Blood of the Lion

by Don Pendleton

  "Yeah, Mack Bolan, the curse of the KGB," Godfried commented, pulling a cheroot out of his pants pocket and firing it up with a Ronson lighter.

  "Exactly," Alchupa said. "I have gone through great time and expense to have you men tracked down."

  "And what about our time and expense, mate?"

  "As I am sure you have been told, you will be paid well for your time and trouble, no matter what."

  Sucking on his cheroot, Godfried scowled at Alchupa. "No matter what, eh? I don't like the sounds of that."

  "You are not being paid, Señor Godfried," Alchupa said in an icy voice as a thin smile slashed his lips, "to like or dislike anything here." The colonel had a short fuse for anyone with a smart mouth.

  "Yeah," the Viper growled, his narrowed gaze fixed on Alchupa as balls of sweat broke from the crew-cut assassin's forehead and rolled down the sides of a face that looked carved out of granite, the skin gray and tightly drawn over his sharp features. "A million dollars is nothing to sneeze at. But my question is why do you need five of us?"

  "I am not necessarily interested in this one assignment alone," Alchupa replied, clenching and unclenching his fists behind his back. "I am still looking for more good, reliable help."

  The Viper became angry. "Spit it out, Colonel. I've been whisked all over Brazil and just spent more than a week riding down the Amazon in your gunboat. I'm hot, tired, hungry and I don't have time for bullshit. Get to the point."

  With effort, Alchupa kept his temper under control. There was something about the Viper that Alchupa didn't trust. The colonel knew he was going to have a problem with that gringo sooner or later.

  "The point is, regardless of which one of you terminates Bolan, there will be other work. There will be plenty of work, I assure you."

  Liao Khan spoke up. "I do not understand. I believed that this was to be a one-time removal."

  Smiling, Alchupa looked at the Mongol. The colonel was glad there was no language barrier between them. But that was another reason why he had chosen these particular men. In order to be able to move about freely in many foreign countries, one of the assassin's most invaluable assets is a tongue fluent in many languages. How else could he fit in at the right time, live as an "actor" among the local populace while stalking and sizing up a target and determining a decisive course of action?

  "Your services may be required again," Alchupa told the Mongol. "As for the current target, numbers will be drawn to determine who goes out first."

  "Wait a minute, wait a minute here," the Viper growled. "This isn't some goddamn lottery, Colonel. I was under the impression I was here to do a job for you, do it and get paid."

  "I agree," Mohammed al-Rhabin said. "I do not wish to spend months down here in Brazil. There are others who require my services also. I feel as if I have been deceived."

  Alchupa held out a hand, tried to suppress the patronizing smile he felt tugging at his lips, but knew his impatience and anger were getting the best of him. Perhaps he had misjudged these men. Why all the questions? Why all the whining? He had not deceived anybody. He had merely not bothered to tell them the entire truth. If he had, there was a chance they would not have come.

  "I will say only this," Alchupa told the five assassins. "I have not lied to any of you. There is a job for you. That job is Mack Bolan. Do the job. You will be paid. Take it or leave it."

  "By the way," the Viper said. "Why the fascination with Bolan? I find it strange that you'd want him iced out of the blue like this."

  "There is nothing strange about it, señor. Bolan is no immediate threat to me — perhaps. But that could change. The Executioner seems to have a nose like a bloodhound for hunting down such operations as ours. I can take no chances."

  "So you're covering your rear. All right, I can buy that," Godfried said. "After what Bolan did to the KGB... Bloody hell! I heard he even took his crusade into the heart of Moscow."

  "You are testing your own strength against a powerful and dangerous enemy," Liao Khan said.

  Alchupa rested his gaze on the Mongol. He held the man's stare for a moment, looking deep into Khan's dark eyes. The Mongol, Alchupa decided, judging from his experience in dealing with hired assassins, was a man who could see through any ruse or lie. because he himself had been down many dark roads. Khan could not be fooled. And the Mongol was no one to play.

  "Si. That is part of it."

  "And the other part, mate, is you're looking to earn a name for yourself if one of us brings back the head of Mack Bolan."

  "Si. But the glory will not be all mine. In fact, the one of you who eliminates Bolan will get all the credit."

