Renegade Agent

6

The dark-haired guy was trying to blink cigarette smoke out of his eyes and bring around the M-16 carbine at the same time. He had accomplished neither when the silenced 9mm slug tore through his throat.

The cigarette dropped from his lips as he went down, and blood geysered from the jagged wound to stain the grass on which he fell. Then, almost lazily on the clean twilight mountain air, smoke drifted from the same gory hole, as the guy's lungs rejected the inhalation that was his last living act.

Mack Bolan grabbed the guy, who had been dying for a smoke, by his heels and dragged him under the canopy of the lower branches of one of the stunted larches that dotted the steep slope, before melting into the shadows of the trees himself. The exertion cost him some pain from the tightly bandaged shoulder, but he needed time for surveillance before moving in. The encounter with the guard had been chance, but it did not mean the numbers were up yet. It could be some time before the guy was missed.

Right now time was not Mack Bolan's ally.

His chronometer, now set to Switzerland local time, read 2010; within a few minutes it would be full dark. He had left London less than five hours before, in a Lear-jet nominally registered to a British citizen, but flown by a crackerjack RAF pilot. At Cointrin Airport in Geneva a chopper was waiting to transport him to Sion on the Rhone River, capital of the Alpine canton of Valais. A Land Rover loaded with the equipment Colonel John Phoenix had requisitioned awaited him.

It was undoubtedly some of the most beautiful country in the world, with its crystal-clear mountain streams bisecting the rugged scarps of the towering peaks.

Driving west, Bolan passed through groves of larch trees and hornbeam; a marmot darted across the road. But the thought of the traitor Frank Edwards and the woman who was likely now his prisoner occupied Bolan and allowed him only the most superficial appreciation of the extraordinary terrain.

At Sierre he turned the Rover south, up the Anniviers Valley. He passed the power station at Vissoie, the tiny resort towns of Ayer and Zinal. Soon after that, about thirty miles after he left the Rhone Valley, the gravel road narrowed, and less than two miles further on a posted gate announced that it was a private access from that point on. Rigging for combat, Bolan went EVA.

Ten minutes of dog-trotting had brought him to his present position and to the guard who had just learned that like the pack said, smoking was hazardous to your health.

Due south Bolan could see the Matterhorn, marking the border with Italy, and off to the west the Dufourspitze, at 15,200 feet the highest peak in Switzerland. The glaciers that never melted streaked the sides of the rugged Pennine Alpine range.

The dusk that had already pervaded the steep-walled valley for hours began to rapidly purple now, but it would be a cloudless starry night. That suited Bolan's purpose perfectly.

From a pocket of his military web belt he removed a Litton Miniature Night Vision Pocket Scope, the compact NVD no bigger than the palm of his hand. Designated the M-841, the second-generation image intensifier used passive low light operation; that is, it amplified available light, no matter how dim, five hundred times, focusing it on a viewing screen. An automatic brightness control counteracted blooming, and the second-generation microchannel plate completely eliminated streaking of the image. From another pouch Bolan selected the objective lens, an eight-step zoom whose magnification ranged from seven-tenths of unity to 4It, at f-stops from 1.8 to 22. Screw mounted to the pocket scope, it formed a unit about five inches long, weighing under two pounds.

The chalet where Edwards had recently called his "black" CIA organizational meeting, and which he maintained as one of several permanent bases, sat about one hundred meters from and twenty above Bolan's surveillance position. The building rose three stories, each story encircled with an ornate balcony fashioned in a Bavarian style; the peaked roof was baroque with gingerbread trim, and topped by a weathercock. It could have been any one of the hundreds of small resorts that dotted this Alpine high country. Instead it was an operations center for a brilliantly twisted one-time U.S. agent now turned terrorist mercenary.

Alpine meadow surrounded the place out to the perimeter where Bolan had taken his position; a drive of crushed gravel curved up to the entrance a canopied parking apron like the entrance to a hotel, which is what the building had likely been at one time.

Bolan focused the NVD in that direction, clicked up to 2AX magnification, and picked out three 4WOULD rigs and a Toyota longbed pickup truck.

Bolan had made three other guards in addition to the dead man under the larch. Similarly armed with M-16's, they were walking the perimeter, and not paying a hell of a lot of attention to their work. That was going to turn out to be a deadly mistake.

