"It's going to be the most audacious strike you've ever undertaken. But if this mission is a success, we'll have a man placed at the very top level of the KGB's operation, and you'll have Strakhov in your sights. And that's something everyone wants. That's why this one is being played tighter than ever before. So everyone goes only by what they need to know, and that includes the Man."
"Thanks for bringing me in on it, Hal. My flight leaves from Dulles in ninety minutes."
"Ninety minutes from now?" Brognola said, blinking. "You're going to have to make some damn good time to catch that flight."
"I will. How's Kurtzman?"
"He'll be sorry he missed you and, uh, well, I've taken enough of your time... with April. Good luck, Striker. Watch your back."
They exchanged another warm, firm handshake.
"You watch yours, buddy. There are snakes everywhere," Bolan said.
The Fed turned and disappeared back down the incline the way he had come, the sloping terrain and starry gloom swallowing him up. Bolan turned then and knelt for a brief moment next to the burial marker in the middle of the clearing. Reverently, he touched the chiseled stone script — the name and dates of birth and death, no more — with his fingertips, trying to recall the essence of what he had lost and the spirit that dwelt there. He wished with all the ache in his soul that he could touch the vibrant, alive woman of his memories just one more time.
"This one's for you, April," he whispered in an icy voice to the grave.
Then the big man was one with the night as he straightened abruptly and moved out, away from there.
The blackness devoured him.
* * *
When Hal entered the computer room, Aaron "Bear" Kurtzman swung his wheelchair away from the CRT terminal that was spewing green lines of letters and numbers across its display screen.
The walls of the windowless room were lined with consoles housing reels of magnetic tape that revolved in sporadic jabs, the processing units interlocking, reading in and assessing data from countless intel sources around the world.
The surface of the walls and ceiling were specially tiled to dissipate heat as controlled streams of air filtered into the subterranean room to maintain an exact degree of coolness. Uncarpeted floors ensured the absence of unwanted electrical impulses created by static electricity. The man in the wheelchair's protection against the chilled air was his own excess weight, layers of disheveled clothing and a white lab smock.
Kurtzman served as the link between Brognola and the operators running Stony Man Farm's computers. The irascible "Bear" had recovered both mentally and physically from wounds suffered during the KGB-sponsored commando attack on the Farm that had cost the life of April Rose and several members of the security staff; he had fully reconciled himself to the disheartening reality of being wheelchair-bound for life.
The moment Hal dropped into a swivel chair and dug for one of his ever-present stogies, Kurtzman read the Fed's dark expression.
"Let me guess," Kurtzman opened with his usual gruff glint. "People magazine has just learned about what we're up to here and wants to do a story on Stony Man Farm with handsome Bear Kurtzman on the cover."
Hal fired his cigar. His expression stayed sober.
"Good try, guy, but even your wisecracks aren't going to lighten the load I'm carrying."
Kurtzman grew deadly serious. "What is it, Hal?"
"I just spoke with Striker."
Kurtzman frowned. "Where was he calling from?"
"It wasn't a call. He was here in person."
"Striker? Here?"
Brognola chuckled. "That's the first time I've seen you flustered, Bear, since... that night."
"Striker was here? Is that what you were doing on that walk to... visit April?"
Hal nodded. 'The Sarge set it up. He asked about you, Bear. You'll understand why he couldn't stay around."
"Uh-huh, but what the hell, Hal? I don't know much about this hot potato you've dropped in his lap except that it's real hot."
"That's all you want to know, believe me."
"I can live with spy-in-the-dark," the Bear groused, "but what was our man doing here? This is the hottest spot in the world for him."
"No, it isn't. I've just sent him into the hottest spot in the world and, dammit, I can't even tell you where."
"He didn't come by to turn down the mission then?"
Brognola took a long tug on his cigar and filled the air with smoke, watching for a moment as the grayish cloud eddied and was whisked efficiently out through the air ducts above the CRT terminal.
"I wish he had turned us down, Bear, and that's the truth."
"Why did he come then?"
"To say goodbye. To us. To April."
"Sounds like he doesn't plan on coming back. Jeez, Hal, is it that tough?"
Brognola rose from the swivel chair and walked toward a wall of computers, his back to Kurtzman as if not wanting the man in the wheelchair to witness what he felt inside, what he could not keep from showing.
"Damn me and damn this world we live in, Bear, but unless Mack Bolan can somehow pull one hell of a miracle together, I've just sent the Executioner to his death."
1
It was a place for death, thought Andrei Mikhalin. The car that he and his partner, Vladimir Gordeyev, sat in was parked well off the road, hidden he hoped, in a cluster of trees.
There was no moon. The darkness amid the trees was inky, impenetrable. A night breeze whined eerily through the branches overhead.
Gordeyev, seated alongside Mikhalin behind the steering wheel of the ancient Moskvitch, broke in on Andrei's thoughts as if telepathically reading them.
"Trees or no trees, we'll be like sitting ducks here if a patrol comes by and they're wearing night vision device goggles."
"It would be better if we did not have to meet the woman first," Mikhalin muttered in an attempt to change the subject. "This is not a woman's place. A woman will jinx us."
