his hand as the bolt slid home and chambered a round.
Bolan climbed into the pickup and slammed the door closed. He stood on the gas and cranked the wheel hard, turning the vehicle in a tight circle and leaving rubber skid marks across the pavement. As he straightened the nose of the European pickup back toward the road, his front tire rolled over the body of the driver he’d killed with the 9 mm pistol.
The steering wheel shuddered in his grip as first his front and then his rear tires rolled over the body. Without a backward glance, Bolan sped away into the night.
JACK GRIMALDI had the sleek Saber jet running flat-out over the Atlantic Ocean.
In the back of the private, executive-class plane Mack Bolan had dressed his wounds, then cleaned up and changed clothes. Immediately upon takeoff he’d dumped the contents of the flash drive he’d purchased from Vasili into an Epsilon Protocol Encryption laptop provided to him by Stony Man Farm’s mission controller, Barbara Price.
The powerful little computer had downloaded, security checked, encrypted and sent the information contents of the flash drive to Stony Man’s mainframes via Keyhole satellite. Now, an hour later, Bolan had just popped the top on a cold beer to wash down a fistful of ibuprofen tablets when the call came in.
“It’s Barb at the Farm,” Grimaldi called through the open cockpit door. “There’s been an update from that Croatian information you passed on.”
Bolan placed his beer on a nearby table after swallowing his antiinflammatory pills, then picked up the secure satellite phone lying next to him.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Striker,” Barbara Price said. “I’ve already given Jack new coordinates. We learned something urgent from that file you gave us. Something new has come up.”
“When doesn’t it?”
He felt the plane shift course as Jack Grimaldi cut the Saber jet onto new coordinates.
And so it began.
CHAPTER ONE
Mack Bolan jumped from the jet at forty-five thousand feet, opened the canopy high and sailed miles in from out over international waters. He wore a thermal suit and used supplemental oxygen to help him withstand the rigors of high altitude.
Over time the Executioner had come to excel in such airborne insertion operations. The nature of the deployment was such that stealth was an even higher priority than the lightning-quick speed of heliborne and fast-boat delivery methods. Often it was by high altitude low opening—HALO—jumps. He’d leave the jump plane at up to thirty thousand feet then free fall down to a height of fifteen hundred to a thousand feet, waiting until the last possible minute to deploy for short exposure over the target.
In the HALO jumps, as in this instance, Bolan’s insertion relied not only on the extreme altitude of the plane, but on great, even vast topographical distance, as well.
THE COUNTRY WAS an armed camp. North Korea contained a civilian population motivated and conditioned to a degree of loyalty not seen since the Spartans. To help ensure Mack Bolan’s probability in remaining uncompromised by a chance encounter, Stony Man Farm, under mission controller Barbara Price’s direction, had picked a landing zone in a remote section of very rugged terrain in the mountains above the objective. After being outfitted at a Joint Special Operations Command forward operating base in Djibouti on the way in, Bolan was now dressed in complete tree/cliff landing gear: padded suit, football-style helmet with full face mask, reinforced ankle guards. The Farm’s planning called on him to make a tree landing in an isolated valley, rappel from the canopy, then make his way down a steep crevice and into the Yellow River tributary.
He carried nearly two hundred pounds of mission-essential equipment, weaponry and survival gear for the operation. The mission plan called for infiltration into the site by means of the river, so he jumped with a Draeger Rebreather scuba system. Such an ops plan was horribly “Hollywood” in execution as such a plethora of skills and independent stages greatly increased the operative’s exposure to the double threats of military SNAFUs, including the omnipresent threat of a mission-ending injury.
Given the choice, Bolan would have preferred walking in, cutting through the DMZ to the south by means of routes already secured and verified by Special Forces teams assigned full-time to covert LRRP/SU ops in the no-man’s land between the north and south of the Asian peninsula.
But as happened so often when Stony Man Farm and the Executioner were called into play, the operation depended on complete invisibility while at the same time remained hamstrung by timing. The train Bolan intended to intercept was going to be on target on time, and only for that time. The Oval Office wanted a surgical strike with no collateral damage.
The land was arrayed below the plummeting commando in an uneven checkerboard of blacks and grays. He flared his canopy hard at the last moment, attempting to curtail his momentum as the ground rushed up. He heard then felt his rucksack crash into the copse of trees, then two heartbeats later his feet, tightly clamped together, broke through the mesh of interwoven branches at the top of the canopy. He kept his legs pressed together as gravity yanked him down through branches and tree trunks. He took several bone-jarring impacts before his parachute caught and his neck whip-lashed hard into the special support collars leaving him sore but unharmed.
Taking stock of his surroundings, he looked down and saw he was about forty feet from the ground, caught halfway up a good-size evergreen. His chute seemed securely trapped above him, but he was too far out from the main trunk for the branches to have enough girth to support him.
Hitting his quick-release clip, Bolan let his rucksack fall, then pulled himself along the branches of the pine tree until he was on a more stable support. He disengaged the jump harness and secured his nylon ribbon of a rappel cord from a pocket in the lower leg of his padded suit.
He slipped the strong, flat cord through a D-ring carabiner positioned at his waist and kicked away from the tree, dropping to the ground in a smooth arc. On the forest floor he quickly removed his jumpsuit, helmet and supplemental oxygen along with the rest of his rappel harness. He made no effort to retrieve his chute and paid only cursory attention to camouflaging the gear he was leaving behind. If there was anyone close enough to stumble onto it in the dark, then the mission was probably blown in any case.
From his pack Bolan secured first his primary weapon, a Chinese model AKM with folding paratrooper stock, and a night-vision-goggle headset. Like a modern-day version of the childhood boogeyman, he hunted at night, could see in the dark and was armed with fearsome claws. Straining against the weight, Bolan slipped into the shoulder straps of his rucksack then took first a GPS reading before double-checking his position with a compass to verify his start point. Satisfied, he set off down the steep, narrow valley toward the dull gleam of the wide river below.
In many ways his cross-country navigation was almost more dangerous than the HAHO jump, or even than the potential difficulties he faced in his coming swim. Every model of night-vision device available offered depth perception difficulties. The scree-covered terrain was rocky and steep, making his footing uncertain, and he was cutting down not an actual path but rather a rain wash gully. With two hundred pounds on his back each step downhill sent a biting jar through his knees and lower back, threatening to turn his ankles constantly as his heels came down on loose gravel and powdered dirt. The topography was so steep and uncertain Bolan spent half the two-kilometer descent sliding on his backside as opposed to on his feet.
By the time Bolan reached the floor of the wash he was