These men did not project the alertness or polish of well-trained operatives. Bolan figured they were the terrorist gang-members on loan to Edwards for routine security.

Except the Executioner was about to break up the routine. Above the canopy fronting the chalet, light flashed as a door to the balcony opened and shut. Bolan zoomed the Litton to full 4It magnification, and picked out the man, standing with both hands on the railing, scanning the dark grounds. He was about forty, in wire-rimmed glasses and modishly long hair, and he wore a nylon windbreaker against the chill of the spring mountain air.

Among the data package that Stony Man Farm had telexed to London were five photographs, which Bolan had committed to his eidetic memory. The faces in the photos, of four men and one woman, were of American Intelligence agents who had severed their official relationship with their agency within the prior six months under any circumstances which could be considered unusual.

One of the faces belonged to the man on the balcony. His name was Corey James, and he had been with the CIA for fourteen years, including two when he was posted to Western European Section, then headed by one Frank Edwards. His file had been closed with the notation: "Voluntary retired, highest service rating." That would have to be replaced by: "Turncoat." Bolan guessed that if a man of James's caliber were on-site, it would be as chief of operations at the chalet. As such he would be able to tell Bolan quite a bit.

Whether he wished to or not.

Bolan came out of his crouch. It was time to go hard.

On Bolan's right wrist was what looked like a thick metallic bracelet with a one-inch length of wooden dowling attached. Bolan nestled the dowel between the second and third fingers of his right hand and pulled, and the head end of a two-and-a-half-foot length of spring-loaded piano wire unreeled from inside the bracelet, like the starter on a lawn mower. But it was immediately and painfully apparent to Bolan that there was no way the torn shoulder muscle would allow him to raise his left arm high enough to put the garrote to deadly use. It was not a situation he was pleased with, but the reminder of his limitation was useful. Mack Bolan was no wild-ass warrior with a knife between his teeth and a blazing gun in each hand, charging heedlessly into a hail of lead. He was realistically aware of his mortality and his capabilities. Right now those capabilities were limited in a way he wasn't used to. But that would only change his methods, not his effectiveness as long as he kept in mind the restriction the wound was imposing.

Bolan let the spring tension recoil, and reached for the sheath on his left hip.

The second guard only managed to get out half of a gurgling cry as the Fairbairon-Sykes commando stiletto sliced through the flesh of his neck to sever the jugular vein, but one of his buddies was near enough to hear it. The body-cock called out, "Ahmed," softly, and followed it with a guttural string of Arabic ending in a questioning intonation. As Bolan let the deadweight of Ahmed drop to the ground, the shape of the other guard came into view.

The guy must have spotted Bolan at the same time.

He tried to bring up his M-16 while twisting to make himself a smaller target, and the mistake of thinking defense when he should have been thinking offense gave Bolan the millisecond he needed. The guard was still lining out his shot when a 9mm skullbuster cored into his temple and on through into the night, a spray of red and gray its wake.

Ninety seconds later, darkness covered the blitzer's path as he eased below the canopy fronting the chalet. Behind him, the same darkness hid the body of the fourth guard, heavier by the weight of three silenced 9mm slugs.

Because neither the time frame nor the chalet's physical layout allowed for a full-cover preliminary softprobe, the night-fighter had rigged up for every contingency up to an all-out firefight. His guess was that there were fewer than four bodycocks inside, the relief crew for the men now littering the lawn, plus Corey James and his technical support people. But if the chalet's forces went beyond that, Bolan was ready.

He wore the skintight blacksuit that had been specially designed of a rip-stop elasticized material by the same NASA scientists who outfitted the astronauts. The suit served another purpose beyond its obvious value as camouflage: it gave its wearer a significant psychological edge. The sight of the big black apparition, weapons dangling from shoulder and hip, had startled more than one enemy into momentary hesitation which abruptly ended along with the enemy's life.

A military canvas web belt hugged the waist of the outfit, the hook-and-eye flat bronze buckle snapping fast. The Fairbairon knife rode the left hip, and the Executioner's newest side arm rode the right.

Stony Man armorer Konzaki had introduced Bolan to the recently developed Beretta Model 93R. The production model was a true machine pistol, which meant it could be fired on full automatic with one hand. For improved accuracy and control, however, it was fitted with a fold-down front handle and an elongated trigger guard; the fingers of the left hand wrapped around the handle, and the guard accommodated the thumb. The side-by-side magazine held fifteen steel-jacketed 9mm cartridges; a sixteenth nestled in the chamber.

