Executioner 053 - The Invisible Assassins

by Pendleton, Don

  Bolan thrust himself onto the roof of the speeding "bullet" train

  "Hey, Tanaga!" Bolan yelled into the wind. "It's you and me—"

  Suddenly Tanaga's partner came hurtling toward The Executioner in a low kamikaze dive.

  Bolan remained in a crouch, and supporting himself with his arms, swung both legs out in a scissor kick.

  He wrapped his legs around the oncoming ninja's neck, then closed them in a viselike grip. The assassin's neck twisted and snapped. His limp body slithered along the roof and fell into the slipstream.

  Bolan watched as his assailant hit the track in an explosion of skullbone and brain....

  Also available from Gold Eagle Books, publishers of the Executioner series:

  Mack Bolan's

  ABLE TEAM

  #1 Tower of Terror

  #2 The Hostaged Island

  #3 Texas Showdown

  #4 Amazon Slaughter

  Mack Bolan's

  PHOENIX FORCE

  #1 Argentine Deadline

  #2 Guerilla Games

  #3 Atlantic Scramble

  Dedicated to the Nisei Yankee Samurai who, as Americans of Japanese ancestry, served their country in the dark days of World War II and played such a vital role in achieving victory.

  First edition May 1983

  First published in Australia August 1984

  ISBN 0-373-61053-X

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to

  Alan Bornack for his contributions to this work.

  Copyright (c) 1983 by Worldwide Library.

  Philippine copyright 1983, Australian copyright 1983,

  New Zealand copyright 1983.

  Cover illustration copyright © 1983 by Gil Cohen.

  Scanned By CrazyAl 2011

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 118 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, NSW. All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  The Gold Eagle trademark, consisting of the words GOLD EAGLE and the portrayal of an eagle, and the Worldwide trademark, consisting of a globe and the word WORLDWIDE in which the letter "o" is represented by a depiction of a globe, are trademarks of Worldwide Library.

  Printed in Australia by

  The Dominion Press—Hedges & Bell, Victoria 3130.

  War's a brain-spattering, windpipe-splitting art, Unless her cause by right be sanctified.

  —Lord Byron

  It is courage that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

  —Bernard Shaw

  Man's malice through the centuries has turned mere fountains of blood into raging rivers.

  We can only tame such a flood with unremitting courage. The source of that courage, my friends, is simply the need, the desire, the hunger to do what is right.

  —Mack Bolan, The Executioner

  (from his speech at the leaders' conference, Stony Man Farm)

  Zeko Tanaga is the name of an infamous Japanese terrorist leader, considered second only to Carlos "The Jackal " in the annals of international outrage. Tanaga was with the Japanese Red Army before he became a ninja under the mobster family Yamazaki. He was involved in the massacre at Lod Airport. Tanaga was supposedly killed in a training exercise in a terrorist camp in South Yemen.

  1

  MEN COULD DIE HERE.

  Mack Bolan shifted his position, taking care not to disturb any of the charred rubble that was strewn across the floor. Jay Marten, his attention fixed on the street below, did not even hear the big man move.

  Bolan sensed trouble. He automatically began to relax and then to tense his deeper muscle groups. He was readying himself for action, while on a more conscious level he strove to isolate precisely what it was that made him feel so uneasy.

  He was standing well back in the darkest shadows, about eight feet from what had once been the window. At the window frame, silhouetted by the artificial glare of the street lighting, Marten was hunched low in the wide-open square, his elbows propped across the crumbled sill. Even before that first intuitive tingle subsided, Bolan picked his way silently through the trash on the floor and stood behind the other agent.

  Neither man took his eyes off the road.

  For Jay Marten, Colonel John Phoenix was a last-minute partner. Jay's boss had abruptly dismissed his protest that he did not need a nursemaid, with a serious caution that this time the orders came from the top.

  Right from the top.

  It could only mean that the subject of their surveillance, Kenji Shinoda, was in bigger trouble than Marten could venture a guess at . . . very big trouble.

  Bolan tapped Marten on the shoulder and signaled that he wanted to use the Startron. Marten handed over the bulky nightscope, attached to his sniper rifle, to the man in black. Bolan rested his eye against the rubber cushioning ring and was slightly annoyed to find the scope needed to be readjusted.

  He did not care much for Jay Marten. The younger man wore a button-down shirt and had a manner to match. He seemed like yet another ambitious college kid with a bent for snooping; but Bolan supposed he'd looked pretty good on paper to a hard-pressed recruiting officer.

  Bolan was never tied down with red tape, and that was why he would always take the offensive—he was free to seize the initiative without having to fill out any forms in triplicate. So maybe it was simply the waiting that was making him edgy, and perhaps he was being unfair in his assessment of Marten. He would soon find out—when the action started.

  And that built-in alarm system warned him it could start at any second.

  He concentrated on the electronically reconstituted image of the deserted Los Angeles street. They had picked the best place possible for a stakeout; in fact, it was the only nearby place that could conceal them. The two men were on the second floor of an abandoned warehouse, torched twice within the last year by punks with nothing better to do. The entire block in front of them had been leveled months ago to make way for an auto-parts factory that had never been built.

