A guard posted outside the door coughed, and Dade scowled. He had no money with him, but had millions stored in offshore accounts that he could get his hands on with a few phone calls or access to a computer. More than enough to get a couple of these gun-toting morons to help him get off the island, get away from Kursk.
A pang of fear passed through his stomach. Trying to turn Kursk’s men against their boss was risky. They could turn him in, maybe for a better reward, and he’d die at Kursk’s hands.
Dade snorted the cocaine, went to the bathroom and spent twenty minutes under a steaming shower. By the time he had shaved and slipped into fresh clothes, the nagging fear had dissipated. The cocaine always took the edge off. He felt confident, ready to make the guard an offer too good to refuse.
He knocked on the door.
MACK BOLAN STOPPED the Swimmer Delivery Vehicle one hundred yards from the shoreline. Disengaging himself from the craft’s built-in oxygen supply, he grabbed the regulator, stuffed it in his mouth and cleared it of excess water. He began taking long, steady pulls of air from the twin-cylinder scuba system attached to his back.
A dark shadow moved overhead, prompting him to look up. He saw Rytova had unhooked herself from the SDV and was distancing herself from the conveyance. Bolan patted down the weapons he carried in watertight containers. He was ready to take the war to Nikolai Kursk.
Inflating the buoyancy control device, careful to compensate for the weight of the weapons and tools on his body, Bolan pushed off from the SDV. Pulling the craft to a rock ridge about fifty feet below the surface, he secured it against some rocks. He unhooked a small weapons bag outfitted with an air bladder from the SDV and kicked away from the vehicle.
As he took in air with measured breaths, bubbles roared around his lips and rushed past his ears. He’d wanted a bubbleless rebreather system for the infiltration. Unfortunately, because of time constraints and meager equipment offerings, he’d been given two options: use scuba or hold his breath.
About twenty yards from the island, Bolan signaled Rytova and pointed at a large pipe that extended from a gentle slope of rocks positioned over their heads and about twenty feet below the surface.
According to intelligence nailed down by Stony Man’s cyberteam, the island had been a small, but expensive resort a decade or so ago before Kursk’s people had swooped in and forced the corporate owners to sell.
The cyberteam had hacked around until they found a series of drawings detailing the original structure and its water system. Any changes made by Kursk were a wild card and rendered the intelligence questionable at best. A fresh set of satellite photos supplied Bolan with information that qualified as better than nothing, but only barely.
He cut across the currents and came up to the entrance. As expected, Kursk had realized the vulnerability created by the tunnel and had sealed it with a thick mesh of steel bands interwoven with sensor wires.
Bolan weighed whether to risk the time and effort necessary to infiltrate the tunnel. He assumed Kursk, Cole and anyone else who mattered knew he was coming. Bolan had figured all along that the gunrunner was receiving intel from people both inside and outside the law in Sierra Leone. The State Department’s dead security team and the equally dead Ronald Moeller underscored that grim point.
The best Bolan could hope for was that Kursk was expecting his arrival, but wasn’t sure when or where the fireworks would start.
Bolan planned to start them soon. But he needed some time. Signaling Rytova to watch his back for him, he began working to bypass the alarm hooked to the grate.
JACK COLE MOBILIZED a dozen well-armed soldiers as he steeled the island for a visit from the man known as Cooper.
Cole rode shotgun in the Land Rover, while Emmett drove. Neither man spoke. There was no need; Cole had already laid out the plan. Instead, he cracked a clip into the Colt Commando assault rifle, chambered a round and stared ahead. He felt his teeth clamping together, his heart pounding as the vehicle neared the water-treatment plant. Adrenaline rushed through him, making his vision seem clearer and giving him a rush that was downright euphoric. He’d take this son of a bitch, he decided. Or at least die trying.