Konzaki had modified to Bolan's specifications the 93Rather he was now carrying. With the installation of a suppressor and specially machined springs designed to cycle subsonic cartridges, the Beretta was effectively silenced. A selector switch offered the options of single-shot fire or three-round bursts, at a reduced cyclic rate of 110 rounds per minute. The result was extraordinary auto-fire accuracy, particularly in the hands of a marksman like Mack Bolan. For gun-leather, Konzaki had customized an oversized one-piece holster with a plasticized friction-reduction lining that reduced to almost zero the possibility of hang-up by the gun's sights or hammer.

Bolan's submachine gun was the new Israeli Uzi. Konzaki had fitted it with a flash-hider, and it was throated to feed 9min Parabellum hollow-points. The armorer had also welded two 32-cartridge magazines together at a right angle, so that when Bolan inserted one into the magazine well of the pistol grip, the other extended forward parallel to the barrel. Not only did this facilitate speed-loading, but the extra front-end weight helped compensate against barrel-climb during auto-fire. The Uzi's change lever was all the way forward in the A (auto) position.

In addition to the web belt's pouches, Bolan wore a military hip pack with a capacity of nearly a half cubic foot. He would have preferred the size and comfort of a backpack, but there was no point in additionally straining his torn shoulder.

Bolan used the Litton M-841 for a quick-scan of his backtrack, saw no sign that there had been more than the four guards. He stowed the NVD and moved on to the chalet's door.

From there on in, the play would have to be by the ear.

Beyond the front doors, the first floor was still laid out like the hotel lobby it had once been. Several chairs and two sofas were arranged before a fireplace, and the front desk was off to one side.

Beyond the desk was a staircase.

A swarthy guy in fatigues with no insignia was sitting in one of the chairs, facing the doors. There was an M-16 in his lap, and on top of it a girlie magazine opened to the centerfold. The guy's head was back, and his eyes were closed.

Through the crack where the doors met, Bolan could see a thrown deadbolt. He set the silenced Beretta on single-shot and put a slug into the bolt. The impact didn't make much noise, but it was enough to wake the door guard. He shook sleep out of his eyes, threw the magazine across to the sofa, and got cautiously up, the auto-carbine at port arms. Bolan saw he was also wearing a military .45 automatic pistol in a holster. When he was close enough to see the busted lock, Bolan came through the door.

Then the guy was pinned hard against the wall, the M-16 immobilized by the press of Bolan's body, a handful of his blouse twisted into Bolan's hard fist, which pressed into his chest. The wall was covered with flowered paper, beginning to fade.

Bolan let the guy have a very close look at the end of the Beretta's suppressor. "Where's Corey James?" The guy opened his mouth to gasp in air, but it was a lousy attempt at a stall. Bolan anticipated the move before the guy had started it, letting go of the pinned M-16 and clawing for the .45 on his hip. The Beretta made a soft pffutt and spit a 9mm whizzer into the guy's face. Stuff came out of the back of his head and dripped down over the faded flowers.

Bolan's sensitive hearing picked up footsteps on the staircase. The first guy followed instinct and tried to get in the opening shot, and took a three-round burst from navel to neck for his trouble. The second guy followed common sense, and faced the blacksuited nightfighter with both hands over his head.

Bolan used the barrel of the Beretta to motion the guard down the rest of the stairs, then back against the wall next to the fireplace. He was a big-boned black man, and the gaze he gave Bolan was sullen. But then he saw the nearly headless corpse sprawled on the other side of the room, and his eyes widened in fear.

"James," Bolan said, crossing to him, the Beretta big in his fist. He stopped three feet from the black man, did not touch him. "Where is he?"

The black pointed with his chin.

"Downstairs. Only one door there." He spoke with a thick West Indian accent. "You gonna kill me too?"

"You're already dead, guy," Bolan said. He laid the suppressor against the black's temple, his hand moving fast as thought, and the guy went down like a sledge-hammered cow. Blood glistened along his hairline. No sound came from the chalet's bowels.

Bolan did not like leaving the bodies there in the open, even for a few minutes. But there was greater risk in not reconning. He did not want his upcoming chat with Corey James to be interrupted.

The second and third floors were occupied by rooms bisected by a single long corridor. Light shone under the door of one on the second floor, but when Bolan kicked into it he found it empty, although it was clearly someone's quarters. The name on an old envelope identified the someone as Corey James.