"Don't tell me about it," Gordeyev grunted agreement. "It was not my decision."
Mikhalin rechecked the action of the Uzi submachine gun he carried, held low against his lap, his eyes, like his companion's, ceaselessly, nervously, panning the pitchblack night beyond the sedan's windshield. The terrain was tabletop flat for miles in every direction, fertile farmland except for the distant twinkling lights of Moscow's southwestern suburbs.
The two men had been parked at this contact point, 150 meters off a secondary highway, for the past fifteen minutes, it being Gordeyev's custom to always arrive early for connections such as this one.
Especially such as this one.
It was the predawn hours of a weekday morning. There had been no sign of any traffic from either direction.
"It is true the woman is the only one who can positively identify the man we are to meet, this Bolan," Mikhalin groused. "That is but one more reason to worry."
"She should be here," Gordeyev said, nodding. "If the people bringing the American in are on schedule, he or they will be showing up any second now."
"Where can she be?" Mikhalin wondered aloud. "I don't like it."
"So you have told me more than once," Gordeyev snapped peevishly. "I will hear no more of it, Andrei. She will be here. Bolan will be here. We will escort them safely into Moscow, and our job will be done within the hour. Relax. This is not your first assignment for the underground, more like your twentieth, and yet you behave like a novice."
"I know something of this man, Mack Bolan," Mikhalin retorted. "We are in more danger than any of the times before, Vladimir, as is our entire cell, meeting him like this. They call him the Executioner. Did you know that? He is an avowed enemy of the KGB. If we are caught aiding him..."
"His fight is our fight, Andrei. It is true that every other time such as this we have been smuggling people out through this pipeline. Now we smuggle someone in. But we have been asked to help. If we care anything about a free Russia..."
"Yes, yes." The stock of the Uzi felt
slippery in Mikhalin's sweaty grasp. "Someday / would like to be smuggled out through this pipeline of ours, along with our Jewish friends. Thoughts of Lefortovo or the camps or, worse, the Serbsky Institute..."
Mikhalin broke off, willing himself to think of something else. The current regime was as ruthless and cruel in their treatment of dissidents as any since Stalin, and it could only be worse for he and Vladimir, two known members of an organized underground group.
There was hardly any organization whatsoever in what vestiges there were of an underground resistance movement in the Soviet Union. The group that smuggled Russian Jews to the west, financed by American Jews and the Israelis, had been high on the regime's Active Measures list since its existence had been discovered eighteen months before.
The worst that men such as Mikhalin and Gordeyev feared was the infamous Lefortovo Prison in central Moscow, scene of wholesale torture and execution of dissidents day in and day out. "Special causes," as Andrei knew he and his friend would most certainly be, were far more likely to end up among the horrors of the living dead at the Serbsky Research Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. Dissidents were known to be injected with combinations of drugs that induced schizophrenia, leading to mental and physical deterioration during which one had almost no resistance to brutal KGB interrogation before death.
Mikhalin sensed for the first time the increasing unease of the man who sat beside him.
Gordeyev also held a weapon, a Russian-made Tokarev pistol. He glanced at the luminous hands of his wrist watch.
'The woman is late. You're right."
"I would feel much safer if she had not once been a typist in the army," Mikhalin griped, struggling to keep the tension he felt from showing in his voice. "She could still be working for them..."
"Nonsense. She has proven herself to our cause too many times. She served in Kabul, yes, and what she saw there sickened her. And the way they hounded her family until we got them out... no, Katrina is one of us, Andrei. I fear for her safety at their hands."
"And our safety if she's caught and they go to work interrogating her," Mikhalin added. "No one can stand up to the things they do with electricity. Was she not, er, emotionally involved with this man, Bolan, when they met during a mission that took him to Afghanistan? Were they not lovers?"
Andrei was suddenly conscious of something cold pressing against the side of his neck just below his right ear through the open side window. He realized with a skip of his heartbeat that someone had advanced without detection from the darkness to his side of the car, and that the object jabbed against his neck was the muzzle of a weapon.
A woman's voice intoned very low and deadly, "That comes under the classification of private business, my nervous, talkative friend. None of your business, am I right?"
Gordeyev started behind the steering wheel, as surprised by the voice as was Mikhalin. He stopped his hand from tracking up the Tokarev when he discerned the vague features of the woman who had so soundlessly crept up on their vehicle.
For his part, Mikhalin stared straight ahead, his forehead beaded with perspiration despite the coolness of the Russian night. He gulped audibly.
"O-of course it is your private business, Citizen Mozzhechkov. I, that is, we, were just..."
The woman eased back on the pistol and holstered it in the belt strapped beneath the jacket she wore.
"You were running at the mouth, citizens, and you would be dead right now had I been a militiaman or KGB. And I do not care for people I barely know discussing my private life."
Mikhalin gulped loudly again. "I am truly sorry, Katrina."
Katrina Mozzhechkov, an attractive dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties, shifted her attention from the men in the car and looked up and down the highway. In the darkness she could see nothing.
"You have been at this work too long, Andrei," she said, not unkindly. "Your nerves are gone. This should be your last assignment for us."
