Don Pendleton - Day of Mourning

He had been forced to drop the infrared device. The Executioner fired off a close pattern of heavy slugs from his weapon, aiming from memory at the positions of three divers before the lights went off.

He waited for a few moments and no one challenged him.

He chanced a quick scan with his diver light on. He found and retrieved the IR.

He flicked the infrared device upward and gazed through it. He saw three floating corpses, trapped from rising any farther by the walls of the compartment. The water around the divers took on a deeper hue in the IR viewer.

Bolan returned his attention to the nuclear device.

There were two handles on the container. He gripped one handle and began swimming away from the underwater killzone, holding the scanner up before him as he retraced his route.

He wondered if the damn thing would be intact. Or had these men all died for nothing. No. Nothing is ever for nothing.

The dead divers had consciously chosen this path. But they had been brought unwittingly to this appointment with their executioner. Whether they were motivated by greed or power, Bolan could not know. But it did not matter now. Their evil deeds had culminated in a fitting demise in the hellish depths of the dark Atlantic.

Now the bastards were shark food.

All that remained for Bolan was withdrawal.

Gripping the container, he swam on.

The underwater warrior conserved the remaining air in his tanks, breathing shallowly despite his effort.

He turned on the diving light and began to swim clear of the dead ship.

He ran into no further opposition as he moved upward.

Bolan released the IR and stroked faster toward the surface with the deadly cargo.

It was time to alert Grimaldi, up in the Harrier, to get ready for him. He would have to spend time in the decompression chamber on the boat then a quick flight back to the States. The communications blackout with Stony Man still troubled him.

"Stony Man One to Stony Bird. I'm coming up, Jack. I've got it. Do you read me?"

No response.

Bolan was about to try to raise Grimaldi again when the watery world around him thumped with a loud, hollow sound.

Bolan looked up.

And saw Death descending.

The massive shape of Grimaldi's Harrier was coming toward him.

Its misshapen hulk was sinking like an oversized stone, plunging directly at Bolan.

Bolan did not try to swim out from under the fast-descending tonnage of the Harrier.

He reversed his course and dived back down the way he had come. He gained cover within the sunken hulk of the Liberian freighter.

He made it with one heartbeat to spare, still gripping the nuclear device.

The tips of his fins cleared the entranceway to the tilted superstructure of the ship just as the heavy weight of the Harrier impacted the submerged vessel. Bolan was socked by the nearest wall of the companionway as the ship jarred.

He reversed himself and swam out of the companionway to find the Harrier lodged against the superstructure and the ocean floor.

The downed fighter plane was still making strange little underwater sounds as it settled into its new environment. The Harrier had sustained a serious hit to its tail section.

Bolan's gut constricted with apprehension.

Grimaldi!

He approached the plane with extreme caution despite his concern for Jack. He raised the shark gun, which was slung around his shoulder by its strap. He now scanned the vicinity of the wreckage for terrorist divers he might have missed.

There was no one.

Bolan found no sign of Grimaldi in or around the Harrier's cockpit. The pilot was not strapped into his seat. Jack had not sunk with the plane.

The tanks strapped to Bolan's back were almost empty. Any more time spent down there would be suicide.

Once more Bolan began to swim toward the surface, the shark gun again strapped across his back. Using his free arm and both fins, he propelled himself up and away from the ship toward the first glimmer of dull sunlight that drew closer and closer overhead.

Bolan broke the surface on the swell of a cresting wave. He bobbed like a cork on the endless expanse of rough ocean. His face mask cleared water, and he looked around to get his bearings.

There was no sign of Jack.

A jet turbine Bell chopper, boasting 5.56mm mini-guns and 40mm cannons mounted externally on turrets, hovered clearly against the low grim cloud ceiling.

A cable hung from the open door of the Huey. The cable was pulled taut by the weight of Jack Grimaldi, who was being winched up toward the aircraft.

Bolan could make out four members of Phoenix Force crowded in the side opening of the Huey: Gary Manning, the Canadian explosives expert; Keio Ohara, the Japanese martial-arts master; David McCarter, the British brawler; and Rafael Encizo, the Cuban underwater demolitions specialist.

That meant it was Yakov Katzenelenbogen, the Israeli-French intelligence vet, topkick of Phoenix Force, who was flying the chopper.

Bolan glimpsed the smoldering debris of what had been another helicopter on the surface of the water. The wreckage was slowly disappearing into the hungry rolling waves.

The boat that marked the site of the terrorist salvage operation bobbed on the stormy Atlantic.

Bolan knew he would need decompression time aboard that boat.

He saw the men of Phoenix hoist a very wet Grimaldi into the safety of their gunship.

Bolan lifted a victorious thumbs-up sign to the guys.

He punched into the tac net as he swam.

"Is that you, Yakov?"

"You were expecting Jacques Cousteau?" grumbled the Phoenix Force honcho from behind the chopper controls. "Get yourself onto that boat and into decompression, Striker. Then we talk."

Bolan fought the sea toward the boat and the DC. He tugged along the nuclear device that had gotten so many men killed this day.

There were still too many things left unexplained. They chewed at him inside, demanding action. Like a communications screwup that could only mean more trouble...

"Yeah,'' Bolan replied grimly as he swam toward the wind-tossed boat on the rough sea. "Then we talk.''

One hour later, Jack Grimaldi was still wearing the widest ear-to-ear grin that Bolan had ever seen.

"Man, I'm here to tell you," the ace pilot was telling Bolan and Yakov, "I must've aged ten years in the ten seconds it took those terrorist bastards to shoot me into the drink. I was never so glad to see one of these big Hueys coming to the rescue. Not even in Nam."

Grimaldi was now at the controls of the Huey.

The helicopter was in the same stationary hold it had maintained while Bolan did his time in decompression.

Then Colonel Phoenix was pulled aboard the chopper by the same winch that had rescued Grimaldi from an Atlantic death.

Two vessels now rode the ocean beneath the Huey. The terrorists' boat had been joined by another trawler while Bolan was in DC; a trawler that was in fact a well-disguised U.S. spy boat sailing with computerized eavesdropping capability and armed with torpedoes and missiles.

The spy ship had been ordered from its regular course for this "accidental" rendezvous with the chopper.

"After all the times you've airlifted this guy out of hotspots," said Katz to Grimaldi, with a nod to indicate Bolan, "I'd say you've damn well earned yourself some luck, my friend. It was our pleasure, Jack."

"Where are the others?" Bolan asked Katz.

He was referring to the other members of Phoenix Force. They were not aboard the Huey.

Katz pointed down at the raging sea.

"Rafael is supervising the cleanup inside the sunken ship," the Phoenix Force leader told the Executioner. "It's ours in accordance with open-sea salvage regulations."