If the lobby and the upper floors had been left as they were when the place was a hotel, the basement had undergone some remodelling, for sure. Bolan cat-footed down carpeted stairs. At the bottom there was a short entryway passage that jogged hard right after a few steps. At its corner a video camera on a motor mount was sweeping the entryway.

Bolan put a slug into the lens.

Beyond the corner the featureless hallway ended ten feet farther on in a windowless door. The door swung open and an M-16-armed gunman came charging out.

He charged into a three-round swarm of 9mm stingers that stopped him cold. Behind the fresh corpse the door started to swing shut. Bolan's right shoulder hit it before the motion could be completed, and the door swung wide again. Someone grunted with pain and crashed into something.

Corey James turned and looked at the black-clad intruder without expression. Over shirtsleeves he wore an automatic in a shoulder holster, but he made no move toward it.

The efforts toward maintaining the chalet's original Old World elegance had been foregone down here in favor of modern expediency. The basement consisted of a single large windowless room, and it was obviously the nerve center of Edwards's Alpine base. One wall was lined with a control panel fronted by swivel chairs. There were keyboard terminals, video display tubes, two computer-tape transports, several radio transceivers and a couple of telephones.

And it looked like the guy was still in the process of outfitting the place. Along the adjacent wall were stacked a couple dozen crates of various sizes, most of them stenciled, "Fragile-Electronic Components-Avoid Extreme Heat or Cold." Corey James was standing at the console, next to a man who was seated in one of the swivel chairs.

Another technician lay behind the door that Bolan had slammed into him; a goulash of electronic parts was scattered on the floor around him. The guy was trying to shake off his daze, but he didn't look hurt.

Bolan wished he could say the same. The body blow he had taken coming in, even though he had tried to absorb it on his good side, had cost him more than pain. He thought he had felt the traumatized muscle tear a bit, and there was a warm wetness under the dressing on the left side of his chest. As he straightened, a sharp pinch of hurt darted across it.

The traitorous ex-CIA agent across the room coolly regarding him would have been enough to arouse Bolan's righteous anger. The wound enhanced it.

"They're dead, James," he snapped. "Your amateur bodyguards weren't good enough. You ought to do something about security."

James nodded toward the crates. "You were a week early."

"Too bad." Bolan holstered the Beretta; the necessity for silence was past. He held the Uzi by the pistol grip, letting the lanyard support its weight.

Yeah, one more week. One week, and this base would have been in full operation, with capacity as a safe house, communications center, data-retrieval facility. Not even a headquarters, but only one of many bases just like it, the foundation of a scheme unlike any Bolan had encountered in all the days of the New Terrorist Wars. Bolan had long been aware that most of the terrorist organizations were loosely linked in an informal network. But for the most part the ideological hate-mongers were poorly trained at best, underfinanced and unarmed, and too suspicious and jealous to fully trust their so-called allies.

But Frank Edwards, and the people like Corey James to whom he had chosen to delegate responsibility, were experts, trained in the black arts by the finest intelligence outfits on the globe, the training backed by years of experience. Their contacts in the shadow world of international intrigue were vast, and by dint of their one-time official sanction, they had access to the most advanced technology in the free world. Not only that, but Edwards apparently had the money to pay for it. But that was no surprise; illicit arms smuggling could be immensely profitable, with terrorists desperate for firepower willing to pay markups of several hundred percent. As a business, it was hard to beat. If you didn't mind trading in death.

Now Edwards, along with other renegade agents of his ilk, were consolidating their resources to form a private intelligence agency. International in scope, wide-reaching in capacity, staffed by experienced men who still retained entree into most corners of the worldwide underground, it would rival the official bureaus of many free nations. And it would service those sworn to turn free nations into slave states. Mack Bolan was determined to see that would not happen. He owed it to the world and to one brave woman named Toby Ranger.

"Where's Edwards?" Bolan asked, his voice steel cold.

"I don't know," James said calmly.

The guy knew all the tricks, and he tried one now. With his right hand he adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, let the hand linger there. He held out his left, gestured with it vacantly, a protestation of innocence and a polished piece of misdirection of attention.

The hand at the glasses shot across the twelve inches that separated it from the shoulder holster, got fingers around gun butt. It was a good trick, sure. But Bolan had seen it before. The Uzi stuttered a four-shot burst into the smart guy's outstretched left hand.

