Don Pendleton: Final Resort

A forty-something face replaced Gul-Bashra’s, glaring from the screen at those assembled in the War Room. Dark hair spilled across the pockmarked forehead, over narrow, angry eyes.

“Here’s Emre Mandirali,” Brognola said. “He’s a Turkish national, age forty-two, arrested with a load of weapons in Afghanistan, nine months ago. As far as I can tell, he made it to Camp X-Ray based on his affiliation with the Turkish People’s Liberation Army. Someone may have thought he’d spill the beans about an international connection. They were wrong. Next rabbit?”

Kurtzman put a seventh face on-screen. The first smile they had seen, so far, lit up a heart-shaped face framed by shoulder-length hair. A pointed goatee gave the smile a hint of mockery.

“Cirrus Mehrzad,” Brognola said. “A twenty-nine-year-old Iranian, picked up in Baghdad eighteen months ago. Arresting officers found evidence that he was building IEDs—that’s improvised explosive devices, Pentagon-speak for homemade bombs—and someone suggested he might be a link between Teheran and Iraqi insurgents.”

“Seems cheerful enough,” Bolan said.

“He’s a talker, I’m told, but it comes down to nothing,” Brognola replied. “Tries to ingratiate himself with his interrogators, blabbing up a storm about his family and what-not, but they come out on the other side of it with bupkus. Four to go.”

On cue, another face took its place on-screen. Brognola gave his audience a moment to survey the deadpan countenance, marred by a crescent scar at the left corner of the mouth.

“Bahram Parwana,” he declared, at last. “He and the next fellow you’ll meet are both Afghanis, lifted from their homeland. This one got himself arrested in 2004, for sniping at a U.S. convoy.”

“I’m surprised he made it,” Bolan said.

“He nearly didn’t,” the big Fed acknowledged. “When our boys returned fire, this one took a shrapnel hit that knocked him out. The medics stitched him up and shipped him out. He’s thirty-one, according to the records. Hasn’t said a word to any of his jailers since they locked him up.”

“The wound?” Bolan suggested.

“Nothing medical. He’s just a stubborn son of a bitch,” Brognola said. “Next slide.”

The ninth fugitive looked younger than Bahram Parwana, if only by a year or two. His lean face was unmarked, except by worry lines around the eyes.

“Mahmood Tamwar,” Hal said. “Age thirty, if you trust his file. Picked up in Kabul, in 2003, supposedly associated with al Qaeda and the Taliban. Also a heroin connection, which is nothing very special in Afghanistan, these days. Aaron?”

The next face had a youthful look, despite the salt-and-pepper beard. Wire-rimmed glasses with a cracked left lens magnified hazel eyes under glowering brows. The mouth was a bloodless slash beneath a meaty nose.

“Ishaq Uthman,” Hal said. “Egyptian, thirty-six years old, ex-military and associated with a remnant of the gang that killed Sadat. What he was doing in Iraq is anybody’s guess. Lord knows he hasn’t dropped a hint to any of the X-Ray experts.”

“No al Qaeda ties?” Bolan asked.

“Nothing on the record,” Brognola replied. “For what that’s worth. Last one.”

The final face was solemn but serene, the scalp clean-shaved over thin brows, with a close-trimmed beard. The upper lip was scarred by childhood surgery to correct a cleft palate.

“Last but not least, we have Ghulam Yazid,” Brognola declared. “He’s a thirty-year-old Pakistani, busted in Afghanistan last year, after a border crossing. Guns and ammunition were recovered, plus a message from Osama’s minions to the Taliban. That bought Yazid a ticket overseas, but he has not been, shall we say, forthcoming during his interrogations.”

“There’s a shocker,” Price remarked.

“Indeed. And that’s the lot. Long story short, we need to round them up or bury them before they mount new operations on their own, or as a group.”

“But no one knows exactly where they are,” Bolan said, stating it as fact and not a question.

“Hey,” Brognola answered him, “if it was easy, we’d all be retired.”

“Terrific,” Bolan said. “Where should I start?”

THE DOSSIER CONTAINED sparse information on the fugitives, a bit more on their liberators and two pages on the contact who’d be waiting for the Executioner when he got to Cuba. The short bio told him that Maria Santos was a thirty-three-year-old contract employee of the CIA, whose day job as a tourist guide allowed her contact with outsiders visiting Cuba.

Her photographs showed Bolan that Santos was a Latina looker, with long dark hair, surprising blue eyes and a body reminiscent of Raquel Welch in her prime.

Bolan would travel as Matt Cooper of Toronto, on a Canadian passport. Stony Man’s forgeries were impeccable, and he had no worries about clearing Customs. The hassle would come afterward, when he and Santos began seeking their quarry on an island with over eleven million residents.

That was, assuming the nine fugitives and their surviving liberators were still on the island. If not, as Brognola had stated, the world was their oyster.

And none of them would be afraid to crack it open, given half a chance.

Straits of Florida

“Full speed ahead,” Captain Arnold Bateman said, peering through his binoculars at open sea before the Tropic Princess. From the giant cruise ship’s bridge, he had the vantage of a man standing atop a twelve-story hotel, with no clouds overhead and nothing to obstruct his view to eastward.

In fact, the Tropic Princess looked like a hotel that had been set adrift somehow, as if by magic, floating on the sea when it should logically be squatting on a corner of Park Avenue or the Las Vegas Strip. The ship measured 960 feet from bow to stern and weighed 115,000 tons. Beneath the captain’s feet, three thousand passengers were anxiously awaiting the vacation of a lifetime, while twelve hundred crew members and entertainers worked around the clock to meet the needs of paying customers—and to keep the behemoth afloat.

During a classic two-week cruise, the British captain’s passengers were treated to a taste of Cuba, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Trinidad-Tobago, Venezuela and Jamaica. Shore excursions granted them the opportunity to browse and carouse in each port.

It was not all island-hopping, though. For those who truly loved to cruise, the ship was self-contained, permitting them to pass the full two weeks in luxury without ever setting foot on dry land. The ship featured seven restaurants, three swimming pools and seven spas, a dinner theater and cabaret, a discotheque, a first-run cinema, three gymnasiums, a fully staffed infirmary and a casino.

Most days, the captain liked his job. Granted, some passengers were no better than spoiled children, posing as adults, but Bateman managed to avoid them for the most part, choosing only a select few for the honored nightly ritual of dining at the captain’s table. Minors were excluded, and his steward had an eye for younger women, well endowed, whose husbands or companions didn’t mind the captain peering at their cleavage over cocktails and filet mignon.

On balance, Bateman worried more about his crew than any of his passengers. Despite the smiling photos the cruise line printed in its various brochures, some of the employees were a surly lot, uneducated, and the screening process left a lot to be desired. Substance abuse and petty theft were more or less routine. Some members of the crew engaged in smuggling; others moonlighted as prostitutes or gigolos.

So far, the present cruise had been smooth sailing, both in terms of weather and the human element. There’d been no quarrels among the passengers or crew, no incidents ashore demanding Bateman’s intervention. If his luck held, they could all relax and—