Dead Easy

by Don Pendleton

  Annotation

  TERROR AT DAWN.

  A high-speed train races across the Italian countryside on the overnight run from Rome to Vienna.

  Suddenly a powerful explosion rips through the predawn darkness, buckling coaches and derailing the express.

  The toll: sixty dead.

  It's the beginning of a string of events that weaves a web of intrigue and terror… a string manipulated by a KGB-Mafia connection determined to shatter America's economic powerbase.

  * * *

  Don Pendleton's

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  * * *

  Don Pendleton's

  Mack Bolan

  Dead Easy

  "I'll be the judge, I'll be the jury," said cunning old Fury. "I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."

  Lewis Carroll

  It is not for me to judge; I am the Executioner. But sometimes, in the dark places of the world, a situation arises where judgment and execution are no more than two faces of the same coin. At such times I do not pause to ask questions. I act.

  Mack Bolan

  To the memory of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who was assassinated in Stockholm, February, 1986.

  Special thanks and acknowledgement to Peter Leslie Snr.

  OCR Mysuli: denlib@tut.by

  Chapter One

  The first shot from the Winchester repeater gouged chips of stone from the cornice only moments after the big stranger appeared through a trapdoor leading to the roof. Pigeons flapped angrily into the dawn sky as the sharp crack of the rifle echoed across the deserted piazza.

  The stranger was dressed in close-fitting black, and there was a 9 mm Beretta 93-R automatic holstered in a shoulder rig beneath his left arm. He ducked behind one of the white marble statues that dominated the cornice.

  The sniper fired again. Aristotle, second in the line of ten sculpted figures, and with a hand raised to compel attention, lost an index finger. Hidden by the folds of the Greek sage's robe, the stranger checked his face for blood where marble chips had stung his cheek. He unleathered the silenced autoloader now, and scanned the buildings on the far side of the square.

  The third shot ricocheted off the tiles of the shallow roof. And gave the gunner away. Diagonally across the piazza an ancient archway, flanked by two pyramid towers, led to the winding streets of the old town. It was from the top of one of these towers, above Perugia's massive ramparts, that the gunman was shooting.

  The man in black took in his surroundings. He was three stories above the street, perched on the roof of a rectangular Renaissance palace. He realized that he could ill afford to let the rifleman pin him down. The stranger hoped the sniper would not get lucky with his fourth shot. But mere wishing, the black-clad man knew, would not help him if he stayed where he was any longer. The sky was lightening. And time was running out.

  The terrorist he had chased up onto the roof had vanished — either escaping while the stranger was tied down by the unseen rifleman or working his way around the central stack to rake him with gunfire.

  From the roof to the tower, he estimated, was about 250 yards — which put the sharpshooter way out of range of the 93-R autoloader. Between him and the trapdoor stretched twenty-five feet of empty asphalt, sitting-duck territory for a guy with a high-powered rifle firing at less than half its effective range.

  There was a possible escape route immediately behind him, where the cornice turned at right angles to cover the building's main facade, and again there was open ground to be crossed — no more than eight or nine feet, but still a death trap if the marksman was as good as his weapon.

  The stranger knew that the Winchester carried its 200-grain slugs in a tubular magazine that could empty at a rate of fifteen rounds per minute. He decided to offer himself as a tempting target until the remainder of that magazine was exhausted, then cross the danger space while the killer reloaded.

  The man in black exploded into motion and began to sprint, ducking, weaving, varying his pace and his attitude until he reached the eighth statue. He hid behind it for a moment and then, as if deciding that he couldn't make the far side, turned and dodged back. He plunged to the asphalt below the figure of Aristotle as the fifteenth bullet struck the cornice and screeched off into space. His gamble had paid off.

  Now, hastily but surely, he crawled back to the corner of the building.

  For an instant — the moment of maximum danger — he knelt upright on the coping, a perfect target in silhouette. Then, grasping the stonework, he lowered himself into the void beyond.

  The first round from the new magazine cracked out as his head sank below the coping and he saw the last marble figure with its hand lifted in valedictory salute. The slug hit so close to his own hand that he felt the wind of its passage, and a sliver of stone gashed his thumb.

  He hung at the full stretch of his arms, supported by four fingers of each hand. He looked over his shoulder. Sixty feet below, a small Fiat sedan nosed around the corner of the palazzo, passed the wide steps leading to the entrance and headed for the arch. Otherwise the square was still empty.

  The stranger altered his position, inching away from the corner hand over hand. Two hundred-odd pounds of solid muscle dragged at his locked fingers and crucified the tendons of his shoulders. His breath hissed through clenched teeth.

  The muscle was itself locked into a husky frame measuring slightly more than six feet. This, plus the length of his arms, enabled him — he had gambled on this, too — to touch the apex of a protruding triangular window frame in the palazzo's upper story.