  "It is not credit I came here for," the Swede said, his ice-blue eyes glittering like diamonds.

  "Certainly, I understand," Alchupa said, smiling. "Let me explain further. You see, I have plans for Brazil. If you wish, you can fit into those plans. If you do not wish to be part of an organization that will be as powerful as any secret police or conquering army in history, all you have to do is get back on the boat and you will be returned to Belém,"

  They hesitated. Alchupa read the fear in their eyes. He would not just let them go on their way. They knew that if they left now their lives wouldn't be worth the worms that would feed on their flesh.

  "You have agreed to come," Alchupa said. "Do you then intend to honor your commitment?"

  "What about legwork?" the Viper asked. "Or do you already know where Bolan is?"

  "I do. I have my sources on the inside of a new division of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Unfortunately, my base here has been discovered by special agents from the DEA. One of them got out of Brazil with evidence of our operation here,"

  "Great," Godfried grumbled. "So we go down with the ship, too. Is that it, mate?"

  Alchupa ignored Godfried's sarcasm. "The agent who escaped has been tracked by my inside sources. He is presently in a safehouse in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. My man is at this moment watching the safehouse. From the inside, I might add."

  "So what? What has this safehouse got to do with Bolan?" the Viper asked.

  "I believe Bolan will go to the safehouse and question the agent who escaped. The special agents who were spying on us had worked out an elaborate relay system down the river. They were gathering intelligence on our operation here. Under torture one of those agents has talked. Everyone involved in what they called Operation Sweep knows the exact location of our base here. This agent told me that someone would be coming for me. Coming to kill me and destroy our base. That someone, he informed me, was Mack Bolan, who is once again working for his imperialist warmongering government. That was fine with me, that Bolan is coming for my blood, I told him, because Mack Bolan will be a dead man very soon. One of you will see to that. I want Bolan eliminated, at all costs. I want him killed. If I were Bolan, I would say that the only logical place to begin a trackdown of our base would be the agent who escaped in Belém."

  "The one in the safehouse in the Rockies?" al-Rhabin said.

  "Si. Now... I have my own jet waiting to take you to Colorado. Your favorite weapons have already been sent here. I would like the first of you to leave as soon as possible."

  "Just one more thing, Colonel," the Viper said as Alchupa started to turn away from the wharf.

  "What is it?"

  "Why us?" the Viper asked, sweeping a look over Alchupa's soldiers. "You have plenty of guns here. Surely even a specialist or two."

  "You don't seem to understand something. This kill of Bolan will not be just a stepping-stone to glory for me and my organization. It is not a game, either. Simply put, you are believed to be the best in the world at what you do — kill. I am asking you to prove it, even though you may feel you have nothing to prove to me. No. You have already proved yourselves time and again. But this will be your biggest challenge. Are you not curious as to who will be the better man?"

  Alchupa's smile was met by cold silence from his five assassins from the four corners of the earth.

 
; 3

  "You got any spades?"

  "Shit."

  "Guess not. That puts me over five hundred points. Wanna try some blackjack?"

  "Up yours."

  "You're one beautiful dude when you're losing, know that?"

  "Shut up."

  "My, aren't we touchy today."

  "Fuck you."

  Special Agent Anthony Spiraldi looked away from his two "cabin-sitters" in disgust. They were supposed to be his guardians? Hell, they were just builshitters more interested in killing time. Or was there more to them than he had been able to figure out? There was something about those two he hadn't been able to put his finger on. At the moment, the big, balding man with the scar over his cheek, and a pug nose that looked as if it had been on the receiving end of more than a few right crosses, was gloating over his fifth spades victory in a row. That put the guy well over the four-figure mark for cash earnings. Spiraldi knew that special agent from the DEA's SOD as Bear. That nickname was no misnomer, because the guy was as big as a grizzly and he had a deep gravelly voice that growled out words and made him sound as if he was constantly on the hunt for somebody's ass to chew.