As the vehicle passed down the hand-hewn trail it kicked up roiling clouds of tan dust. Dirt and rocks popped underneath the tires as the vehicle crept along the path. A pair of hardmen walked point about ten feet from the Rover’s grille, scanning the surrounding foliage. A fifth gunner manned the mounted machine gun in the back of the vehicle. A pair of divers seated in the back seat performed last-minute checks on their equipment.
In brief, measured statements Cole had alerted Kursk to the impending infiltration. Kursk had greeted the news with stony silence. His rage spoke for itself, a silent but tangible force—a force Cole knew would be directed at him before all was said and done.
He had sought to reassure Kursk, but to no avail.
Cole had spent ten years as a U.S. Army Ranger before working for the CIA where he specialized in staging secret paramilitary operations. He was a professional soldier, and he thought he deserved some respect from that coldblooded thug.
Emmett brought the vehicle to a stop.
Cole noticed that his anger was causing him to grip the Commando’s pistol grip so tightly that his knuckles had turned white and begun to ache. He pushed it away and cleared his head, knowing he had to stay sharp until the danger passed. One of the soldiers walked to the gate, unlocked it and swung it open. The second gunner covered the first, then moved inside the fenced area, followed by the first. The two men continued to leapfrog covering each other’s approach until they disappeared from view. Thirty seconds later, the soldiers returned to the gate and motioned Cole and his people into the area housing many of the island’s electric generators and the water treatment plant.
Back at the compound, Cole had figured the utility area as the island’s weakest point, making it the most likely place for an enemy insertion. A large tunnel brought in thousands of gallons of sea water to be processed for use in toilets, showers, sprinklers and the like. Weekly shipments of bottled water were used for drinking and cooking. But with a few dozen people living on the island at any one time, the demand for water was endless.
A series of cameras positioned on the outcroppings surrounding the entrance monitored the area. More cameras positioned inside the tunnel offered a view of its interior, but were used primarily for maintenance purposes such as identifying blockages. Cole sat at a large console and began watching the screens for activity.
It didn’t take long to find some.
He saw what he assumed was the Justice Department agent working to slice through the grate with a set of cutters. The woman watched Cooper’s back while he worked. Cooper had disabled the alarm system before he began cutting at the grate. Not surprising, considering the level of skill the agent had exhibited thus far.
Cole had switched to a headset communicator before suiting up for battle. “Predator One, this is Command, do you read?”
“Predator One, go.”
“You in position?”
“Almost, sir. What’s the target’s status?”
“He’s at the grate, just like we expected. You ready to put in the divers?”
“Affirmative. Another two hundred yards and we can drop them in. Cut off the rear flank. You got them if they make it into the tunnel?”
“Right. We knew this damn tunnel was a liability. Kursk has outfitted it with a few surprises in case they get too far. You let me handle this end.”
“Clear, Jack.” The headset went dead.
Cole watched Cooper work on the gate for another minute, before a shadow filled the picture and the monitor went black. Damn, apparently the Russian woman had found the camera and—judging by the speed with which it winked out—had deactivated the damn thing by yanking it free or smashing it.
No matter, he decided. If things went south and one or both of them got past the first set of attackers and made it inside the tunnel, they’d find
themselves surrounded by cameras and things a whole lot deadlier.
Either way, they were screwed.
Metal scraping on metal sounded behind Cole, prompting him to turn. He saw a pair of his gunners sliding a steel cover from the top of a large cylinder. The strain caused their muscles to bunch under their shirts and their faces to redden to the shade of cooked lobster as they hefted the cover and set it to the floor.
Cole knew the cylinder, which measured about four feet in diameter, was the access tower leading into the tunnel. Originally, it had been installed so divers could safely enter the passageway and clear blockages.
The divers who’d accompanied Cole in the Land Rover entered the room, masks poised on their foreheads, hoses tipped with mouthpieces dangling over their right shoulders. Each man fisted a speargun and carried a pair of combat knives, one on the hip, one on the right strap of his scuba tank.
Cole held up his hand to stop them and called over his shoulder, “You girls hold on a minute.”
