Final Assault

“How do you know he has not joined Interpol, hey, Cooper?” one of the others said, leaning forward. Slim and dark, he wore an Italian suit.

Brognola laughed. “Agent Cooper knows better than that, Chantecoq.”

Bolan had first met the French Interpol agent and his subordinate, Tanzir, during a terrorist attempt to enter the United States through Mexico. “How is Agent Tanzir?” Bolan asked, looking at Chantecoq.

“Very well, Cooper,” Chantecoq said. Bolan inclined his head and looked at the third man. Tall and blunt featured with an expensive haircut and even more expensive sunglasses.

“CIA,” the Executioner said without hesitation.

“Among others,” the third man replied. He smiled and extended his hand. “My name’s Tony Spence. Pleasure to meet you, Agent Cooper. Big fan of your work.” All of the men present, save Brognola, knew Bolan by his cover identity, Agent Matt Cooper. Bolan had used many names throughout his long, lonely war, and he suspected that he would use many more before the end. Each name was like a weapon in his arsenal, opening doors and armoring him against the slings and arrows of his enemies.

Bolan didn’t take his hand. “I knew Tony Spence. He had about twenty pounds on you, and you’ve got about six inches on him. And he’s dead.” Spence had been Bolan’s CIA contact for a recent mission to Hong Kong—a mission that had gone dangerously wrong at the eleventh hour. Spence retracted his hand.

“He is. I’m not,” he said, still smiling. Bolan frowned. He had a long, complex relationship with various agents of the CIA. Some of his interactions had fallen somewhere on the spectrum between frustration and anger, but he’d grown to like Spence—the original Spence—in the brief time he’d known him.

“You can let me off at the next airport,” Bolan said. “I’ve got more important things to do than waste my time playing games.”

Brognola cleared his throat. “Ease back, Cooper. You know how these Puzzle Palace types like to complicate things. Every one of them has three names and none of them the one their momma gave them. Tony Spence is just an alias for use by whoever needs it at the moment.”

Spence inclined his head. “And right now, that’s me.”

Bolan sat back. He looked around. “CIA, FBI and Interpol...something smells funny.”

“Might be my aftershave. Wife’s making me try something new,” Ferguson said.

Brognola shook his head. “If you think those are the only letters in this particular alphabet soup, I’ve got some bad news...” He held up a hand as if to forestall the protest Bolan hadn’t been planning to make. “But that’s beside the point. What do you know from yachts, Cooper?”

“Been on a few,” Bolan said without elaborating.

“What about cargo ships?” Spence asked, leaning forward.

“Been on a few of those, too.”

“What do you know about—”

Bolan cut Spence off with an impatient gesture. “Pretend I don’t, since you seem to want to tell me a story,” he said curtly.

Spence smirked. He turned in his seat and pointed to one of the screens that lined the cabin as he tapped at a tablet. The volume increased, and Bolan found himself watching a BBC news report on an ongoing hostage situation somewhere in the Gulf of Aden. “Pirates,” he said. He’d dealt with modern pirates before, both in Somali waters and in the South China Sea. The former were mostly fishermen, out of their depth and desperate. The latter tended toward smuggling and drug running.

“So they’d have you think,” Brognola said. Bolan glanced at him. “Well, they might have been pirates to begin with, but they’re claiming to be terrorists right now. They might be something else tomorrow.”

“It’s not the pirates we’re worried about,” Ferguson said. He made a face. “Show him, Spence.” Spence tapped the tablet again, and a recording began to play on the screen. It was the same ship, Bolan saw, only from a different angle. He squinted.

“Camera phone?” he asked.

“These pirates are very social-media friendly,” Chantecoq murmured.

As Bolan watched, a man parachuted toward the deck. Spence froze the image and zoomed in on the parachutist’s face. “Recognize him, Cooper?” Brognola asked.

Bolan shook his head.

“Nicholas Alva Pierpoint. Sustainable technologies wunderkind,” Brognola supplied.

“Never heard of him,” Bolan said.

“If you had, I’d be more upset than I am now,” Brognola said drily. “He decided to make a public display of idiocy and parachuted onto his own hijacked ship to deliver the ransom, despite the collective scream of his lawyers.” Bolan watched as Pierpoint was led away. Brognola sighed. “Turned out the bloodsuckers were right for once. It was a singularly bad idea, and Pierpoint got added to the hostages, whereupon our merry band of pirates revealed that they were terrorists, and they’d trade the hostages for the release of certain prisoners in the usual places—Guantanamo Bay, Israel, Nigeria.”

“Any pattern?” Bolan asked.

“None. We think somebody picked names out of a hat and went for broke.”

“So it’s a scam. What do they really want?”