  He dragged in a lungful of air, lowered his heels gingerly to the sloping stonework and released his grip on the coping above.

  He was standing facing the seventeenth century wall with his weight evenly supported on both legs. Now came the difficult part. One side of the frame or the other, he had to make the base of the triangle. If he attempted to do so while upright he would surely slip and fall. But if he bent or crouched, to get a hand down to the level of his feet, he would risk pushing himself a sufficient distance from the wall for his center of gravity to lie outside the edge of the frame; with nothing to hold on to, he would drop backward into space.

  With infinite care, flattening himself against the facade as much as he could, he swiveled one leg, splayed out the knee and slowly began to bend it.

  At the same time he tilted sideways from the waist with an outstretched hand arcing down toward the slanting stone. Muscles all over his body were on fire by the time his fingers touched the stone and he could transfer his weight to that hand. Now he folded the knee beneath him and slid until he was lying full length along the opposite slope. He released his breath in a long sigh of relief.

  The exhalation translated itself from chest to hip and his weight shifted. A fragment of weathered sandstone crumbled away from the edge of the frame. His body
toppled outward and he fell.

  Only a desperate two-fisted grab saved him from a death plunge to the street. The full weight of his body jerking suddenly as his outstretched arms jolted him so savagely that his teeth rattled in his head. He gasped, once more extended with only the strength of his fingers between him and oblivion. And this time there was no stonework beneath his feet.

  With hands now bleeding and raw, he lowered himself down the last few feet of the slope until his toes touched the top of a column. Finally, he rested.

  And at that moment he heard movement above him… looked up… and saw the terrorist he was hunting lean over the coping with a 9 mm Uzi machine pistol in his hand.

  The stranger fisted the Beretta from its shoulder rig once more and triggered a 3-shot burst in a single fluid movement before his enemy could fire.

  The face above him — swarthy skin, hook nose, black mustache — vanished in a cloud of blood, brains and bone fragments. The Uzi fell into the street. The terrorist's body slumped over the coping with arms trailing, slid slowly beyond it and then dropped to the cobbled sidewalk of the Corso Garibaldi.

  By the time the thump of the impact reached him, the man in black was sliding down the Corinthian pillar to a wide sill outside the double windows.

  He knocked out one of the square glass panes with the butt of his Beretta, reached in to unfasten the latch and stepped into the room beyond. It looked like a schoolroom, with maps on the wall, a dais, a chalkboard and a semicircle of tiered desks.

  From a pouch clipped to the belt at his waist, the stranger took a wadded nylon packet, which shook out to become an ultralightweight, unlined windbreaker. Thrusting his arms into the sleeves, he zippered the front to hide the reholstered automatic, left the room and took the wide mosaic stairway down to the entrance hall.

  The sextuple doors already stood open. On the steps outside, a man in dark blue uniform lounged, smoking a cigarette. "You're early, sir," he remarked in surprise. "Classes don't start until eight, you know."

  "Classes?" The stranger also looked surprised.

  And then it dawned on him. Gold lettering cut into the marble architrave above the pillared doorway spelled out the words:

  Università per Stranièri.

  University for foreigners… or strangers.

  Of course, the big man in black thought. This was Perugia, capital of the province of Umbria, and the Palazzo Gallenga was famed worldwide as a center for students of all nations taking postgraduate courses on Italian history, culture and language.

  That figured: it was the abduction of a student that had brought him here in the first place. And it was the protection of the ancient Greek educators lined up along the cornice above that had saved his life!

  "I guess I already learned my lesson for today," he told the uniformed janitor. "And who knows, maybe I taught one too…"

  He walked on down the flight of steps. Boys and girls with bikes or mopeds and on foot were now converging on the piazza. He turned along the side of the building away from the arch, skirted a chattering crowd gathered around the body on the sidewalk and strode unhurriedly down the grade to the parking lot where he had left his rented car.

  Chapter Two

  It started with a train wreck more than two hundred miles to the north.

  The first headlines reported forty-one dead, but the chief of carabinieri — Italian police — directing the salvage operations told the tall American with ice-blue eyes that the final count could be much higher. One of the buckled sleeping cars at the front of the train had been reserved for a party of foreign students on their way from Perugia to Vienna. "A block booking," the commendatore — police chief — said. "We have no idea how many boarded the train."

  "Surely you know how many sleeping berths there were in the car?"

  "Naturally. Still, it would certainly have been overcrowded. Lying in the corridor, resting on backpacks, even sleeping two to a bunk." A Latin shrug. "You know the young people today, signore."

  "So I guess there'll be no record of the number of persons passing the barrier at Bologna with tickets for this train. Or of those who joined it farther south, at Perugia."

  "That is correct, signore."

  Light fog rolling up from the Lombardy plain had shrouded the valley when the disaster occurred. The first explosion was small, and although the locomotive shuddered at the concussion, the engineer assumed it was a signal torpedo placed between the rails to warn him that visibility ahead was too poor for him to read the signals.

