too,” another man added, disassembling his own weapon to clean the interior.
“Never saw so much blood in my life,” an older man whispered.
“Shut up and concentrate on your work,” the first man growled, irritably touching the bandage. Then he savagely jerked out the clip from his assault rifle and placed it aside.
The entire group had been practicing for the past hour, disassembling an old AK-47, only to put it back together and then take it apart once more in an endless learning ritual. Naturally, all of them were familiar with hunting rifles and such, but nobody had any military training. How could they? Iceland had no army or navy, only a national police force. This bizarre Russian weapon, a combination of a 7.62 mm machine gun and 30 mm grenade launcher, was as foreign to them as the dark side of the moon. As was murder.
Killing for food, they understood. That was part of life. However, taking the life of another human was something horribly new, and most of them looked a little queasy from the recent slaughter. True, it had been necessary, but still extremely disagreeable.
Located at the extreme rear of the lead Hercules, the fifty men and women were jammed uncomfortably between the hydraulic exit ramp and a solid wall of wooden cubes that filled the rest of the huge cargo transport.
Each squat cube was roughly a yard square, and bore no manufacturer logo, designation or shipping label. Nor was there a manifest, customs sticker or duties seal. The identical wooden boxes were completely blank, aside from a few smears of drying blood, an occasional tuft of human hair and the all-pervasive smell of industrial lubricant.
At the front of the plane, only inches away from the colossal mound of crates, was a short flight of metal stairs that led to the flight deck. Underneath the deck was a utilitarian washroom and a small metal room that once had been an ammunition bunker for a twin set of 40 mm Bofors cannons. But for this trip it had been converted into a crude electronics workshop. The noise from the engines was noticeably less at this location, yet the three people clustered in the cramped room hadn’t spoken for hours, ever since hastily leaving the burning warehouse.
“So, is it done yet?” a portly man finally demanded, grabbing the hexagonal barrel of an old-fashioned Webley .445 revolver and breaking open the cylinder to remove the spent shells. He dumped them into a metal waste receptacle, and the brass tinkled musically as it rolled about on the bottom. Though he was a large man, the three-piece silk suit he wore hung loosely from his wide shoulders, and a series of holes cut into his leather belt accommodated a recent dramatic weight loss. On his right wrist was a solid-platinum Rolex watch that shone mirror-bright, while a cheap gold-plated wedding ring gleamed dully on his left hand. Although only middle-aged, he seemed much older, with deep lines around his mouth and eyes, and his curly dark hair was highlighted with wings of gray at the temples.
“Only glaciers can move mountains, Thor,” muttered the slim woman bent over the workbench clamped to the metal wall. Her pale hands moved among the complex circuitry of an electronic device, soldering loose wires into place and attaching computer chips with the innate skill and speed of a surgeon.
“What does that mean?” growled a skinny man attaching a large drum of 12-gauge cartridges to the bottom of a Vepr assault shotgun. The deadly weapon mirrored its new owner, bare-bones and deadly, possessing nothing that wasn’t absolutely necessary to the single goal of eradicating life.
His hair was so pale that he almost appeared bald, and he was painfully clean-shaved, with a small bandage covering a recent nick on his shallow cheek. He was wearing a camouflage-colored military jumpsuit, and one of his boots bulged slightly from a folded straight-razor tucked in the top for dire emergencies.
“It means, Gunnar, that we shouldn’t bother the professor when she’s busy,” Hrafen Thorodensen answered, thumbing a fifth round into the cylinder. With a snap of his wrist, he swung up the barrel and closed the British-made weapon.
Gunnar Eldjarm scowled, resting the Vepr on a shoulder. “You shouldn’t snap a revolver shut like that, Thor. It damages the catch.”
“Only if I do it a lot,” Thorodensen replied. “But with any luck, two days from now I can throw it away and never touch another damn weapon.”
“And if we fail?” Professor Lilja Vilhjalms asked, expertly inserting another circuit board into the rapidly growing maze of electronics.
Midnight-black hair trailed down her back in a thick ponytail that almost reached her trim waist. A pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses dominated her otherwise lovely face.
“If we fail, my dear Lily, then we’ll all be dead, which will achieve the same result,” Thorodensen said, pulling a folding jump seat from the curved wall. “Now, please finish up quickly. We will reach our next target soon.”
“Target?” Vilhjalms asked in a whisper, her hands stopping cold. “But I thought—”
“Yes, yes, we will try to legally purchase the equipment, of course,” Thorodensen interrupted with a curt gesture. “But if there are any complications, then we shall take what we need.”
“At any cost?”
“Yes, at any cost.”
Putting aside the soldering gun, the woman made one last plea for sanity. “Please, Thor, the Americas aren’t our enemy.”
“Wrong,” Eldjarm stated coldly, brushing back his hair. “The friend of my enemy is my enemy.”
Removing a cigar from inside his suit, Thorodensen grunted in somber agreement. He didn’t really care for this new blood-thirsty aspect of his childhood friend, even if it did help in this dirty little war. However, as the old saying went, needs drive as the devil must. Which he always took to mean that, sometimes, in extreme cases, the end actually did justify the means.
Withholding a sigh, Lilja Vilhjalms tactfully said nothing and returned to the arduous task of assembling the sonar scrambler. She didn’t care for the name of their little group, Penumbra, and had no idea if they were on the path of righteousness or damnation. Sadly, there was no other course available. Win or lose, right or wrong, this was their destiny, and revenge was as inevitable as death itself.
Outside the windows, the sky began to darken as the three Hercules raced away from the thunderous storm and slipped into twilight, heading directly into the coming night.
CHAPTER ONE
Brooklyn, New York
Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled in the stormy sky. A cold rain fell unrelenting on the dark city. Rivers of car headlights flowed in an endless stream along the regimented streets of south Brooklyn, while traffic lights blinked their silent multicolored commands.
The ragged shoreline of Sheepshead Bay was brightly illuminated by the bright neon lights of countless bars, restaurants and nightclubs skirting the choppy Atlantic, where oily waves broke hard against ancient rocks and modern concrete pylons. Tugboats churned across the bay, guiding huge cruise liners out to sea, and even more massive oil tankers to the industrial dockyard.
As silent as the grave, a black Hummer rolled to a stop near the mouth of an alley, and the driver turned off the headlights, but kept the engine running. For several minutes, Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, did nothing, closely studying every detail of the area, from the flow of the dirty water in the gutters, to the shadows on the window curtains of nearby apartment houses.
