his leg like a scythe. Grinding his teeth against fiery waves of pain, al-Rhabin hit the ground and rolled. The track-down was off to a bad start, but Mohammed al-Rhabin had never been one to let adversity knock him off stride when be was manhunting.

  Cursing, he shucked off his chute. West of the DZ, he saw Alchupa's private jet swallowed up by the night. This whole deal was crazy, he suddenly thought, but a million dollars for the killing of one man was worth a little pain and aggravation. Al-Rhabin was on his way now, but that was the only way he would have wanted it. Start bringing other people into a killhunt, so-called help, with their own ideas about how to do things, and from grim experience he knew that his life would be in jeopardy.

  Probing inside the jagged slash in the pant leg of his blacksuit, al-Rhabin prodded the torn flesh for a moment with bare fingers. No broken bones, just an ugly gash down the side of his calf. He cleaned the wound with snow, clenched his teeth and swore viciously to himself as the snow melted and burned into his open flesh. The pain he could live with. Pain, he knew, could bring a man to a higher degree of mental and physical toughness. It was the trail of blood, though, that such a wound would leave behind him that could prove to be his doom. Later, just before he was ready to get under way for the engagement with his target, he would pack the wound and completely stop the flow of blood.

  Quickly al-Rhabin rolled up his parachute and buried it in the snow near the woods. With a flick of his hand, he wrapped the black kaffiyeh around his mouth and nose, blocking out the cold, biting air.

  Al-Rhabin looked around the valley, enclosed on all sides by woods. The safehouse, according to Anaconda's informants, was at the top of the ridge at the far south end of the valley. It would be a three- or four-mile hike to get there. Al-Rhabin hoped that Alchupa's intel on the location was solid, but he suspected that the Colombian colonel was a soldier who knew how to map out such an operation carefully, particularly with such high stakes involved.

  The weapons satchel and sheath had been dropped one hundred yards east of al-Rhabin's landing spot, near a ravine. He could hear the wind sough through that ravine, punch into the black parachute and expand the chute into a mushroom head.

  Before setting out for the ravine to retrieve the weapons satchel and sheath, al-Rhabin fingered the buffalo handle of the jambiya, the Arab fighting knife fitting snug inside his black sash. Twelve inches of razor-sharp I curbed blade glinted in the moonlight. Al-Rhabin smiled. He loved the jambiya. What an accomplishment it would be to plunge the tempered steel of his fighting knife into Bolan's guts, twist and rip upward, watch as the Executioner's intestines spilled onto the snow. What a feat, indeed! He would succeed where hundreds of men had failed before him. He must succeed. For him, there was more involved here than just a million dollars. Personal pride was worth more to him than any amount of money. He was there to find out just who was the better man.

  Al-Rhabin had been given exactly twelve hours to finish the job. If he did not return to the DZ for exfiltration at the end of that time, he would be left there in the snow-choked valley of the Colorado Rockies. Left behind, he had been informed, because it would be assumed he had failed. Failure meant he was dead. And the next assassin in line for the attempt to stain his hands with the blood of the lion would be ordered to go.

  Twelve hours to stalk, observe, form a plan of attack and kill the target wasn't much time, particularly since the target was one of the world's most feared stalkers and killers himself. As a rule of thumb, al-Rhabin would demand of a principal at least three to four days to observe a target, note his habits, his life-style, determine a pattern in his movements and make an assessment of his strengths and weaknesses. But Mack Bolan was no ordinary target. Mack Bolan would stick to no man's timetable, observe no one's logic but his own. From all-Rhabin had heard about this Executioner, he knew that he was a man to fear and respect. And it went without saying that if Bolan had any weaknesses they had yet to be found out.

  Keeping to the edge of the woods, al-Rhabin swiftly made his way to the ravine. There, he used his jambiya to slice the riser wraparound on the satchel, then cut through the rope around the sheath before burying the chute in the snow. Al-Rhabin unzipped the satchel and pulled out an H&K MP-5 SD-3, then screwed the 40 mm modular pure muffler-type silencer to the subgun's muzzle. There were three Soviet F1 hand grenades in that satchel, too, but al-Rhabin didn't think he would need them. No, he intended to draw Bolan out into the woods somehow. Then he would come up on the Executioner from behind and drive the jambiya into his guts.

  The sheath measured exactly 900 mm in length, a perfect fit for what it concealed. As he unzipped the sheath, al-Rhabin's dark gaze narrowed. Grimly he smiled. The RPG-7V, a replacement for an earlier weapon derived from the World War II German Panzerfaust, would be used only as a last resort, or to deliver the final mop-up pay dirt to Alchupa's informants. Al-Rhabin was under orders to blow the safehouse into the sky, preferably with Alchupa's informants inside.

  Mohammed al-Rhabin slipped his arms through the strap of the RPG. Overhead the stars shone down on the valley like beacons.

  Twelve hours. That would have to be enough time.

  The Syrian assassin intended to finish the job well before his deadline. When al-Rhabin returned to Alchupa with Bolan's head in a sack, he would merely smile and hold out his hand for that million-dollar bounty.

  The other assassins would go home, and they would all know who was the best man.

  * * *

  Mack Bolan had come to the safehouse expecting trouble, and he was set to ride out a high tide of violence and mayhem. During the ride to Dulles Airport, he had picked up strong warning signals from Hal Brognola about this mission, and he had a feeling it would be some time before he made it through the storm to the shore. The big Fed had more questions about the DEA SOD and Anaconda than he had answers. Without some sound intel, Bolan had known he was in serious trou
ble even before boarding his flight at Dulles.

  He needed some answers about the DEA SOD, and Anaconda. Maybe the big guy he'd just kicked to the floor or the redhead drawing on him with a .44 Magnum would provide some answers or clues to the mystery.

  First, Bolan had to deal with the guy looking to blow his head off with the .44 Magnum.

  Red was quick as he swung his gun toward Bolan in the blink of an eye, but he wasn't quick enough. How many times had Bolan faced down a would-be kilter, who could streak a weapon at him from out of nowhere, and beaten that enemy to the punch? One hundred times? One thousand? Even though instinct and lightning reflexes took charge during such lethal encounters, each time Bolan stared into the eye of death he was grimly aware that his own doom could be just a split second away. Perhaps in the beginning, when he'd returned from Vietnam to bury his family before cutting a bloody swath through the Mafia, he had carried a death wish — a deep subconscious longing for death born out of his family. But with the slaughter of the Mafia vermin responsible for his pain, a cold killing machine had been transformed into a man with a mission, a man who realized that the world was in desperate need of someone with his martial skills, a warrior could fight the savages on their own terms.

  Mack Bolan didn't think of himself as a hero, or even as some avenging crusader. There was no glory in his arena, no fame or fortune. No, he wasn't looking for praise and recognition. His was a lonely, selfless war. In a way his private war was a personal statement of how he felt about the condition of the human race. There were good people, plenty of good people suffering at the hands of the cannibals. And they were worthy of his war. They were worth saving, worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for.