Don Pendleton: Cold War Reprise

“Hal won’t be particularly pleased with you hitting up old contacts.”

Brognola was the least of his worries, Bolan mused. With a death squad on the loose in the streets of London, the Executioner knew that it was time to load up for bear.

In this particular case, the ursine was a breed the Executioner had hunted before, a ghost species he’d hoped had disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Unfortunately, the Soviet Bear was still a living, vital threat, and its predatory hunger had claimed the lives of two of Bolan’s old allies.

Hunting season was on again.

Mack Bolan ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Douglas P. Wojtowicz for his contribution to this work.

Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,

Some boundless contiguity of shade,

Where rumour of oppression and deceit,

Of unsuccessful or successful war,

Might never reach me more.

—William Cowper

(1731–1800)

It would be nice to shut out the evils of the world,

but my conscience demands that I search for the truth

of every rumor of oppression and deceit, and try to

head off all wars to make them unsuccessful.

—Mack Bolan

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Mack Bolan was no stranger to the London night, having come to the grand old city early in his war against organized crime and returning for multiple engagements since. Yet the Executioner was not on a hunt this night, nor was he being pursued.

Bolan had the collar of his black wool long coat turned up against the cold, his arctic-blue eyes scanning the dock for trouble. He was walking with a light load, relatively speaking, carrying only a Beretta Px4 Storm in his shoulder holster, with a compact version of the same model tucked into his waistband at the small of his back for backup. The two sidearms accepted 17-round standard or 20-round extended magazines, equaling the firepower of his usual standard, the Beretta 93R machine pistol, while fitting into a smaller profile.

With his instincts at full alertness, Bolan spotted ordinary potential threats—drunken soccer hooligans, knife-armed thugs on the prowl for mugging victims and smugglers awaiting their contacts. The London dockyards were a wilderness, but as long as the Executioner was there to keep an appointment, he had to maintain a low profile.

Bolan sidestepped a pair of drunken sailors who staggered out through the door of a musky-smelling dive. Sweat, alcohol, cigarettes and even a few whiffs of marijuana thrown in for good measure assaulted Bolan’s nostrils as he went into the dockyard bar. The crowd turned its attention to the newcomer, who was over six feet tall, powerfully built, clad in black with chilling blue eyes that cut like lasers through the gloom of the tavern. A jukebox and a television set struggled against the undercurrent of slurred and hushed conversations, failing to do more than contribute to the wall of white noise. That was the point, though. No one sound carried farther than a tabletop, allowing plotters to plot and cheaters to cheat without being overheard by interested parties.

A stocky Slavic man gestured from his corner booth. Two shot glasses bracketed a bottle of clear liquor in front of him, and to one side, an ashtray was overflowing with crushed-out butts. Bolan knifed through the bar as the Slav poured the booze into his shot glasses, pushing one of the little servings of the clear stuff to what was to be Bolan’s seat. Bleary, smoke-stung eyes looked up at the Executioner.

“Mikhail Belasko,” Vitaly Alexandronin greeted, lighting another cigarette as Bolan slid into the booth.

“The name’s Cooper, now,” Bolan corrected, taking a sip. It was a bitter, foul version of vodka that tasted as if it had been filtered through sweat-crusted socks. “Couldn’t find anything better?”

“Tastes just like the crap I distilled in Afghanistan,” Alexandronin replied. “Except British feet stink a bit more.”

Bolan chuckled. Alexandronin offered him an unfiltered cigarette and Bolan accepted it. The Russian’s lighter fired it up, and Bolan took a single puff before resting the cigarette between the knuckles of his left hand. He didn’t want to offend Alexandronin’s hospitality, and Bolan had the discipline to avoid slipping back into a nicotine habit. “Bad booze and worse cigarettes? This is war mode for you, Vitaly.”

“Why else would I invite you by for a drink?” Alexandronin asked. “It’s not for my health.”

Bolan frowned, but he wouldn’t interrupt the Russian, breaking the rule of polite conversation by going for hard data right off the bat. He could see that Alexandronin was ragged, his jowls hanging loosely as if he hadn’t eaten for a month. The Russian’s fingertips were completely bronzed by nicotine stains, but the last time Bolan had interacted with the defected former KGB agent, his skin had been a healthier shade due to quitting smoking. Lack of sleep darkened Alexandronin’s eyes into an impenetrable shadow. “Is it about Catherine?”

Alexandronin took a long pull off of his cigarette, blowing the smoke through his wide, blunt nostrils. His brow crinkled and Bolan knew he’d touched a raw nerve. “The pitiful excuse for lawmen in this damned city claim that she was jumped by soccer hooligans. The thugs broke Catherine to pieces, and she lingered in a hospital for the last of her days.”

Catherine Alexandronin was not a name on the Stony Man watch-list database, but Bolan cursed himself for not keeping an eye out for her. He had last known her as Catherine Rozuika, a TASS journalist who had helped Bolan and Alexandronin derail an effort to turn back the democratic processes of the early Commonwealth of independent states. The hard-liners were not willing to give way to the end of the old Soviet Republic and freely and blatantly killed anyone in their path. The Executioner had stopped the plot and through his Stony Man contacts, had arranged for a new life for the pair in London.

Catherine had been a beautiful woman. Back then, Bolan had enjoyed a few moments of tenderness with the lady reporter. The news of her death by a brutal beating was like a knife in the soldier’s heart. Something, though, had sparked Alexandronin’s paranoia. “You said the police ‘claimed.’ You don’t buy that story.”

Alexandronin knocked back his glass of vodka. “The law looks at the ambush of an investigative reporter as just another case of drunk sports fans. But this was not the work of alcohol-besotted misanthropes.”

A stack of photos plopped in front of Bolan and he leafed through them, studying the photographic records taken at the emergency room and during her autopsy. Bolan’s sharp mind already spotted inconsistencies between the police reports and reality.

“Pay attention to the broken right arm,” Alexandronin said.

“The end result of a standard Spetsnaz cross-forearm disarmament snap,” Bolan replied. “Using one limb as a fulcrum, the gun hand is deflected, the force shattering the ulnar bones. Catherine was armed, and she pulled her weapon to defend herself.”