  After viewing the wreck, the officer told the foreigner, the police figured that a second charge, much larger and expertly placed, detonated between the rear of the engine and the baggage car that preceded the passenger coaches.

  The train was traveling at more than one hundred mph when the blasts were triggered. The locomotive and seven of the sixteen cars were blown off the rails. The baggage car disintegrated, and the first three of the wrecked sleepers folded into less than a quarter of their original length.

  "You see what I mean," the policeman said. He gestured toward the blackened and still smoking debris littering the tracks. A wrecker on the southbound line was winching up a mass of twisted steel from the remains of the first sleeper, but there was still a chaos of metal, cloth and splintered wood beneath. Men from one of the salvage crews were operating cutting torches around the impacted panels of a compartment overlaid by the second mangled sleeper.

  The tall American watched two attendants in white coats carry something heavy wrapped in a sheet toward the rows of plastic body bags laid out along the riverbank. Moisture seeping through from the contents darkened the heavy curve of the sheet at the lowest part of the load.

  "You guys are sure it was a terrorist attack?" the American asked.

  A decisive nod of the head. "Very certain. There is a hole big enough to hide a bus underneath all that. Besides, the bastards responsible have already phoned headquarters to boast about it." The officer glanced at the capsized locomotive. Diesel fumes from its ruptured fuel tanks tainted the mountain air, which was already sour with the stench of death and burning. "And why here of all places…?"

  He stared helplessly around him. Early-autumn sunshine had driven away the mist in the six hours since the Rome-Vienna streamliner had been dynamited. The valley, twisting through the eastern foothills of the Dolomites, ran between Venzone and Carnia, below the long grade that rose past Malborghetto to the Austrian frontier. The town of Udine lay twenty miles downstream.

  The place was more than two thousand feet above sea level, but thin skeletons of vines still clung to the stony terraces beside the tracks. On the far side of the Tagliamento River, the gray slate roofs of a village showed among the trees at the edge of a chestnut forest.

  "Who did you say is claiming responsibility for this attack?" the American inquired.

  "You have a particular interest? You are not, I think, a newspaperman, Signore…?"

  "Bolan. Mack Bolan."

  The policeman frowned. Mack Bolan? Surely… But yes! This was the category B foreigner on the latest printout from the Interpol computer: six feet three inches, two hundred pounds, dark hair, blue eyes and craggy, determined features; hold for questioning at the request of CIA, NSA, MI6, DSGE, Mossad, Garda and whomever. There could be no mistake: this was the man they called the Executioner!

  Another shrug. The American was not wanted for anything in Italy. The officer had received no specific orders; what with this damned terrorist bomb, he had quite enough on his plate already without running into any more — possibly international — complications.

  "I am looking for a girl named Suzanne Bozuffi, the daughter of a friend of mine. She was with the student group," Bolan said.

  "Bozuffi? An Italian girl?"

  "American. But her grandfather was born in Siena."

  "My home town! I am a Tuscan myself," the officer exclaimed. "Signore Bolan, what can I do to help you?"

  "Tell me where I can check out the names of the dea
d. And of course the survivors." Bolan had hitched a ride to the disaster site on the wildcat tanker puffing the wrecker crane up from Udine. He had no idea how the local authorities were handling the administrative side of the disaster.

  "The injured have been flown to Udine by helicopter," the policeman told him. "Some of the rescued continued their journey by bus. Others returned to the plain. Some may still be in the village." He nodded across the river. A TV camera crew, curious onlookers, peasants from the village and a handful of reporters were being held back on the far bank by a line of carabinieri. "You will find the details at the town hall."

  "And those still under the wreckage?"

  The police chief spread his hands. "Just those first three cars now. Certainly there will be more casualties there. But alive? I fear it is unlikely, signore."

  He shouted something to the wrecking crew. For a moment the roar of blowtorches, the rasp of saws and tapping of hammers ceased. The normal sounds of the valley were audible once more. The salvage boss standing on top of a section of coachwork that looked as if it had been squeezed in a giant fist shook his head. There were no more cries to be heard beneath the wreckage. The crews resumed the search for the dead.

  "You have of course the description of this Suzanne?" the commendatore asked.

  "Uh-huh," Bolan replied. "She has red hair, shoulder length. She was traveling with a white leather suitcase. Most of her companions carried the usual student gear: bedrolls, rucksacks, that kind of thing."

  "It is as well to know," the Italian said. He glanced at the lines of body bags. "Matters of identification can be very… delicate. It is perhaps a good thing the girl's father could not come himself. But one thing I can tell you: nobody of that description is among the dead so far recovered."

  "Okay," Bolan said. "I'll talk to the people at the town hall and come back later. Maybe she took a walk along the train."