On it now, there appeared the imposing, graying figure of Harold Brognola, twice as big as life, slightly distorted by the screen's curvature, and looking grim. There had been a time when Bolan and Brognola had been adversaries-unwillingly so, but adversaries nevertheless. In that other lifetime of the Executioner, Brognola had been pledged to bring his head in on a pike, even though he was aware that this man had done more to hobble the Mafia hyena in a few years than Brognola's Org Crime unit had done in decades. After the Las Vegas campaign, however, Brognola the pragmatist took over from Brognola the man, and though cop to the core, he could no longer pursue such a death hunt. By the latter days of the Mafia wars, Brognola was lending active support to the blitzing fighter, and it was he who made the president know that the country needed Mack Bolan in the new wars against the terror-brokers.
Brognola nodded and said, "Hello, Striker." He paused, pinching at the bridge of his nose. Bolan could see the weariness in that good face. "Frederick Charon," Brognola said finally. "It turns out he was only the tip of an iceberg."
"If you find the tip, you find the iceberg."
"That's right," Brognola grinned wanly. "And this is one iceberg we ought a blow right out of the water."
2
Bolan's chronometer read 1610:30 when April Rose came into his personal billet at Stony Man Farm. He was fully awake before she eased open the door; back in his Vietnam days he had cultivated the facility for combat sleep, had taught himself to relax and recharge the physical and psychic batteries while remaining alert to any signal, any danger or approach.
April was standing just inside the doorway, her fine figure silhouetted by the hallway light.
"We've got a wedge in," she announced.
Bolan nodded grimly and arose from the bed.
Frederick Charon's computer had finally yielded at least some of its secrets.
"Gadgets and Aaron were working on it most of the day," April told him as they moved down the corridor. "Gadgets was pulled away an hour ago. Able Team has been activated." Bolan dug the last cigarette from a crumpled pack. As commander of the Stony Man Farm cadres, he always felt tension when his men were called into action.
He thought gratefully of Gadgets. The guy made Bolan smile, even though Schwarz was tougher than nails. He was such a mystery half the time.
Believed, from an earlier confession, to have had parents who died in the sixties, Gadgets did in fact have a mother living still, a true eccentric, domiciled with her cats in Pasadena in a distance from reality no less great than the rumor of her death was, which, in her strange and lonely grief, had been her idea to begin with.
Thanks so far, Gadgets. And good luck, great good luck with Able's next one.
The corridor ended at a windowless heavy steel door devoid of insignia. Next to it was a panel containing a one-foot-square glass panel at eye level, a smaller panel at waist level, and a speakers microphone grill. April looked into the larger panel, placed the pad of her thumb against the smaller, and pronounced her name. The steel door slid noiselessly open, admitting her and her only into a featureless antechamber backed by a similar door.
The corridor door slid shut and a red light blinked on above it, shining for ten seconds or so before going out, indicating April was through the interlock.
Bolan repeated her process, pronounced the word "Phoenix" into the mike. A few moments later he was with her in the War Room. The Bear was at his computer terminal. On the end of the conference table next to him was an ashtray containing his pipe and a scattered pile of computer printouts, most of them dusted with the ash from Virginia's best cut.
"I think we've got something, Mack," Kurtzman said in his deep voice, not turning. He inputted something and watched as characters raced across his video display, then leaned back and grunted with satisfaction. "Gadgets and I were able to figure out the format of Charon's signature." Kurtzman turned to Bolan for the first time. "That is, the number of letters and characters and so forth of his user code and access protocol."
"Aaron," April prompted gently.
"Beg your pardon? Oh, right, sorry." Kurtzman stuffed dark tobacco into his pipe. "I tend to forget that computer detective work might not be as interesting to you as it is to me." He touched a match to the pipe, puffed out great clouds of blue smoke. "Okay, the bottom line," Kurtzman said.
"Two bottom lines. One — we're not ready to address the DonCo mainframe yet, but we do know that Frederick Charon has juggled the computer books to disguise the fact that a prototype of the new missile guidance system that his company was developing is now missing, along with the specifications manual that he himself developed."