The report was an eardrum-straining crack in the enclosed room, and it brought a ragged croak of pain from Corey James. The hollow-point 9mm fleshshredders had left nothing at the end of his left arm but a mangled stump of bone and gore.

The dazed technician on the floor turned deathly pale and lurched onto his hands and knees, whatever he'd had for supper spewing out of his mouth and nostrils. As Bolan had figured, before putting in with the turncoat network, the guy had been a desk jockey; the "wet" side of intelligence work was new to him. The other technician was a little cooler.

He shucked his lab coat and went to James.

The ex-agent was ghostly white himself, halfway into shock already. He sunk into one of the swivel chairs. The technician tore a long strip from his coat, wrapped the rest around the shreds of blood-soaked flesh that had been James's hand.

With the reserved strip he began to fashion a tourniquet around James's forearm. There was fear in the glance he gave the Uzi when Bolan poked James with its snout, but he continued his work.

"Where is Frank Edwards?" Bolan said, each word deliberate as a death knell.

The guy looked up at him, and Bolan could read the knowledge in his eyes. James was seeing a vision of his own death, and he knew that vision was a heartbeat from becoming reality.

"I'm not sure," James muttered, teeth clenched against the pain.

Bolan prodded him with the submachine gun.

"When you stop talking, you stop living."

"Edwards left yesterday evening. A while back, he took an apartment in Rome, rigged it up as a safehouse, a place where he could go to ground if he had to. He'd done some work for the Red Brigades — the Italian terrorist group — and some of their people housekeep, in exchange for using the place. That's where Frank said he was going." James's face was drawn with pain. "I don't know if he was leveling with me, and if he was, why he was going there. My guess is he was just trying to leave a hard-to-follow trail. He might be there. He might not. But that's all I can tell you." James's longish hair was damp with the sweat of hurt and fear. "That's the truth. Your killing me won't make it less true."

"What about the woman?"

"Ranger? She left with him."

"Was she all right?"

"Sure. Why wouldn't she...." Faint light cut the pain in James's eyes. He tried for a smile that came out a grimace instead. "So she was one of yours. Frank had an idea about that. Maybe that's why he headed for Rome. Those Red Brigades people specialize in kidnapping for ransom. They know a little about coercion."

"Where is the Rome place?" James's skin was the color of chalk, and his eyes were starting to glaze. Bolan jabbed the barrel of the Uzi into his chest, hard enough to hurt.

"Okay, okay." James's voice was weak and reedy, but he managed to mutter an address. He just got it out before his chin fell forward to his chest, and his eyes turned glassy.

"Get him away from there," Bolan told the technicians. The guy on the floor got shakily to his feet. The front of his lab coat was stained with his own vomit.

It took only seconds for Bolan to dig the goop from the hip pack, mold it to the console in a few strategic spots, and set sixty-second fuses. The two technicians recognized plastique, all right; Bolan had no trouble getting them to hoist James and drag him up the stairs and out of the chalet.

There were five-gallon jerricans of gasoline strapped to the backs of each of the 4WOULD rigs parked out front, which made things easier. Bolan uncapped them, splashed their contents over the inside of the three vehicles as well as the cab of the Toyota pickup.

From the bowels of the chalet there was a dull boom.

By the time Bolan had finished emptying the gas cans, he could see flames licking up the stairway into the chalet's lobby.

James and the two technicians backed away down the slope. But Bolan had lost interest in them.

He selected an HE grenade from a belt pouch, pulled the pin, and rolled it into the back of the nearest 4WOULD, then dogtrotted down the slope.

Behind him the grenade's explosion shattered the night.

A moment later the vehicles gas tanks began to blow, like a string of gigantic firecrackers.

Bolan paused at the tree-line perimeter. A huge ball of gasoline-fed fire was eating into the canopy, moving to meet the flame now consuming the chalet's first floor. Windows began to implode.

As Bolan watched, the canopy creaked and collapsed, tearing framing from the building's facade. James and the technicians stood halfway down the slope, looking small and helpless in the fire's hellish glow.

One small part of Frank Edwards's "black" CIA was destroyed, but the guy himself was still at large, somewhere.

And somewhere a woman's life hung by a thread a thread tied to that same Frank Edwards.

It had been on the heartbeat. Now it was in the hands of fate.