  The other op, a slightly built man with closely cropped red hair, was called Red. Uh-huh. Red had lost more than eight hundred dollars in just the past three hours of card playing alone. Red seemed to be a loser at any game he tried, and a very poor loser to boot. It would take ten lifetimes of character polishing to make Red a class act; he had the style of a fer-de-lance looking to strike from the brush and the snorting impatience and uncontrollable anger of a bull charging a matador. Bullsnake, Spiraldi decided, fit the guy much better than Red. Yesterday Red the Bullsnake had gone down in Yahtzee and poker, and it didn't look as if his luck was going to change anytime soon. Red was just a natural born loser, sure, but he was more like one of those guys who just want to lose — at life, at love, in their work. Maybe they want to lose because they don't like themselves and want somebody to feel sorry for them.

  If Red was a loser at heart, though, Bear was just the opposite. Bear had to win at any cost, even if that meant cheating and lying. Yeah, Spiraldi wouldn't put it past Bear to be using a marked deck, or slipping an ace here and there from out of his sleeve. No, Spiraldi wouldn't put anything past Bear. Make no mistake, the guy was dangerous. Anthony Spiraldi had worked enough undercover assignments to know a mean son of a bitch who would just as soon cut your balls off and feed them to you as he would swat a fly. It was a certain way he carried himself, a look in his eyes that told people / will hurt you. I want to hurt you. I can't really explain it, but I just need to grind your bones into dust.

  Spiraldi knew he was no psychologist. Time and experience, though, had a way of sorting out the whys of other people's behavior. Introspection helped a man arrive at some answers, too. Spiraldi hated the fact that he was always looking at other people and trying to figure them out. It was either a curse or a blessing — he wasn't sure which — but something just wasn't quite right about those two. Observing the glow of kerosene light on their heavily lined, bearded faces, he decided that Bear and Red looked evil. If these were supposed to be the good guys, then God help us all.

  Wrestling with his thoughts about Bear and Red, Spiraldi looked around the small cabin, and then he smelled the stink of his own sweat. Or was it fear he smelled on himself? Yeah, he was worried, all right, and he had plenty of goddamn reason to be a little edgy. For five days he had been cooped up in this cabin overlooking a valley in the Tarryall Mountains of the Colorado Rockies. Like a puppet on a string, he had been jerked around by the Justice Department for more than two weeks, hustled from safehouse to safehouse across half the United States, after he had survived a shoot-out with Anaconda mercenaries in Belém.

  He was sure that Anaconda would send somebody for him. They would have to. After all, he had escaped with evidence that could well pave the way to Alchupa's destruction. Why else was he under guard, being watch-dogged by what he was sure were two thugs, hired from what the DEA's SOD chief called the "free-lance arenas"? And, no, there was no doubt in Spiraldi's mind what his watchdogs were. Mercs. Hired guns. Great. Just what level of the Justice Department's version of Dante's inferno had the Drug Enforcement Administration sunk to? Spiraldi was stuck, trapped in an abyss of cutthroats, goons hired to work outside of the law against the lawless. And the situation stank right to the bowels of unholy hell. Christ, he had always believed that only the CIA pooled extra resources from the assassin underworld. Now, ten years down the road as a special agent for the DEA, he had allowed himself to be led straight to the threshing blades of a deadly nightmare he couldn't awake from.

  Gut instinct told Spiraldi that the snafu that had led him here to this safehouse would before long become further entangled in a web of treachery and violence. For damn sure something was brewing in Brazil, and he had brought back the evidence to substantiate a lot of suspicions that were rumbling ominously like thunder along the horizon through Wonderland.

  No sooner had he stepped off the 727 in Miami than he'd been whisked away under armed guard to a shack in the Everglades and debriefed as if he'd been a KGB agent who had decided to go over the Berlin Wall. Mysterious troop buildup in the Amazon jungle? Arms cache? Colombian druglords? Gunrunning and hired assassins? News to him. Just what the hell was going on? He had merely been a link in a chain of infiltration down in Brazil. He hadn't seen this so-called evidence of a cocaine processing plant and a private army of mercs that he had carried back to the States in a bullet-chewed satchel.

  But he had heard the rumors from other ops in the Amazon chain. He had heard "revolution and a mass assault on the Brazilian capital of Brasilia." Experience had also taught Spiraldi that there was always at least a shred of truth to rumors. But what the big guy from the Justice Department, one Hal Brognola, had wanted to know were facts. What did Spiraldi know about the person called the Iceman? Hell, he had told Brognola, relying on the grapevine of rumors from DEA veterans, the Iceman was none other than Mack Bolan.