"How big a prototype?" Bolan asked.
"Physically? It would be fairly substantial it would have to include a control board and a display of some sort. I'm guessing to a degree, but I'd say two standard twenty-two inch bays, each about as tall as a refrigerator. The manual would be no size at all. Reduced to microfiche which it probably already is it would fit in a small envelope."
"Okay," Bolan nodded. "What else?"
"Two — something that looks very much like that missing prototype was shipped to Transworld Import/export, an outfit that has a warehouse in the International Zone at Heathrow Airport in London."
"That way," April explained, "any cargo held for transshipment only does not have to pass British customs."
"Third," Kurtzman growled on, "Transworld Ist is a front run by our friends in MI5 — BRITISH Intelligence. And fourth, there is here Kurtzman shuffled through the printouts '4-a 99.3 percent chance that this "Sir Philip" whose name you saw, Mack, in Charon's datebook is Sir Philip Drummond, a high ranking MI5 official."
"Wait a minute," Bolan objected. "That doesn't make sense."
Kurtzman smiled with satisfaction. "It does if you add in point number five." He held up his hand, palm out, all digits splayed. "Sir Philip Drummond is a puppet," he announced. "And the Kremlin is pulling his strings."
Bolan's coffee cup was still half-full when he left the War Room. Within an hour, he was in a military jet, clearing the Atlantic coast, racing to meet the incoming twilight.
3
The man sitting alone at the corner table was in his mid-fifties, and wore the years well. He was dressed in an impeccably cut Savile Row three-piece suit, gray with muted gray pin striping, and his full head of silvery hair looked as if it had been styled that morning, every strand in place. He was slim and tall, carried himself with an offhand grace, visible now as he came into the vip lounge on the first floor of the departures section of Terminal Three at Heathrow Airport, London, England.
From his position four tables away, Mack Bolan had a clear line of sight to the elegant man. Two walls of the lounge were glass, looking out on the airport's terminal aprons. Planes with a variety of international markings taxied to or from the building every minute or so; Terminal Three handled intercontinental traffic. A third wall of the lounge was faced by a long table on which a luxurious buffet brunch had been laid out, a complimentary courtesy for the international passengers that the various airlines were most anxious to woo: business people, statesmen, anyone who did a good deal of traveling. The brunch was presided over by a Pakistani chef in livery, as was the cocktail bar tucked up to the fourth wall.
At mid-morning, there were no more than a dozen people in the room. Of the four at the bar, Mack Bolan knew the identities of three. The sandy-haired man at one end was named Voorhis; the man with whom he appeared to be in deep conversation was named McMahon. Both were American Intelligence agents.
At the other end of the bar, a young blond man, hardly twenty-five, appeared to be dawdling over a Guinness stout.
In fact he was an agent of MI5. Like his American colleagues, he was fully briefed on what was to come down.
The distinguished-looking man at the corner table glanced at his watch, then took a sterling silver cigarette case from his inside jacket pocket.
He extracted a slim brown-paper cigarette, produced
a lighter that matched the case, drew in flame.
His name was Sir Philip Drummond, and although he did not know it, he was sitting right in the middle of a suck.
A West Indian waiter in immaculate whites approached Bolan's table and refilled his coffee cup. Bolan's protective coloration for this rather refined corner of the human jungle consisted of a lightweight turtleneck and conservative slacks. The coordinated jacket was specially cut to conceal the Detonics mini .45 Associates automatic pistol riding in custom-crafted shoulder leather under his left arm.
On the table next to him was a slimline Samsonite attache-case with combination lock.
Three tables away, Sir Philip stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette and glanced impatiently at the lounge's entrance. He did not smile, but his frown relaxed as he rose from his seat. Frederick Charon crossed the room.
The two men shook hands with no particular warmth, then both sat down. Bolan kept them in the corner of his vision. To all appearances, two classier members of a pair of great nations, meeting to discuss something of worth or import within the elegant surroundings to which they had been bred.