  The far side of Alvarez Street was flanked by a gray wall more than ten feet high, which now shielded only another few acres of wasteland. The whole area was a barren battlefield of recession-hit industries, funding cuts, shifting political priorities.

  Bolan leaned forward far enough to make a quick check of Munsen Avenue, the cross street immediately below their observation point. It was as dead and deserted as the empty industrial boulevard.

  He paused for a moment to scrutinize an abandoned filling station off to their left and a boarded-up hot-dog stand. It looked like the landscape of Hiroshima after the bomb—two or three structures inexplicably left intact amid the otherwise flattened ruins.

  He wished there had been time to fully reconnoiter the whole area around Alvarez and Munsen. Bolan knew of more than one mission in Nam that had come to grief because of a lack of adequate reconnaissance. It had cost good men their lives, which was a lesson a surviving soldier would not forget.

  "He's late," snapped Marten, double-checking his wristwatch.

  "Is that what your file says—punctual?" Bolan asked.

  Marten made no reply. He was not sure how seriously Colonel Phoenix was mocking him.

  Bolan made another
slow sweep along the wall. About two-thirds of the way down the block, one of the street lamps was out. It left a long gap of inky shadow in the otherwise garishly lighted street. Not that it made any difference to the Startron, a device whose business it was to probe the night.

  Nothing moved in the darkness, but something was wrong. It was empty out there, yet Bolan still sought to corroborate whatever primitive instinct it was that warned him of impending danger.

  The best trackers in the Old West had an uncanny ability to read signs where no one else could even see the trail. It was not simply that they knew what to look for—a bent twig, a single pebble displaced, a scrape of mud—but what counted most was that they knew where to look. That was the real trick. Whether tracking a mountain lion or a man, they knew how their quarry thought and which route it would take as the fastest or the safest or the most deceptive.

  Bolan's hunting instincts had first been sharpened in the swamps and undergrowth and fetid village alleyways of Southeast Asia, then honed to an even more lethal edge in the city jungles where he had waged his one-man war against the Mafia. He had stayed alive and had stayed fighting, despite incredible odds. He survived because the Executioner possessed that special talent for getting inside the minds of his opponents. One simple rule: know yourself, and know your enemy, and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster. That rule had insured continuing victories in Bolan's new terrorist wars.

  Tonight Bolan was at a disadvantage. He had been on his way to a private demonstration of the very latest combat chopper, the Thunderstrike, a new breed of war machine, when Brognola's priority orders had intercepted him at LAX—Los Angeles airport. He knew very little about Kenji Shinoda.

  "What have you got on this guy?" Bolan asked Marten, not lowering the weapon's sight.

  "Ken Shinoda? A computer genius. He's sansei-third-generation Japanese-American. And one of the best cryptographers we have. He's worked out some of our toughest codes and then designed the systems to put them into operation. Ken Shinoda is the guy who invented the Checkmate program."

  Bolan pursed his lips. Marten could see he was suitably impressed.

  "Isn't that why you're here, Colonel?"

  Bolan ignored the question. "How did your people get on to him?" he asked.

  "He's being considered for a transfer. They want him to head the Buzzsaw project." Marten hesitated as he turned back to check the street again. Phoenix should have known all this . . . but then, maybe he did. Marten suddenly suspected that he was being tested himself.

  Bolan had indeed heard of Buzzsaw—an intelligence program that would use the very latest wrinkles in satellite communications and ultrahigh-speed transmission. He lowered the Startron. "And that would mean liaison with other NATO members. As a cryptographer and programming genius, Shinoda was hitting the big time."

  "Right. So we were running a standard clearance. Just updating the file on him. Wasn't much to add. He and his girl had broken off their engagement last year. Then he made a couple of trips to the Caribbean and Japan. Anyway, we hardly had the tap on him when the call was intercepted. Whoever phoned him gave the instruction 'Corner of Alvarez and Munsen,' then he agreed 'Right—midnight' and hung up."

  Marten took the scope back while the big man stood and mulled over the reported exchange. "That's all?"

  "Yep. I saw the transcript," replied Marten. "They didn't stay on the line long enough to run any kind of a trace."

  Marten had no idea which particular group of security agencies this Colonel Phoenix owed his allegiance to. He knew only that Colonel Phoenix had the power. It was not in any badge or plastic ID card, not even in the wicked Beretta 93-R he'd seen Phoenix check as soon as they had staked themselves out—no, it was an inner authority he possessed, which Marten had no choice but to respect.

  Jim Garfield, Marten's boss, had made it quite plain: he was to cooperate fully, to defer if necessary to the colonel's judgment. To the young agent, it was all very irregular.

  Right now, Jay Marten wished he could check with his partner, Hennessy, in the backup car, now under cover four long blocks away. Jeez, he hoped his buddy hadn't dozed off. But Marten could not break silence with Phoenix standing there, staring, his face a hardened mask.

  "Is there any more on Shinoda?"