The cigar wagged between his lips as he spoke, shedding bits of ash on the control board. “If I have my way, these stupid bastards never will get close enough to warrant putting you guys in the water. Chances are, they’ll never get past our first underwater team.”
“And if they do?” one of the divers asked.
Cole stared at the man and grinned. “Then they’re just delaying the inevitable.”
7
Using a pair of long-handled cutters, Mack Bolan severed the grate’s final supporting strut and let the barrier fall free. It kicked up thick clouds of brown, and etched jagged lines in the vegetation blanketing the rock wall underneath the tunnel’s mouth as it sank into the murky depths.
He’d spent two minutes deactivating the alarm and another minute slicing through the grate. Bolan assumed more alarms and other security devices remained inside the tunnel.
Rytova, in the meantime, had discovered a camera lens about the diameter of a pencil inside some nearby rocks and smashed it with the butt of her knife.
Bolan’s combat senses suddenly came alive, warning him of impending danger.
Long shadows circled overhead and began descending toward him. A pair of divers, each armed with a carbon dioxide powered speargun bore down upon them. Bolan slid his war bag from his shoulder and jammed it into the mouth of the tunnel. Kicking fiercely and drawing a combat knife from his harness, Bolan rocketed up to meet the challenge. A spear flew past him, missing his head by inches and smacking harmlessly into the rock walls at his back.
Motion to Bolan’s right caught his attention. With his peripheral vision, he saw Rytova also darting upward.
While the first shooter reloaded his speargun, the second drew down and fired at Bolan. The Executioner whipped to the side, and the spear’s trident-shaped tip razored inches from his chest as he closed in on the hardmen.
Bolan rose face-to-face with the closest of the two men and drove an open palm under the diver’s chin, pushing back the man’s head and knocking him off balance. The speargun slipped loose from the man’s fingers and he grabbed at Bolan with both arms, trying to get hold of his attacker. With his other hand, the Executioner brought up the combat knife and drove the blade into the man’s rib cage between the third and fourth ribs, letting it bite deep into the man’s heart. He watched life drain from the man’s face. The diver’s regulator came free as his mouth opened to utter a final cry of pain.
Grabbing the speargun and twisting his knife free from the corpse, Bolan sheathed the knife and reloaded the gun with the dead man’s last spear.
Bolan turned and darted to the right, sharklike in his movements as he crossed the distance with sweeping kicks from his legs.
Just ahead, Rytova struggled with the second diver. The pair was at a stalemate as Rytova gripped the wrist of the man’s shooting hand. Likewise he had caught her wrist in midlunge, fingers encircling her small wrists and holding her knife at bay. The fighter was a good deal larger than Rytova, and the fight seemed to be shifting in his favor. She had no solid surfaces to give her the leverage she needed to take the man down.
Raising the speargun, Bolan drew down on Rytova’s opponent, but the pair’s thrashing quickly caused him to lose his clear shot. He rushed forward through the water, ready to grab another shot or ditch the speargun and go hand to hand.
But Rytova turned the fight in her favor before Bolan got close enough to help.
Twisting her knife hand down, she drove steel into the man’s wrist, slicing skin, tendons and muscle as she did. The move surprised the diver and he opened his mouth to scream in pain, letting the regulator slip free. Trying to grab some distance between himself and his opponent, the man began whipping his body about and eventually drove a foot into Rytova’s gut to force her to loosen her grip on him.
Breath exploded from her lungs and she lost her own regulator and her grip on his arm loosened. The man slipped away. The hardman gathered up his regulator and shoved it back into his mouth, then surged back toward Rytova.
As the woman gathered her regulator and jammed it back into her mouth, her opponent was raising his speargun, ready to skewer her with the three-pronged spear.