In reality, two traitors, pooling resources to sell out those great nations. For all their intelligence, culture, and social status, to Mack Bolan these two men were certainly no less harmful than a pair of fat old Mafia dons who argued obscenely about how to split the profits of their vicious exploitation.
It was all a question of choices. Charon and Sir Philip could have chosen to be leaders, men who enriched the societies to which they had climbed to the top.
Instead they had chosen to be criminals.
The clue to the tie-in had come with the notation on the datebook of Charon's secretary: "Brunch with Sir Philip." It was an elementary computer exercise for Aaron Kurtzman: compare that name to all names filed in the Stony Man Farm data banks, with crosscheck to the NSC computer. It had taken exactly 51 seconds — Kurtzman was proud to announce to produce the correct name.
Bolan had studied the printout summary of Sir Philip Drummond's dossier on his transatlantic flight. Now aged fifty-six, he was the only son of a titled family that traced its lineage back to England's famed House of York. He was a member of the House of Lords, and was third-ranked officer below the Minister of Defence. His private school was Eton, after which he read for his baccalaureate at Cambridge University. In addition he held a Master of Arts degree from Oxford.
And for more than thirty years, Sir Philip had been a double agent for the Russian KGB.
This creep had first become involved with communism as a theoretical system, when he joined a socialist student faction at Cambridge. Such an association was not particularly unusual in those days, was considered no more than a harmless intellectual flirtation. Since Sir Philip had renounced it quite quickly, it was no barrier for his entrance into the British Intelligence service, first as a military officer during the Second World War, then with MI5 after mustering out.
That is how the "old school tie" has always worked in England.
In fact Sir Philip had embraced communism totally.
When an old college chum who had already gone turncoat approached him, Sir Philip signed on with the Soviet cause.
For over twenty-five years he rose through the ranks, in the parlance of the trade a "sleeper," an agent-in-place. In carrying out his intelligence duties, he showed only the most scrupulous attention to the best interests of Great Britain.
Then, two years ago, Sir Philip was "activated" by his Russian masters. A deception that had consumed the man's lifetime was finally to bear fruit.
It turned rotten within a month. That was how long it took MI5 to realize Sir Philip was a "mole." Over the years, British Intelligence has had its share of double agents. The most famous was Harold Adrian Russell Philby, better known as Kim, a Soviet double, who rose to become first secretary of the British Embassy in Washington before fleeing to Mother Russia in 1963.
Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were another pair of traitors, escaping only because Philby tipped them off that they were about to be blown. As a result, MI5 had instituted certain fail-safes, one of which had revealed Sir Philip.
Sir Philip himself had no idea that his perfidy was known, because he had been left in place and allowed to operate. He was also unaware that every piece of British intelligence he passed on to the Kremlin was deliberate misinformation, which was all he was still allowed access to. Today, however, Sir Philip had slipped through to act as go between for highly classified American defense date, sold to Russia by Frederick Charon. In a few minutes that transfer was scheduled to take place.
"It's why I'm here, guy," Bolan muttered to himself. Present and correct, armed, ready. The Executioner was abroad again.
At the corner table, Charon slipped a hand inside his five-hundred-dollar suitcoat and took out an ordinary letter-sized envelope. Sir Philip did the same. The envelopes changed hands, disappeared into pockets. Sir Philip rose and elegantly crossed the room toward the exit.
The young MI5 agent who had been nursing his stout fell into indiscreet step behind Sir Philip. His name was Lemon, and his nominal assignment was as bodyguard to Sir Philip, as it had been for the past six months. Sir Philip's treason was known to only a handful of people, for obvious security reasons, so as far as Lemon was outwardly concerned, his boss was just what he seemed.
As Sir Philip passed fluidly out of the room, Bolan nodded in the direction of the American agent, Voorhis. He and McMahon moved away from the bar. They were pros for sure. At the corner table, Voorhis said something in a soft voice to Charon. Charon went white, but did not reply. Voorhis spoke again. Charon stood and walked across the room, Voorhis and McMahon flanking him closely. Charon's gait was unsteady. One down, one to go as soon as Bolan saw to a further little piece of business.