  "He's well connected. Seems to know most of the people in his field," said Marten. "And he's known by them."

  "How well liked is he?"

  "Nobody that clever is universally liked," Marten observed dryly. "But he's respected all right. As I said, he works hard and plays hard. He enjoys the best R & R that money can buy. Likes to travel. But it looks as if somewhere along the line somebody got his hooks into him. And if he's susceptible to—"

  "There's somebody coming." Bolan pointed to the far end of the street. "On foot."

  At that long range the lone pedestrian was scarcely more than a ghostly flicker, but he was quickly approaching the first of the street lamps.

  "I see him," confirmed Marten, watching through the Startron, which gave more than three times magnification. "Yeah, that looks like Shinoda. So...do you think the party we're interested in will actually show himself'?"

  "I doubt it—I think it'll be a drop."

  "Then we might be in for a long wait to snatch whoever comes to collect the payoff."

  Bolan hoped not, but Marten was probably right. "First of all, we have to see exactly when and where he makes the drop."

  Shinoda, or whoever it was, just kept on coming.

  Two...three.... Bolan internalized the pace, watching with his naked eye.

  The man was approaching the unlighted stretch near the broken lamp.

  Bolan quickly scanned the rest of the street. Still no one else in sight. No sign that a direct contact would he made.

  Four... five....

  The navy blue raincoat rendered Shinoda as just another shadow in the darkness.

  Six ... seven . . . eight .... Bolan continued monitoring.

  Where the hell was he? An uneasy tremor snaked up the big man's spine, and this time it triggered an alarm bell in his brain.

  Nine.... What's happening? Bolan grabbed the Startron from Marten.

  The image was softly blurred. Out of focus, dammit: it seemed as if one figure was hovering over the other like some ghoulish night visitor draining his victim of lifeblood. Impatiently Bolan adjusted the focus. Marten looked at him sheepishly.

  Now he could see clearly; now there was only one figure out there. Prone! Their subject was lying face-down on the sidewalk.

  "They've got him!" Drawing his Beretta, Bolan ran for the stairs and descended them two at a time. He had no idea who "they" were, or how they had made the hit in the middle of an empty street. But he reviewed all the possibilities as, gun in hand, he raced across the intersection and up Alvarez Street.

  Marten was right on his heels. He was shouting into the small transceiver: "Backup, backup! Close in—subject is down, I repeat, down!"

  Shinoda was down all right—downright dead.

  Bolan had reached the victim and was feeling for a pulse. Nothing. He checked the street in both directions. It was as lifeless as the corpse lying at his feet. Bolan holstered his gun.

  "What the hell happened?" gasped Marten, squatting to inspect the body.

  Bolan knew that a determined hit man would have used soft-nosed or explosive bullets—either way the killshot would have blown a crater in Shinoda. And yet he did not appear to have any wound whatsoever.

  "Jeez, how am I going to explain this?" Marten wondered aloud. He looked up, hearing a car approach along Munsen.

  "Right now, Shinoda would like to have your problem," remarked Bolan. He studied the street surface. He looked up at the wall five feet away. Whoever hit the computer wizard had got away. Bolan did not believe in magic. The only other logical answer was to have gone to ground—he had used the trick himself--so he began casting around for a manhole cover; a sewer entrance, anything large enough for a man to crawl down, to
hide or escape.

  A car wheeled round onto their street. As it cleared the far end of the wall, its lights swept the roadway. Bolan turned his back on the vehicle, checking for any telltale evidence revealed by the high-beam illumination.

  Yeah, there it was—a circular steel plate about thirty feet away. He unholstered the Beretta again and strode out into the street.

  Marten still crouched close to the body, bewildered by what had happened. He must make an immediate report on the car radio. He began to straighten up...

  That car did not look like the beat-up Dodge that was working the backup detail. Marten tried to shield his eyes from the glare—it could not be Hennessy's ear. It wasn't even slowing down.

  "Look out, Colonel!" he screamed.

  The car was roaring down the street toward I them ...aimed like a missile at Bolan.

  2

  BOLAN WAS ALREADY TURNING. Legs apart, arm extended, gun hand balanced by the other palm, the big man had only micro-moments to make his play. Shades of Italy, of the streetfight fought with guns and cars.

  In the short distance from the corner, the sleek black Firebird with gold trim had accelerated with a powerful burst. Thirty-five hundred pounds of metal body and snarling engine were hurtling toward him at seventy miles an hour and climbing.

  Bolan stood his ground.

  The Firebird would cover that final hundred yards in less than three seconds.

  Bolan aimed through the blinding intensity of its headlights, directly at the place the driver should be sitting. The windshield shattered into myriad cracks from the impact of the 9mm bullet.

  The car veered to the left.

  Bolan dived the other way.

  It was too late to roll completely clear. The rubberized edge of the right front fender clipped his calf in midair and sent Bolan sprawling.

  As he smashed onto the street, the pistol spun from his numb fingers and slid across the pavement.

  The driver had anticipated Bolan's shot. He straightened up as he wrenched the wheel over to propel the firebird onto the sidewalk.