Read Renegade Agent Online

Authors: Don Pendleton

Tags: #Action & Adventure, #Fiction, #det_action, #Military, #Vietnam War, #Vietnam War; 1961-1975, #History, #Men's Adventure, #Bolan; Mack (Fictitious character)

Renegade Agent (5 page)

BOOK: Renegade Agent
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"Hal," Bolan interrupted. "Who is she?"

"You know her, Striker. The name is Toby Ranger."

Bolan leaned back in the straight-backed wooden chair and let out breath. Yeah, he knew Toby Ranger.

In that other lifetime, when the Mafia menace took him the length and breadth of the country, fate had engineered the intersection of his path with that of Toby Ranger more than once. He had fought at the woman's side. He had saved her life.

And she had saved his.

So maybe "know" wasn't quite the right word. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that the lives of Mack Bolan and Toby Ranger were bonded, in a way few men and women could ever hope to know.

"Striker, listen..." Hal began.

"You said Toby made two contacts," Bolan broke in, his voice betraying no emotion. "Brief me on the second."

"It's fresh, Striker — came in while you were airborne en route to Heathrow. Last week, Edwards held some kind of big meet at a chalet he owns in the Swiss Alps, in the canton of Valais. Nominally, Edwards now holds Swiss citizenship. Anyway, this chalet is apparently one of his permanent bases. He maintains a full-time security force there, multinational, recruited from the terrorists he serves as opposed to his handpicked inner-circle force that Toby became a part of. The chalet also has a communications facility. Probably Edwards has other bases like it, but he's never domiciled in one place for long.

As near as Toby could make out, something damned big was being hatched at this meet. Those people weren't terrorists, at least not what we usually think of as terrorists. Toby was pretty sure they were intelligence agents, representing nearly every freeworld nation. Some of them were "retired" like Edwards, but some of them were still active, we think.

Besides the agents, there were a few others offering "specialized services." One of them was Frederick Charon." Brognola's voice had gone harsh with tension and suppressed rage. "Do you have any guesses as to what this could mean, Striker?"

"An international underground intelligence network," Bolan said evenly. "A "black" CIA, run by men trained by the top legit agencies in the world, serving the needs of the terrorist network. With state-of-the-art technology provided by traitors like Charon."

"That's the way it shapes up," Brognola agreed. "And it has to be stopped."

So the mission wasn't over after all; in fact, it had hardly begun. The Charon penetration, the cutting of the Charon-Drummond-KGB chain, was only a foot in the door of a major infrastructure of deceit, treason, and terror. Somewhere in the bowels of that infrastructure sat Frank Edwards, renegade agent, death merchant.

And it was up to Mack Bolan to bring that temple of terror crashing down on him, burying him forever.

"Where is Edwards, Hal?"

"Striker, you're in no shape to take him on, not now. That bullet wound..."

"Where is he?"

Brognola's sigh cut through the static. "We don't know." Bolan waited. The idea in his mind was getting uglier. "Toby was only able to pass what I've told you. She was leaving the Valais chalet, but she wasn't sure for where." Another pause. "I'll level, Striker. She suspects her cover might be blown." The ugly idea was clear as a photograph now.

Frank Edwards operated in a grim dark world, and the realities of that world were overwhelmingly lethal.

Toby Ranger would remain among the living only until she had revealed everything she knew to Frank Edwards. And Edwards and his men would know every vicious method for encouraging her to talk.

The odds that Toby was alive were short. The odds that she was entire were almost nil.

"We're not even sure where the Valais chalet is located, Striker," Brognola said bleakly.

The phone handset cradled against his shoulder, Bolan was using his right hand to undo the sling. The pain was down to a dull ache, and the arm itself would serve if he could control it.

"I know how to find out," Bolan said grimly.

"Striker?

"What?"

Brognola started to say something, seemed to change his mind.

"Live large," he murmured, and Bolan heard the connection break.

The sound of the chair legs on the floor seemed unnaturally loud in the bare room, and the door creaked when Bolan went out.

It was time for one last conversation with Frederick Charon.

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?"

BOOK: Renegade Agent
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