  Apparently the Iceman was now a target for the paramilitary strike force calling itself Anaconda. Brognola's debrief had left a lot of questions dangling in Spiraldi's mind. And the whole damn thing was nothing but a puzzle, a maze, a Sphinx riddle, and none of the pieces were fitting together for Spiraldi. Now he was ordered by Brognola to sit tight. Wait.

  A visitor was coming.

  The Iceman.

  Mack Bolan.

  And Mack "the Iceman" Bolan was going to start putting together some of the pieces of this puzzle. A Brazilian Sphinx, Spiraldi suspected, was about to meet its match.

  Padding across a bear rug, Spiraldi opened the belly of a cast-iron stove. Heat from the fire inside the stove warmed his face as he lit a Marlboro from the flames. He must have gone through two cartons of butts in the past five days alone. Trying to take his mind off this Iceman encounter, he'd even sent Rod to town to pick up a few paperback books. Chain-smoking and reading didn't calm his nerves, though, or distract him from wondering when the Iceman would arrive or why he was coming. His mind was racing away in overdrive. Damn it, he just had too many questions, and he was sure the Iceman would want some questions answered, answers he didn't have.

  Unless... yeah, unless, of course, Mack Bolan was looking to take a little trip to Brazil, a journey up the Amazon River. Now that made sense. Spiraldi knew the contacts down there, how the relay system upriver operated.

  Okay, so he was on ice until the Iceman came to chip him out of the block. Fine. But the waiting was killing him, stretching his nerves to the breaking point. Outside there was a foot of snow on the ground and the temperature was somewhere around twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The cabin was old, and the previous owners, cowboys or mountain men, he wasn't sure which — hadn't done a damn thing to keep the place up. The place smelled like old sweat, piss and puke. There was a crack in the wooden front door where somebody had tried to break their way in, and a chilly bite of brisk mountain air was filtering into the cab
in.

  But it wasn't so much the physical discomfort that was bothering Spiraldi. It was a certain mental anguish that kept picking at the back of his brain. Something wasn't right with his watchdogs. He sensed they were nervous. To calm some unspoken anxiety, they busied themselves playing cards and backgammon while they bickered like schoolkids with each other.

  There were other indicators, too, about the freelancers, which Spiraldi took as warning signs. About every hour on the hour. Red would steal a furtive look at his watch, as if he was expecting somebody. Did they know who the Iceman was? Surely they had to know who they were watching and why? Bear wasn't very good at hiding his anxiety, either. He fidgeted and chain-smoked, cursed and paced, and looked frequently at his watch, too. Both men carried Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum revolvers in shoulder holsters. Every now and then Red would touch his holster, as if his trigger finger was itching to squeeze off a few 240-grain Magnum rounds.

  Spiraldi couldn't shake the feeling that something was about to happen. Patience had never been one of his virtues. He knew what the calm before the storm felt like. He had seen enough deals to know when the guns were being loaded. Loaded for big game. There was no question about who the big game was — Mack Bolan.

  Which led Spiraldi to still other troubling questions. Was somebody on the inside of the division hunting for Bolan's head? Was he being used as part of a setup to snare Bolan? For one thing, Red and Bear were part of this new Special Operations Division of the DEA, which meant their loyalty and motives were questionable. They were hired outside of the administration as part of this new war on drug trafficking. Top dollar bought their services. And if a higher bidder had offered more cash for a one-time extermination... Damn! Was he being paranoid? Was there some conspiracy to lop off the Iceman's head? And if the Iceman was set to go down, then, Spiraldi knew, he would fall, too. Hard. Facedown in his own blood and guts.

  "Will you relax, goddamn it?"

  Out of the corner of his eye, drawing deep on his smoke, Spiraldi looked at Bear. There was a twisted set to Bear's mouth, a dark look in the free-lancer's eyes that sent a shiver down Spiraldi's spine. Red was casting a grim look at his watch again. Was the eleventh hour near? Was zero hour going to blow up in his face? Hell, if it did, then where could he go? There was no place to run or hide. No, he'd be caught in a cross fire hurricane of lead and screaming bloody death.