Interception

But Bolan was already running.

HE HIT THE DOORS of the warehouse three steps behind the frantic girl. His eyes were drawn to the LED display and what he saw flooded his system with fresh jolts of adrenaline.

00:00:09.

He sprang forward, growling with the exertion and caught the girl as he dived toward the hiding spot he had first pulled her out from. She turned like a ferret and sank her teeth into his palm.

00:00:08.

He swore and let go instinctively as blood pooled up out of the cuts. The girl was under the desk and with incredulity he saw that her “sister” was a little rag doll as filthy as its owner with bright black eyes. He reached out with his unwounded hand and caught the girl by her shirt. Doll firmly in her grip, she came away easy now and he pulled her tightly to him.

00:00:05.

He saw the readout and knew he couldn’t make it. His feet hit the ground as he drove with his legs against the concrete like a running back breaking for open field after a hand off. He cut around an overturned barrel and cursed the half second it caused him.

The girl was babbling now at him in some dialect he was too keyed up to catch, but she was also hugging him tightly. He saw the door standing open and put on the last burst of speed left in his body. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, banging against his ribs with the exertion and his breath was coming fast and hard.

00:00:02.

He hit the door at a dead sprint just as he felt the air around him suddenly draw backward in a vacuum rush that stung his eyeballs. He drew the girl closer against him as he felt the flash of sudden heat come rolling up behind him like a fast-running locomotive.

Cowering on the pavement, Karen Rasmussen watched him dive through the doorway. He seemed to hang for a moment in the air and she could see the ball of fire rushing up behind like a film image on fast forward.

Bolan was hurtling through the air, twisting as he flew to catch the angle out of the doorway and the orange freight train of a fireball rushed past him. The concussive force sent the doors flying like tumbling dice.

She couldn’t stop screaming as she watched, and Bolan twisted as he fell to protect the girl, landing hard along one arm and shoulder. He grunted with the impact and recoiled slightly off the pavement before sprawling wide to cover as much of the girl’s flesh with his own body as he could.

Behind them jets of flame shot out windows and air vents and punched holes through the roof. Black smoke appeared instantly, and debris began to rain down. The teenager felt her throat choke up with sudden, sharp pain and she realized she had been screaming but that the blast had deafened her.

She stopped, coughing, and then looked up at the savage bonfire lighting up the dockside neighborhood. She felt tears filling her eyes as she realized the bastards were dead.

Just like that, it was over.

CHAPTER FIVE

Bolan eased himself into a chair in the war room at Stony Man Farm. “What’s up, Bear?” he said to Aaron Kurtzman.

Kurtzman, head of the Stony Man cybernetics team, turned his wheelchair toward Bolan. “What’s up, Mack? Got you some coffee. Barb and Hal will be here in just a second.”

Bolan took a seat at the long hardwood table. In front of him was a steaming mug of black coffee and a plain manila folder marked with a single red stripe over a bar code and the word “Classified.”

He had always preferred this place in the old farmhouse to the newer Annex. He had taken a lot of mission briefings here, formed innumerable strategies, argued tactics and made life and death decisions. He shrugged the thought away and reached for his cup of coffee as Barbara Price and Hal Brognola entered the room. Bolan nodded in greeting and took a drink.

He frowned at the bitter taste. “That’s a nice batch you brewed there, Bear,” he said wryly. The thickset man grinned like a Viking from behind his black beard and hit a button on his console panel. “Good for what ails ya,” he agreed. A section of the wall slid down, revealing a huge screen.

“Nice work in Split,” Brognola said. He sat in a chair and dropped a thick attaché case on the table in front of him. “The State Department is very grateful.” He paused and smiled. “If they knew who exactly to be grateful to, that is.”

“The girl?” Bolan asked.

“She’s fine,” Price said. The honey-blond mission controller took her own seat. “We channeled her into an American relief organization. She’ll be safe until she can be returned to her family in Jakarta.”

Bolan nodded. His face was impassive, but he felt pleased. “What’s that leave us with now?” he asked.

Price snorted and Bolan turned to her in surprise. “A ghost hunt,” she answered.

Brognola turned to Kurtzman and nodded. “Show him,” he said.

The cyberwizard typed briefly on his keyboard and hit his roller mouse with a thumb. Instantly the big screen recessed into the wall came alive. Bolan turned in his seat and regarded the digital image.

First what was obviously an official military portrait appeared in HD quality. Bolan narrowed his eyes and scrutinized the picture. The uniform was Russian, Soviet era, and the rank general or colonel-general, the equivalent of a three-star general in the U.S. Army. The man himself had brutal, peasant stock features.

“That’s Victor Bout,” Brognola said. “The man himself.” Bolan saw a square-faced Caucasian with short, almost bristling salt-and-pepper hair, and narrow-set eyes over a thick nose. The man had a lantern jaw, and he wasn’t smiling. “He used to command his own internal security division in the GRU, the Soviet Military Intelligence.”

Bolan grunted. He had tangled with more than one GRU and former GRU agent in his day. They tended to be even more brutal and direct-action prone than their KGB counterparts. “Let me guess,” Bolan offered. “He turned to criminal enterprise when the Communists lost power?”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Kurtzman stated.

“He’s more than that, though,” Price interrupted. It was her turn to nod at Kurtzman. Instantly the picture on the screen was replaced by four. Victor Bout was in a slick dark blue power suit instead of an olive-drab uniform, his military haircut and regulation mustache replaced by a modest ponytail and a full but well-groomed beard. In another picture the barrel-chested man was standing in swimming trunks on the bridge of a private yacht. Two beautiful women with perfect bodies and eyes so vapid they came out clear as diamonds in the pixilated image, lounged behind him, drinks in hand. In the third, Bout was sitting at the table of some obviously expensive restaurant talking to a mahogany-skinned man in his twenties.

“Who’s Bout talking to?” Bolan asked.

“That is the son of the head of the financial projects committee of the United Nations,” Kurtzman answered.

“Oil-for-food?”

“Oil-for-food,” Brognola acknowledged.

The second man in the fourth picture needed no identification. It was the president of Venezuela.

“Well, that’s no problem,” Bolan said dryly. “I just saw on the international news how the guy isn’t a rogue leader at all. He’s just someone who disagrees with the U.S. on oil policy.”

“Sure,” Price said. “Suspend the constitution, muffle the press, jail dissidents, start a war with Colombia…whatever.”

“I do get the point,” Bolan stated, turning away from the screen. “Our good Mr. Bout is a very powerful, very well-connected gentleman.”

“And he’s only third in command of his syndicate,” Brognola said, leaning forward. “He is the principal adviser to one of the premier oligarchs in Russia today, a man in control of Siberian oil fields, Moscow central banking and Black Sea shipping. Colonel-General Bout’s last-known location, Split, Croatia. Status, currently missing.”

“Okay, he’s missing. But he didn’t just pop up because he’s next on some hit list,” Bolan pointed out.

“Bear,” Price said.

Kurtzman hit the space bar then the Ctrl and Tab buttons on his keypad with a practiced motion. The screen changed. Now there was an image of a lanky, disheveled man of some obvious height.

In the picture he stood next to a red Mini-Cooper on a European or Mediterranean city cobblestone street. He had to have been close to seven feet tall.

“Akhilesh Pandey,” Brognola announced.

“Mr. Pandey,” Price continued, “is the premier researcher of cloning technology in India today.”