The Russians were anticipating a package, and they were going to get one except the contents would not be quite what they expected. Bolan stood, picked up the attach more case.
Yeah, treason was a risky business. It had a way of blowing up in your face.
Bolan followed the parade through the door.
There was nothing fancy about the hangar that housed the offices, maintenance shop, and warehouse of Transworld Import/export, the MI5 front through which Sir Philip, was transshipping the missile guidance system prototype. It was a corrugated tin building that stood off by itself beyond Terminal One, the Heathrow facility reserved for domestic and European flights operated by U.K. airlines.
Facing away from the terminal were double loading-bay doors on rollers; opposite was the entrance.
Bolan watched from the shadow of the terminal as Sir Philip Drummond crossed to the entrance, trailed by Lemon. The Russian mole produced a key-ring and unlocked the pitted metal entry.
Electric light flared inside the windowless building, then the door swung shut. Bolan gave them twenty beats before following. The key he had been provided by MI5 turned noiselessly in the lock. He also came equipped with a neat little .45 Detonics, the cut-down gun so good for concealability.
The inside of the hangar was a single cavernous room, except for a line of offices along one wall. Light showed there behind a frosted glass door. Close up, Bolan could hear the soft murmur of Sir Philip's voice. Bolan soundlessly eased the Detonics free of leather, raised it head-high and slammed the barrel into the frosted glass.
Sir Philip was seated behind a chipped scarred desk, holding a telephone receiver. He recradled it, looked up at the gun-toting stranger framed by the jagged shards still clinging to the window frame, and murmured fatuously.
The MI5 bodyguard was to Bolan's left, his back to the wall, hands loose at his side, unmoving. He stared at Bolan expressionlessly.
Bolan turned the inside doorknob and came into the office. Glass crunched underfoot.
Without looking in the bodyguard's direction, Bolan said, "All right, Lemon, you know what to do." From the corner of his eye, Bolan caught the flash of gunmetal. He whirled, but Lemon had
already dropped to a crouch. Bolan started a defensive roll.
Lemon shot him in the left shoulder.
Bolan felt the shock of the bullet furrow into his flesh, but seconds would pass before pain followed.
Only a fraction of the first second was gone when Bolan roared up and struck the young-blood bodyguard.
Lemon fired again, but Bolan's shoulder shoved into Lemon's arm, and the slug buried itself in the ceiling as Bolan's full weight pinned the man in a sprawl against the wall. Lemon tried to get a knee between Bolan's legs. Bolan twisted clear. This time pain lanced savagely through his shoulder.
Then his right hand was free. He smashed the barrel of the little Detonics against the British agent's temple, and the man went down. Bolan rolled clear. Sir Philip was halfway out of his desk chair. "Don't." Bolan waved the .45. Sir Philip sat down again. The body on the floor lay motionless.
Lemon's gun, an Enfield .38 revolver with a two-inch barrel, was still in his outflung hand.
Bolan plucked it away, stood, tucked it into his belt.
Because of Lemon's crouch and Bolan's roll, the slug that had hit The Executioner had entered at an upward angle. The exit wound was almost at the shoulder. There was not too much blood. Bolan transferred the Detonics to his left hand, pressed a scrap of the ragged turtleneck over the rear bullet hole with his right.
Even if a guy planned every number down the line, one glitch could throw those numbers straight to hell. Maybe Lemon was a Russian double too. Maybe someone just screwed up, never informed him. But those answers would have to wait.
Sir Philip regarded Bolan dispassionately. Moving slowly and deliberately, he got out his cigarette case and lit up.
Bolan knew the guy had spent a lifetime walking the edge of the knife. The aristocratic polish was simply a superficial shell over a hard and dangerous man.
With the play now on a blood-soaked heartbeat, Bolan had to show him what hard and dangerous really meant.
Renegade Agent te-47 Page 3