Mikhalin said nothing to that.
"Why did you keep us waiting?" Gordeyev asked. "How long have you been out there?"
She spotted twin pinpricks of headlights rounding a curve half a kilometer to the south, a vehicle of indeterminate size or make from this distance, advancing at a moderate speed toward them.
"It doesn't matter," she snapped in a new tone of voice. "Here they come."
"Or here comes someone," Gordeyev muttered.
"Be ready."
"It has to be them," Mikhalin said. "The patrols would be coming from the city if they were covering this area at all, which they shouldn't be."
"It could be anyone," Gordeyev insisted.
The woman moved away from the car toward wild shrubbery, where she crouched low as the headlights drew nearer, her stomach muscles tensing. She was not sure if it was fear, anxiety or anticipation at seeing a man named Bolan again, and she decided in those fleeting moments, before the vehicle got close enough to identify, that it was most likely a combination of all three.
The memories of her last encounter with Bolan would remain vividly etched in her mind forever.
Bolan was that kind of a man.
It had been less than a year since they had last seen each other, since she had played a part in a Bolan-led lightning commando strike made by Afghanistan's freedom-fighting mujahedeen guerrillas against a Russian outpost not far from Kabul.
The Soviet army had been putting the finishing touches on a chemical warfare atrocity dubbed the Devil's Rain, which was intended to annihilate untold thousands of Afghan civilians fleeing through the Khyber Pass to Pakistan.
The fugitives had been trying to escape the scorched-earth policy undertaken by the occupying force as a means of securing a strategically important, backward nation that had the audacity not to willingly bow before the might of the USSR's invasion and takeover.
The Devil's Rain affair had been a violent, bloody campaign for Mack Bolan and for those who had fought alongside him.
During the course of that mission, Bolan and circumstances had fatefully conspired to turn Katrina Mozzhechkov's life upside down. She had been a troubled yet loyal member of the Soviet Union's headquarters office staff attached to the occupying force in Kabul. But once the American had fully opened her eyes to the atrocities being committed every day on the decent people of the rugged land her government had sent her to, she had become a disillusioned soul committed to doing everything she possibly could to aid Bolan's cause.
Bolan's cause for right became Katrina's cause.
It was, she felt, the cause of all who labored and fought for good and decency in a troubled world that seemed to offer no hope except for those who would light a candle in the darkness and fight.
She and Bolan had not been lovers during their short time together. In fact, Katrina had been pregnant with another man's child at the time. She and Bolan had parted ways shortly after the helicopter they had flown from Afghanistan had landed in one of the refugee camps just inside the Pakistan border.
They had not been lovers, no, and yet not a day had passed since then that Katrina did not think of the incredible American. Bolan haunted her dreams, though not in a romantic way.
The father of Katrina's child was dead.
Katrina thought about Bolan because he had changed her life and that of her child for the better; a debt she knew she would never be able to repay. And she thought often of Bolan because she had never met a man like him before or since. She sensed there were very few, if any, men like Mack Bolan.
And now he was coming back into the very heart of Russia to take on odds even greater than she had faced with him in Afghanistan.
Katrina was proud that she had been asked to risk her life to be a part of this, proud to contribute to what the Executioner was coming here to do, whatever that might be.
She watched the oncoming headlights eat up the distance as it moved closer to where she, Mikhalin and Gordeyev waited to guide Bolan to his next contact in the city.
Katrina drew her pistol and waited
, the night breeze playing with tangles of her dark hair.
Her heart hammered against her rib cage. Her throat felt dry, constricted. A tremor quivered through her insides, more instinct than rationality, and an instant later she realized what was wrong.
Those lights drawing down on them from the south were not the lights of a car. She could tell now for the first time. The lights were too high off the ground and far apart for any sort of private vehicle, and the engine sound, she realized the moment she heard it, was too deep-sounding and menacing to be a car.
A truck, moving at moderate though steady speed.
Then the concentrated glare of a searchlight stabbed the night in wide swinging arcs perhaps half a kilometer away.
A searchlight mounted on a truck cruising steadily along a secondary country highway at this time of night could mean only one thing, Katrina knew.
It would be a truck full of soldiers on patrol! Army, militia, police, it made no difference.
She had eavesdropped on the conversation between Andrei and Vladimir for some minutes before making her presence known to them, and she quite agreed with Andrei regarding their fate if three dissidents were to be captured together like this.
Lefortovo. The Serbsky Institute. The camps — slave labor for the building of the Siberian pipeline. In any event, imprisonment and death.
She hurried from the shrubbery toward the Moskvitch.
"What shall we do?" Mikhalin whined. "We are trapped!"
"Katrina, could they have been tipped off that we were waiting here?" Gordeyev asked in a calmer voice but with clear concern as the three of them studied the approaching headlights and searchlight that were still two minutes away.
Mikhalin wiped sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his left arm, raising the Uzi in his right hand. "Perhaps they have already apprehended or killed the man, Bolan, and whoever brought him this far!"
Katrina fought to suppress the anxiety she felt. "A coincidence, this patrol. An act of God," she assured them.
Moscow Massacre Page 2