Now less than five feet from the struggle, Bolan triggered his own weapon. The spear whizzed through the brackish water and bit into the man’s back at the base of his neck. He thrashed around for a moment, simultaneously trying to assimilate the searing pain raging through his body and to retaliate against his attackers. Stabbing between the flailing arms, Rytova drove her blade into the man’s Adam’s apple and held it there until he concluded his death spasms.
Seconds later, Bolan and Rytova slashed apart their dead opponents’ inflatable vests and let the corpses, weighted with lead belts and other equipment, sink like stones into the depths. Bolan also ditched the empty speargun.
Descending again, occasionally equalizing the pressure in his ears as he went, Bolan slipped into the tunnel with Rytova following a few feet behind.
Two down and how many dozen to go? Bolan wondered as he pushed farther ahead into the darkness. He had wanted to gather more intelligence on the island before hitting it, but that kind of recon took time. He didn’t necessarily trust the numbers gathered by the satellite surveillance photos. If he was lucky, he might get a chance to do some observation on Kursk’s main base before hitting it, once they got on the ground.
The numbers were falling too fast to sit back and try to gather a reliable head count. He was operating on Kursk’s timetable, not the other way around. That meant he had to hit fast, hit hard, hit sure.
And make it out alive.
As he continued on, Bolan played the flashlight’s beam over the cylindrical surface. Something metallic winked back, standing out in stark contrast against the grimy walls. He halted and held up a hand for Rytova to do likewise. Slipping the weapons bag from his shoulders, he passed it back her and closed in on the shiny object.
Worried that the tunnel had been rigged with an explosive trap, Bolan felt tensed muscles loosen when he saw the apparatus was a camera lens.
A hiss, followed by the thunder of metal striking concrete sounded behind Bolan, with the water magnifying the sound. Turning, the warrior saw a steel grate had dropped from the ceiling, separating him from Rytova and his weapons bag.
Bolan felt his breath quicken and his heartbeat accelerate as he realized he was trapped. He quickly brought both reactions under control while he decided on his next move.
He studied the grate for a moment. The barrier was composed of two-inch-thick steel bands that his cutters would never penetrate. Even trying to dismantle the gate would burn time and air, neither of which was in surplus. He estimated he had another hundred yards to cover before he could exit into the water-treatment plant’s control room. Most likely, the path would be fraught with danger, and he needed air and energy to make the journey. He had no other choice but to proceed. And do it alone.
Using hand signals, he told Rytova to retreat. She hesitated for a
moment, and Bolan guessed it was because she didn’t want to leave him behind. Then she nodded, turned and shot back down the tunnel, eventually disappearing in the darkness.
With powerful kicks, Bolan thrust himself forward and prepared himself for his next encounter with death.
AS TREVOR DADE WATCHED, the guard pressed his thumb against a smooth pad built into a wall and waited for the reader to process his prints. After a second or so, the machine chirped and the steel door slid open with a hiss.
Dade felt the guard’s fingers dig into his biceps and yelped in spite of himself. Blood flushed his cheeks as embarrassment washed over him. The bigger man shot him a disparaging look and hurled him through the open doorway like a sack of garbage.
After he regained his footing, Dade took in his surroundings. The massive room extended upward three stories, the entire height of Kursk’s luxury home. A series of massive processors were positioned throughout the ground floor, their cooling fans humming in unison as the machines crunched mounds of data.
One floor up, a mezzanine stretched around three of the four walls, and two pairs of computer workstations sat on the east and west mezzanine ends. Four workers stared into their screens, apparently unaware of the intrusion.
Fucking geeks, Dade thought. So damned absorbed in their little digital fairyland that they didn’t realize death had come calling for them.
Dade glanced at the guard, whose soulless eyes were scanning the room even as he raised his weapon. The scientist shuddered, but the Russian either didn’t notice or didn’t care. The muscles of the guard’s angular jaw bunched and released as he looked around and identified his first kill.
The guard had been more than happy to turn on his boss for the promise of five million dollars to be deposited into a numbered account in the Cayman Islands.
Death Gamble Page 11