Shadow Strike

Caught with his hand in a drawer, Tiffany shrieked in pain as the top of the desk exploded into splinters. He jerked back his arm, his wrist bristling with slivers. “Son of a bitch!” he snarled.

Kicking aside a chair, Bolan went around the desk and yanked open the drawer. Inside was a sleek, black Glock machine pistol and several ammunition clips.

“Now, I thought we had an understanding, Michael,” Bolan said, dropping the magazine of the Desert Eagle to slam in a fresh one.

Watching the magazine fall to floor, Tiffany went pale. “Okay, okay! Sure, no problem, we got a deal!” he replied, backing away until he was flat against the wall. “Ask away. Whatever you want. I’ll tell you everything!”

Bolan stood perfectly still and said nothing. Then he slowly raised the Desert Eagle and took aim.

“Sweet Jesus, what the fuck do you want to know?” Tiffany yelled, a touch of fear in his voice at last. “I’ll talk already! Just tell me what you want to know!”

Unfortunately, Bolan had no idea exactly what he wanted to know. So there was only one way to play this, cold and hard. “Tell me about what happened a few days ago,” he demanded, leveling the Beretta.

After inhaling deeply, Tiffany let his breath out slowly. “Oh…that. I should have known. Well, I’ll be fucking delighted to roll over on those assholes. They paid half a mil in advance, but when I delivered the goods, they released mustard gas and took everything…and killed fifty of my best men. Fifty! Even the fucking rats in the rafters were dead before the air was clear enough for me to get back inside the warehouse!”

“The warehouse on the wharf outside?”

“Yeah, bunch of locals also bought the farm. Some bums, a few gangbangers and two of my cooks.”

Civilians had died; that upped the ante. “Sorry for your loss,” Bolan said in a graveyard voice. “Keep to the important details.”

“Yeah, sure.” Slowly reaching for a wall switch, Tiffany turned on the lights. He blinked as they came on. Bolan didn’t.

“There were twenty or so of them, but one guy was in charge,” Tiffany said, sitting down in a plush leather chair. Wisely, he kept his hands in plain sight. “A foreign guy, nice dresser, platinum Rolex and such.”

“Name?”

“Mr. Loki.”

Now, that was a new one. “More,” Bolan said.

“Loki spoke really good English, but with a weird accent, like nothing I’ve ever heard before,” Tiffany said with a shrug. “Know what I mean? Not Israeli, German, French or anything normal like that. Something else.”

Which left most of the world’s population. “What did he purchase?” the soldier demanded impatiently.

“Junk.”

Bolan scowled. “Drugs?”

“No, I mean real junk,” Tiffany repeated. “Tons and tons of it. The oldest, cheapest crap I had in storage. I was figuring on dumping it all on some third world warlord who didn’t know napalm from orange juice, who didn’t know a revolver from a cruise missile, but this guy had cash in hand, bags and bags of euros. He wanted all of it, but didn’t have quite enough cash. So we cut a deal and—”

“And he used gas and took all of it.”

“Every fucking thing in the warehouse! Let me tell you, there is no honor among thieves anymore.”

“There never was. Define junk, Michael.”

“Antiques, man. Cold War stuff. AK-47 assault rifles, and some World War II bazookas. Honest, freaking bazookas!” He paused, and a shadow briefly crossed his face.

“Don’t lie to me now,” Bolan warned, thumbing back the hammer on the Desert Eagle.

Tiffany shrugged in resignation. “Okay, they stole the guns. They had arranged to buy just a couple hundred land mines.”

“What kind of land mines?”

Reaching down to the ruined desktop, Tiffany pushed away some papers to reveal a wooden box. He flipped the top and took out a slim cigar. “Not land mines, underwater mines,” he stated, biting off the end and spitting it onto the floor. “You know, the sort of things Britain used to chain to concrete blocks and line the Channel with to stop Nazi U-boats. Mines, man.”

Yes, Bolan knew all about underwater mines. North Korea used them by the thousands to blockade their own harbor to prevent NATO or South Korea from invading. Underwater mines were one of the deadliest defensive weapons in existence. But why did Loki want so many of them?

“I need more,” Bolan prodded.

Lighting the cigar tip, Tiffany inhaled deeply, then exhaled dark smoke. “Sure, sure, no problem. They were Iranian mines, M-39s.”

“Any idea what he wanted the mines for?”

“I don’t stay in business by asking questions,” Tiffany told him, touching his wounded arm.

Fair enough. “How many mines?”

“All of them, couple hundred.”

“Exactly how many, Michael?”

“Okay, okay, six hundred and fifty.”

Six hundred underwater mines…that was enough to blockade the entire city of New York. “What did they use to haul them away, trucks or a freighter?”

“A Hercules transport. Big-ass seaplane.”

Interesting. “Describe the buyers.”

“Two men and a woman. She was pretty, and had the biggest tits I’ve ever seen.”

Considering that he ran the strip club overhead, that was quite a statement. “And the men?”

“Loki was tall, good-looking, like George Hamilton, the actor. Old, but classy.”

“And the other?”

“Just a mook. Street muscle. Skinny, with cold eyes, like there was nothing inside but hate and hunger.”

A trigger man. Possibly a bodyguard. “Anything else?”

Tiffany hesitated. “Not all of my guys were dead when I arrived. One of them managed to whisper that he heard the fuckers talk about bringing a squall to the world.”

“Interesting. Did he say a storm or a squall?”

“Squall. Now, in my business, that is both a sudden summer storm and an incredibly expensive piece of Russian navy hardware. It’s a kind of underwater missile, a rocket-powered torpedo.”