Don Pendleton - Aftershock

When the main pack of Turkish soldiers reached his Peugeot, Arcuri grinned and pressed the button on the radio detonator in his pocket. Even five blocks down the street from ground zero, the Kongra-Gel lieutenant was knocked off his feet by the blast wave. The fireball extended three hundred feet in every direction.

Anyone inside that dome of flame and pressure was instantly vaporized. Even the protection of walls and windows were useless as ripples of explosive force shattered brick and turned glass into clouds of high-velocity shrapnel. Arcuri crawled to the cover of a parked car and watched in awe as the hotel shook violently.

The vehicle he huddled against rattled as debris rained atop it. A moment later, the half of the hotel facing the pickup truck expelled jets of dust and smoke from its shattered windows, and slid to the ground in a choking cloud of gray.

Arcuri struggled to his feet. The world had been flipped onto its ear, and wails of pain and terror erupted from the thick blanket of swirling debris that grew, crawling ominously toward Arcuri. The Turk grinned and gave the cloud a small salute, racing off down the street. One cop fired three shots after him, a bullet clipping the sleeve of his jacket, but another Turkish officer dragged the gunman toward the carnage, the act of saving lives more important than bringing in the madman, for the time being.

Arcuri raced to freedom, knowing his brothers would be hard at work, looting the warehouse.

IN THE KANDILLI Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute, scientists registered the tremor in downtown Van. It drew attention, but not as much as it should have, as the radio and television displayed the news of the destruction of the hotel and the deaths of hundreds.

Vigo Pepis, however, was watching the sensors. The vibrations they picked up from the explosion in Van lasted longer. He tried to tell his coworkers about the aberration, but he was brushed off, told that the collapse of the building would have contributed to the odd readings.

Pepis looked at the graph. He could see on the scope the rhythm of the tremors caused by the explosion, and moments later, the collapse of the hotel. There was a definite beat, but a background vibration wave had started a moment before the detonation, hidden by the spike in pressure waves caused by the explosion. Pepis wished he could have seen the scope of the tremor. He was good at predicting earthquakes, but he needed clean, uninterrupted data. The bombing in Van had hit at just the wrong moment for Pepis to tell if the minor quake was a prelude to something worse, an initial breech of pent-up energy between fault lines crushed against each other, or just standard shakes as the earth flexed as part of its natural shifting.

The graph suddenly began going again.

“Vigo! Oh my God…Look!” Taira shouted.

Pepis glanced up momentarily from the graph to see the damaged hotel shake again. Another section collapsed, and he snapped back to the graph. The plates flexed against each other. Something had happened. He was certain a major earthquake was building up. The collapse of another section of building masked more of the seismic vibrations in Van, but nearby sensors, twenty and fifty miles from the city center, picked up sympathetic tremors.

“It’s going to be a disaster,” Pepis muttered weakly.

“What are you talking about?” Taira asked. “It already is! I can’t imagine how many people are trapped under the rubble.”

Pepis’s lips drew into a tight and bloodless line.

“It’s going to get worse,” he whispered. “Much, much worse.”

The Executioner whipped around and leveled the AK-47 at the midsection of the armed thug, stitching him from crotch to sternum with a line of .30-caliber holes. Belly blasted into a gory crater, the gunman’s corpse toppled off the back of the pickup truck and Mack Bolan turned to slide through the rear window of its cab. Gunfire chased after him, but bullets deflected off the sides of the truck.

The driver, his skull dented by a point-blank burst, blocked the Executioner from getting fully inside the pickup. The vehicle rolled out of control toward the gate of the Kongra-Gel facility. Bolan let the emptied AK drop to the pickup’s bed so he could use both hands to steer for the center of the wooden doors. He pushed hard against the corpse’s knee, using the lifeless leg to stomp on the accelerator. The truck raced faster and Bolan held on, white-knuckled, to the steering wheel.

The front fender met the barrier, and two tons of steel defeated the heavy wooden doors. The impact jolted Bolan farther into the cab, and he twisted like a serpent. His legs slipped through the rear window and he dropped into the leg well of the shotgun seat as a fresh storm of autofire tore through the cab. The lifeless driver jerked spasmodically as 7.62 mm ComBloc rounds burst gory exit wounds from his chest, the heavy-caliber bullets smashing the steering column into useless metal and plastic.

The Executioner realized that he didn’t have much longer and pried open the passenger-side door. His long legs extended fully, like steel coil springs, and launched him out the door and into a thicket of bushes as the bullet-riddled pickup truck tumbled onward. The Toyota’s grille collapsed as it hit a tree. Where the unbraced doors had proved vulnerable, the old, deep-rooted tree was an immovable object. The driver’s corpse vaulted through the windshield and slid down the hood, leaving a gory smear.

Bolan drew his Jericho pistol and checked its load, then headed deeper into the roadside foliage. The spectacular crash of the pickup truck had bought him a few precious moments to reach cover, and he took it. The Jericho was a stand-in for Bolan’s usual Desert Eagle. Getting across the border hadn’t given the soldier much of an opportunity to shop for weapons, but he was able to get the gun, in .40 S&W, and several hundred rounds of ammunition for it. Even though it wasn’t the full-sized .44 Magnum he was used to, the “baby Desert Eagle” would give any pursuer pause, and give the soldier an opportunity to acquire a longer range weapon. And if he couldn’t, he’d improvise.

The soft probe of the Kongra-Gel camp had proved disastrous, an example of bad luck as a guard had been able to get off a shot before the Executioner could silence him. Bolan hadn’t had an opportunity to lay the explosives he needed to destroy the training area and the barracks of the Turkish narcoterrorists responsible for the deaths of almost two hundred American and British relief workers, and more than three hundred Turkish citizens in the Van bombing.

He’d only just finished a mission in Azerbaijan, taking out a ring of arms smugglers when he’d heard about the brutal attack in Turkey. Bolan was too late to protect the victims of the Kongra-Gel, an amalgamation of various Turkish Communist insurgent groups. However, a quick conference call with Aaron Kurtzman and Hal Brognola at Stony Man Farm had indicated that the hellish murders were simply a diversion to cover the theft of millions of dollars’ worth of relief supplies, including medications and painkillers meant for the displaced refugees from the incessant civil war waged by these very thieves.

It was a small step up from heroin and opium dealing to flooding the black market with drugs meant for their own countrymen. Bolan hoped to find the missing drugs and supplies before the savage thugs sold them off, and perhaps get them back to work in helping the Turkish refugees. It was the least that the Executioner could do to further the cause of the MOREST lifesavers.

They had been slain in the course of their work to make the world a better place.

Bolan wasn’t going to let their murderers profit from their savagery.