took him was what one of the ghosts said to the others. “Killed a full-grown, healthy leopard while unarmed. The company will be very pleased with our results so far, don’t you think?”
Fingers clenching the grip of his silenced SIG-Sauer P-229 pistol, Mack Bolan listened to the two men as they walked closer to his hiding spot. Talking in rapid-fire Armenian, they were close enough now that he could smell the harsh smoke from their Turkish cigarettes as it mixed with the tang of the gun oil on the hunting rifles slung over their shoulders.
Normally he wouldn’t hesitate to take them out if they got too close. The two men weren’t taking any security precautions. He could easily hear them, even over the constant wind at this altitude. Their steps were slow on the goat trail, their conversation casual, unhurried. At the moment they had no idea where he was.
When they reached the ideal position, he would stand from cover and put both men down with double taps to the chest in under two seconds. The .40-caliber bullets would smash through their woolen sweaters, crack their sternums and plow into their hearts, mangling them before exiting their backs in a spray of blood. Two quick steps forward, along with a third shot into each man’s forehead, and all he would be left with would be to make sure these men were never found.
But this situation was anything but ordinary.
Bolan had spent the past four days surveilling the mountaintop headquarters of Aleksandr Sevan, the leader of the Jadur clan, currently at the top of the Armenian mafia hierarchy. Tightly knit and bound by a strict code of honor and ethics, as well as family ties, the Armenians had resisted all attempts at agents infiltrating their ranks, with even local agents with impeccable jackets either found dead or simply vanishing, never to be seen again.
Meanwhile, over the past few decades, the Armenians had extended their tentacles from their small landlocked country to encircle both Europe and America in a stranglehold of crime and fear. With a well-deserved reputation for savage brutality and the use of violence in response to even minor threats against them, they had made inroads into every type of crime on both continents, from street crimes such as kidnapping, bank robbery, drug smuggling and sex slavery to white collar offenses such as wire fraud, bank fraud, racketeering and embezzlement. Along the way, the Armenians were willing to work with local, established mafias, such as the Russians or Mexicans, to get what they wanted, but also had no qualms about going toe-to-toe with larger mobs to get in on the action, wherever it might happen.
All that was why Bolan was here. When INTERPOL intelligence had managed to get a line on Sevan’s movements, they’d expected him to end up back at the walled town of Artakar, twenty miles east of Tumyanan, where the Jadur clan ruled it and the surrounding mountainous countryside with a heavy hand. Every village and farm in ten kilometers had been co-opted by the syndicate, with large rewards for reporting any suspicious behavior, and illegal shipments of contraband ranging from heroin to guns to women often stored in farms before being moved on to their final destination.
The mission had been straightforward: Bolan would go in, alone, infiltrate the headquarters, kidnap Sevan and extract him to an airfield near Tumyanan, where Jack Grimaldi waited to fly them both to Washington, D.C. No one in European law enforcement would know he was in-country—the Armenians were as free with their bribes with law enforcement as with anyone else, and rumors ran rampant of corrupted police officers and administrators in a half-dozen countries. In and out, no muss, no fuss, the whole operation had been scheduled to take no more than thirty-six hours.
That deadline had passed two days ago. When Sevan hadn’t showed up, Stony Man Farm had put out cautious feelers about what was behind the deviation. A change in plans, or was the entire mission some kind of smokescreen or diversion? Careful intel-gathering and analysis by Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman and Akira Tokaido, members of Stony Man’s cyber team, revealed that the criminal ringleader had been held up by a supposedly minor matter involving a meeting with Salvatore Gambini, one of the heads of the Italian Mafia with whom the Armenians were very close. The meeting had run long, with the two crime family heads celebrating their partnership. When he’d heard about the change in plans, Bolan had cursed not being able to try to get to that one. There were few things he liked better than capturing two scumbag mobsters for the price of one. Gambini would simply have to wait until another day.
Instead he had sat and watched and waited, preferring to take the chance of staying to capture the mob leader rather than leaving and attempting to pick up his trail another day. The longer he stayed in place, however—even with moving his base camp once already to obscure traces of his being here—the odds were greater that he would be detected sooner or later.
Although the Jadur patrols didn’t come out this far, Bolan couldn’t take a chance on a shepherd or farmer stumbling across his base of operations. His low-slung, camouflaged tent was covered by the native grasses so artfully so that an intruder would have had to step on it to discover it. When the flap was closed, it was just another grass-covered hillock among a cluster of them scattered on the mountainside. Bolan had been living on cold MREs—meals ready to eat—and doing anything outside the tent under the cover of darkness, using night-vision goggles to see if the moon was obscured. He hadn’t lit a fire, awakening on the brisk autumn morning to heavy frost and a chilly tent, nor showered in the past two days, as well.
Despite the uncertainly and rough conditions, Bolan lived for situations like this, pitting himself against both the elements and his enemy. Unlike just about anyone else who found themselves in this situation, he thrived on the challenges of remaining undetected while completing his mission, no matter what obstacles might be thrown in his path.
All of which brought him back to the moment at hand, and the two men walking just a few paces away from his hidden lair. The odds were good that they might be part of Aleksandr Sevan’s mob. On the other hand, they might be two farmers, perhaps a father and his eldest son from a nearby farm, out hunting game birds. Either way, if they found Bolan, the odds were very good that they were both going to die. While he tried to avoid civilian casualties—that was the kindest term he could use to refer to any of the population of the area—these tough, hardy mountain people had compromised themselves by accepting deals with the devil that lived in the walled city.
Sevan’s control of the region was ironclad, and Bolan couldn’t take the chance of anyone seeing him and telling the mobsters. His mission was too important to risk because of a chance encounter. Therefore, he waited; every sense locked on what he could hear and smell of the two men, and stood ready to execute both of them, even while hoping they would simply keep walking.
“Doesn’t look like they’ve spotted you, Striker,” a voice said in his ear. Bolan didn’t reply. The voice came from Akira Tokaido, about six thousand miles away in the Stony Man Farm Computer Room, watching the two men through the 1.8 gigapixel eye of an ARGUS camera mounted on the underbelly of a Predator Hawk drone flying overhead at 15,000 feet. “Hunting rifles are confirmed. I think they’re old Mosin-Nagants. Anyway, they’ve passed your site, and are moving south-southeast, still walking and talking. Looks like they’re headed down the mountain. We’ll keep tabs on them in case they come back your way.”
Even with the all-clear sounded, Bolan waited until the men’s conversation faded from hearing before he uncurled his fingers from his pistol and replied. “Copy that.”
“That was way too close for my comfort,” Kurtzman grumbled. Bolan imagined him watching several monitors at once from his wheelchair while drinking from a cup of his abominable coffee that was always brewed 24/7 at the Farm. “Far be it from me to second-guess you, Striker. We’ve backed you on a lot of high-risk missions before, but even before the delay, this one seems a bit, well—”
“Suicidal?” Akira
