a little bit. He repeated the process and pushed the nail through a bit more of the tape. He repeated the maneuver over and over throughout the day, stopping only when he heard one of his captors coming to check on him. By the time night fell, he’d worked through almost an inch of the tape, not quite enough to break his hands free. He kept at it and by the time he worked his hands free, the sky was beginning to lighten again in the east.
When Bolan regained feeling in his extremities, he tested the sliding door to see if it made noise. It did, but its squeaks weren’t any louder than the rest of the creaking emitted from the old boat as it rode the waves and he slid it open as quietly as possible. He stuck his head out the door and scanned the boat. To his right he saw the door to what must have been the forward stateroom. To his left he saw the steps leading up to the galley, and across from his stateroom he saw the open door to the bathroom.
He could hear loud snoring coming from the forward stateroom. Odds were that was where his lead captor slept, and the soldier wanted to keep him alive for questioning.
Softer snoring wafted from the salon area beyond the galley. Bolan crept up into the galley and looked over the counter to see one man sleeping on the lounge and another curled up on a smaller settee. The man on the lounge had been one of the men who had kicked him earlier; he didn’t recognize the man on the settee. He couldn’t see anyone out on the deck, but he heard movement on the flybridge above the cabin.
The Executioner knew he needed a weapon. He’d have to get one without alerting the man on the bridge or the man sleeping in the forward stateroom.
He looked around and saw a wooden block on the galley counter that held several knives. He pulled out a chef’s knife, but the blade was so dull that the handle would have made a better weapon. The second knife he pulled out was a boning knife with a razor-sharp blade.
Bolan crept into the salon. The man sleeping on the lounge stirred and Bolan was forced to quickly slit his throat. The man died silently. Knowing what was at stake, Bolan had dispatched the second man in similar fashion.
The Executioner grabbed the second man’s AK-74 and slung it over his shoulder, but kept his hand on the knife as he made his way to the ladder leading up to the flybridge. He crept up the ladder and peeked over the top. No one was at the helm, but the other man who had kicked him when he was first taken captive sat on a bench alongside the helm, looking toward land through a pair of binoculars. Bolan managed to get up on the flybridge and creep close to the helm before the man started to put down the binoculars.
Bolan rushed toward the man and before he could put down the binoculars and snatch his gun, the soldier plunged the knife blade into the side of the man’s chest, just below the armpit. The seven-inch blade severed the man’s main artery and he bled out before his heart beat five times.
A pool of the man’s blood covered the floor of the flybridge and drops followed the soldier down the ladder to the deck, where they mixed with the water that had splashed on deck during the night. Inside the salon, pools of blood covered the upholstery of the lounge and settee, dripping off and soaking into the carpet below. Bolan walked past the bodies and went to the master stateroom. He threw the door open and fired the AK into the ceiling above the bed. Shards of fiberglass rained down on the leader’s sleeping form.
The man lunged as Bolan had expected. What he didn’t expect was that he would have a Glock pistol in his hand. The scarred man swung the weapon around toward the soldier, but before he could get the muzzle pointed in Bolan’s direction, Bolan fired off several rounds into the man’s face. In a split second his scars vanished, along with the rest of his features. And any hope the Executioner had of interrogating the man disappeared with his face.
3
Monterey, California
“There’s no way in hell that Darrick’s crash was an accident,” Eddie Anderson told Matt Cooper, the sales rep for a Russian oil company. Anderson didn’t question why a gasoline salesman was asking him about his late brother—he’d told everyone he talked to that he thought that his brother had been murdered. Most people wrote it off as the petulant outbursts of a young man in the throes of grief. But grief and anger didn’t hamper his on-track performance; if anything, they enhanced it. Anderson won the race in Qatar by a huge margin, beating his teammate—the current champion, a hotheaded Spaniard named Daniel Asnorossa—by seven seconds.
Asnorossa earned his championship the previous year mostly because Anderson had crashed several times and had failed to finish three races while Asnorossa finished every race among the top five riders. Anderson won four races—three more than Asnorossa—and earned the rookie-of-the-year award. He’d been hired as Asnorossa’s backup rider, but this year everyone treated the upstart American like the team’s top rider.
Bolan missed Anderson’s victory. He hadn’t been able to get to the track before the entire MotoGP circus packed up and shipped off to the United States for the following weekend’s race at Laguna Seca. After searching his captors’ bodies, which turned up nothing but fake Qatar security force IDs, along with paddock passes for the Losail circuit, he’d ditched them in the Persian Gulf.
He hadn’t been able to steam into one of Doha’s heavily patrolled harbors in a blood-soaked boat registered to God knows who, especially with his light skin that immediately identified him as a Westerner. Qatarians didn’t trust foreigners, and he would have been sure to attract attention of the official variety. He waited until nightfall, then abandoned the boat and swam to a relatively deserted beach. In the meantime he avoided attention by doing what anyone aboard a sport fishing boat would do when out on the water—he fished. There was nothing else he could do because the Arabs had taken all of his electronic equipment, including his cell phone, along with all of his weapons and ID.
After hitting shore he made his way back to his hotel room, where he was finally able to contact Stony Man Farm on a secure line. By the time he’d contacted Kurtzman, it was too late to stop the plane carrying the Team Free Flow equipment, which had already been offloaded and was en route to the Mazda Raceway.
By the time Hal Brognola could organize a raid on the Laguna Seca paddock, the plutonium would almost certainly have been removed from the container. Bolan only hoped it hadn’t already been used to make a bomb.
While Stony Man’s top pilot, Jack Grimaldi, flew Bolan to the Monterey Peninsula Airport, Kurtzman sent Bolan new information regarding the Free Flow Racing organization. Apparently things weren’t going so well for the Malaysian scooter manufacturer. The costs of developing a full-sized motorcycle for the U.S. and European markets exceeded everyone’s expectations and Free Flow was in a state of chaos, with a revolving roster of top executives, none of whom seem to survive even a year within the organization.
The one person who seemed to float above the turmoil was Musa bin Osman, Free Flow’s vice president in charge of racing. That was in part because the racing organization was one of the few departments at Free Flow earning money, thanks to the generous sponsorship of a Saudi oil company. That was where things got interesting. The oil company was suspected of being a front for laundering money for several al Qaeda affiliates. The deeper Kurtzman dug, the more terrorist ties he discovered. Musa bin Osman had studied under the suspected mastermind behind the 2005 Bali bombings and many other terrorist attacks. He seemed to have close ties with Jemaah Islamiyah, the most active al Qaeda affiliate group in Malaysia.
Bolan knew that his Matt Cooper identity had likely been compromised, at least as far as the Team Free Flow organization was concerned, but it was still his quickest way to gain access to the racing paddock so he continued to play the role of a fuel sales rep for a Russian oil company. He had Barbara Price try to make an appointment to meet with Jameed Botros before he’d even landed at Monterey, but the earliest