“Near as we can figure, to sell the ship to the highest bidder. And in fact, a number of said bidders have shown up. We’ve got surveillance footage from various ports of call, including Hargeisa International Airport, and a drone spotted the whole lot of potential buyers a few hours ago—guess where?—being welcomed aboard the Demeter.” Spence brought a number of grainy pictures onto the screen. One was of an antiquated speedboat hurtling across the water. There were several figures in it.

“You recognize this guy, I’m sure.” Spence zoomed in on one of the men in the boat. He was a big man with a round face and double chin. But he had a strangler’s hands, crisscrossed with scar tissue. The man’s name was Gribov, and he was an ex-KGB operative. Gribov, like a lot of former KGB men, had found new employment with a group of Pacific gangsters called the Yellow Chrysanthemum.

Bolan stared at the broad, squashed face of the notorious killer. “Who else?” he said.

“S. M. Kravitz,” Spence continued, tapping the tablet. The image of Gribov pixilated and was replaced by that of a thin man in an expensive suit with hair the color of sand and eyeglasses so thick a welder could have used them. He was walking through an airport. “Until recently, he was one of the money men for the Society of Thylea, as well as half a dozen other European right-wing organizations. God only knows who he’s working for now, since the Society got rolled up, but he’s here and looking altogether uncomfortable, what with all the armed brown folks.”

Bolan grimaced at the mention of the Society of Thylea. Gribov was a killer, but the Society was worse, wanting to wipe out two-thirds of the human population. He’d seen to their destruction personally, although both Ferguson and Chantecoq had, in their own ways, helped.

“This handsome fellow is Walid Nur-al Din,” Spence said as Kravitz’s lean shape was replaced by a Middle Eastern man dressed in battered fatigues and body armor and climbing out of a truck. His face was marred by an oddly geometric pattern of scars. “Syrian, mouthpiece of the Black Mountain Caliphate, one of several splinter groups of ISIL still fighting in Syria. Nearly got his face peeled off by a Bouncing Betty a few years ago, which did not improve his general temperament.” Spence tapped the tablet again.

“And finally, representing the Black Serpent Society, Mr. Drenk.” Drenk was Eurasian and, like Gribov and Kravitz, dressed as if he were heading to a boardroom, rather than the deck of a recently hijacked ship. He was walking along the shore toward a waiting boat. “Drenk is a nasty customer—they’re all nasty customers, but Drenk is the worst—with a file so thick we couldn’t bring it on the plane for the weight limit. Drenk isn’t known for his negotiating skills, so God only knows what he’s planning.”

Spence looked up from his tablet. “Those are the ones who took the bait. Garrand—the man who’s leading the terrorists—has four potential bidders, and we can’t allow any of them to take possession of the Demeter.”

“Why?”

“The Demeter is one of a kind. Lots of hush-hush goodies went into that particular basket—green technologies, mostly, things that’ll make a lot of the usual suspects angry, when and if they permeate the corporate membrane,” Spence said.

“You make it sound as if this Pierpoint had some covert help,” Bolan said. “That’s it, isn’t it? All that technology—it was government funded, wasn’t it?”

Spence shrugged. “Partially, and through third parties, most of whom have an interest in seeing the United States of America weaned off foreign oil. Pierpoint’s smart. He knows the ship is a good way of showing off all these previously underfunded projects in one fancy package. Once the money starts coming in, that tub will be stripped for salvage quicker than sin. The problem is, nobody bothered to file off the serial numbers.”

Bolan laughed. There was precious little mirth in the sound. “You’re afraid that if the ship falls into the wrong hands, people will—what?—figure out that the federal government was slipping a few extra bucks to Pierpoint under the table in a bid to undercut certain major industrial concerns?”

Spence looked at Brognola. “You were right. He’s clever.”

“No, just experienced,” Bolan said. He shook his head. “And it’s not a good enough reason. So elaborate.”

“Fine, you want more? Imagine what a savage like Gribov could do with a ship like that. Or Walid. You a movie fan, Cooper? Rule one—never give a super-vehicle to a bad guy. Especially when the vehicle in question is an ocean-going fortress. Which the Demeter is. It can sit out of sight in international waters forever, like the goddamn Flying Dutchman, only instead of ghostly sailors it has a crew of Jihadists or gunrunners or revolutionaries. All three maybe—that’s the worst-case scenario.”

Bolan was silent. The thought was not a pleasant one, he had to admit. Whoever got the ship would be in possession of a state-of-the-art vessel. Brognola cleared his throat. He looked uncomfortable, and Bolan wondered how much pressure he was under to help clean up this mess. “If there were anyone else capable of doing this, Cooper, I’d have dealt them in. But everyone is up to their bootlaces in blood and bullets, and this needs handling soon,” Brognola said.

“How many hostages?” Bolan asked after a minute. That was his main concern. The men and women on the Demeter, crew included, were innocent, and Bolan was determined to see them to safety, if possible.