Shadow Strike

“Swell,” Brognola said with a scowl.

“Did you bring the files?” Bolan asked.

“Of course.” The Fed reached inside his flannel shirt to remove a plain white envelope. “A couple of these needed presidential clearance, but the White House owes you big time, so no problem there.”

“Good to know.” Bolan started riffling through the top secret documents. Where his fingers touched the paper, it turned brown. “Damn, all these are dated yesterday. Anything happen within the past couple of hours? Anything in water? Mysterious explosions, ships lost at sea, river tunnel collapse…anything odd like that?”

“Sorry, no,” Brognola said, then frowned. “Wait a minute, yes, there was. Just a couple hours ago a British naval convoy went missing off the Azores, all hands lost.”

“Any reason given?”

“An unexpected storm.”

Finishing his sandwich, Bolan arched an eyebrow. “A summer storm…near the Azores Islands at this time of year?”

“Well, that’s what the prime minister is saying,” Brognola said with a shrug. “Anyway, the British navy went absolutely ape-shit over the sinking, and scrambled two wings of RAF jet fighters out of their base on Gibraltar to sweep the area.”

“Not helicopters?”

“Nope.”

“It’s impossible to rescue drowning sailors in something flying at Mach 3,” Bolan stated, crumpling the paper into a ball and depositing it back into the cooler. “The jets were doing a recon, not a search and rescue.”

“Obviously. Think those stolen mines sank the convoy?”

“Could be.”

A cold breeze blew over the mountains of boulders, carrying the smell of distant plant life mixed with the reek of diesel fumes.

Bolan leaned forward. “Okay, Hal, what was stolen? A member of the royal family, a new type of message decoder, nerve gas or nuclear warheads?”

“Give me a minute.” Pulling out his smartphone, Brognola tapped in a number and held a terse conversation. Then he texted somebody else and made another call.

“They stole gold,” he stated at last.

“Just gold?” Bolan asked.

“A lot of it. According to my contact in MI5, the convoy was carrying a full consignment of refined ore from the Imperial Gold Mines UK down in South Africa.”

“How much gold are we talking about?”

“Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth, maybe more. The Brits aren’t talking. The Reliant was a big ship, and those are very lucrative mines.”

“Damn well guess so.”

“Now, the U.S. Navy had an attack sub in the area patrolling the deep waters, and offered to help with the search and rescue,” Brognola said slowly. “But the British government refused any assistance.”

“On an S and R?” Bolan frowned. “Those jets were looking for the thieves.”

“That would be the logical assumption.”

“Any chance the RAF blew them out of the water?”

“No way. The Pentagon had a Keyhole spy satellite orbit over the area only minutes behind them. If the Brits blew up anything, even a submarine, we would have seen the oil slick and flotsam.”

Furrowing his brow, Bolan said nothing for a few minutes. “Tiffany said that the people who stole his mines used a Hercules transport. A Herc could carry a hell of a lot of bullion. If the terrorists are hauling gold, they’d need more than one. Any reports of a couple of Hercules planes being stolen recently? That would give us someplace to start looking for the thieves.”

“Not that I’ve heard. But if they rented the aircraft, then they wouldn’t be considered missing for days, maybe weeks.”

“That would be the smart move,” Bolan said.

“Striker, this is starting to stink to high heaven of a French stepladder.”

“That possibility occurred to me,” Bolan growled, setting aside the remains of his sandwich.

“Swell.” Brognola sighed, throwing the squashed beer can at the cooler. It hit the plastic rim and bounced inside.

A “stepladder” was an old French police term for a street mugger who used a rock to smash the window of a hardware store, to steal a stepladder to rob a house through a second-story window. He then sold the purloined jewelry to buy enough explosives to blow open a bank vault, and used that cash to bug a truckload of drugs that he then sold for millions to a dealer. Throw a rock and become a millionaire. All it took was guts, brains and a complete lack of morals.

“Did they take anything else from the sunken ships?” Bolan asked.

“If you’re referring to the rods in the nuclear power plant, no, nothing like that,” Brognola said, shaking his head. “The destroyer and frigates were all diesel.”

“Glad to hear it. Any of the crew missing before the convoy left port?”

“Unknown. Think it might be an inside job? You could be right. There have been traitors before, and for a slice of hundreds of millions of bucks…” Brognola’s voice faded away.

“The big question has to be how did the thieves know where to ambush the convoy?” Bolan asked. “The route had to have been secret.”

“Well, once, very long ago, I was assigned to help guard a delivery of gold from the United Kingdom to Fort Knox. Nothing big, about half a ton.” He smiled. “They hid radio transmitters inside the wooden pallets so that the gold could be tracked every step of the way.”

“Any chance the Brits have upgraded their system and now have GPS microdots on their gold?”

“Sure. Probably on the pallets, and hidden inside the gold itself. Try to melt down a bar, and the heat would trigger a micropulse signal. Five minutes later, you’re surrounded by the British army, asking for their property back.”

“Unless you melt it inside a Faraday cage to block the signal.”

“Think Loki is that smart?”

“They have been so far,” Bolan said. “Now, I’m willing to bet that the British MI5 are already checking on the company that manufactured the GPS dots, to see if anybody called in sick today, or recently died in a car crash.”

“Nothing we can do to help them there,” Brognola stated honestly. “And if Loki can safely remove the tracking dots, then they can sell the bars anywhere, on street corners if they like.”

Bolan scowled. “Not without the British being informed. I’d be very surprised if they don’t already have a huge reward posted across the internet for any information about the thieves, no questions asked.”

“True. Which means Loki will have to sell it on the black market, and get a fraction of the real value.”

“One or two hundred million is still a boatload of cash.”