Don Pendleton - Black Death Reprise

AT THE EDGE OF A VINEYARD four thousand miles from the spot where he had first learned of a place called L’Abbaye de Raphael, Mack Bolan dropped to one knee and reached into the pouch on his web belt containing his night-vision goggles.

Manufactured by American Technologies Network Corporation, the Gen IV vision system employed XR-5 technology and infrared illumination, which meant the ultra-lightweight gallium arsenide tubes could render a completely dark night into an eerie green landscape as bright as noontime. With the moon peeking every now and then from behind sporadic clouds in a sky filled with stars, night vision was not Bolan’s primary need.

He switched the goggles into infrared mode, and the scene before him shimmered slightly for a few moments while the photocathode sensors adjusted to the new data stream. At the base of the hill, laser-crisp infrared beams became visible, crisscrossing the approach to stone steps leading up to the monastery. To the left, a two-lane road wound up and around the side of the hill.

Bolan scanned the landscape before him, searching for additional infrared security nets. Agents McCabe and Gardner, he thought, had to have broken one of the beams, announcing their presence without even knowing it. There were three other hot spots at various points on the hill, but none in the vicinity of the road.

As Bolan removed his goggles, he recalled the reconnaissance photos he had studied at Stony Man Farm. The lab’s entrance was shielded from the road by a thin stand of trees running almost to the top, which meant he could approach on the asphalt until he got close.

His gaze moved to the field’s northwest corner, where six all-terrain vehicles hitched to open carts containing gardening tools were parked in a straight line pointing south into the vineyard. When he reached the first, Bolan stopped to inspect its controls. Using his foot-long combat knife to pry open the instrument panel, he bent close to examine the three-wheeler’s ignition wiring. A bird cried out in the distance, and the warrior paused while listening hard. Crickets close by chirped a summer symphony in tune with their reproductive cycles. From all other directions, the buzzing and humming of night insects reaching his ears reassured him that he was the only human in the immediate vicinity.

Over the years, on battlefields spanning the globe, Bolan had hot-wired vehicles ranging from dune buggies to M-60 tanks. ATVs were at the low end of the technology continuum. Even in the dark, it took him less than a minute to cut, strip and splice the on-off toggle switch into a hot connection bypassing the ignition key. After dipping his finger into the fuel tank to check the vehicle’s gas level, he unhooked the tool cart from the ATV, pushing it a few feet to the rear.

As he passed each of the remaining five on his way to the access road, he paused for a moment to pierce their wide front tires with his scalpel-sharp combat knife, rendering all but the one he had hot-wired inoperable. Bolan didn’t know if he’d need an ATV on his way out, but disabling all except one created an option.

With a final glance over his shoulder, he stepped onto the asphalt, leaning slightly into the incline.

The road’s rise was steep, curling like a corkscrew up the side of the hill to a plateau on which the ancient L’Abbaye de Raphael stood. Shortly before the road leveled out, Bolan entered the sparse woods surrounding the compound. Moving through the underbrush as silently as a shadow, he reached a concealed spot thirty yards from the helipad.

In accordance with its construction period, the stone monastery was built like a medieval fortress, occupying an area roughly half that of a city block. Rounded parapets protected each corner from assault, and it wasn’t hard to imagine defenders on top of the turrets dumping scalding liquids onto invaders attempting to scale the walls. Bolan already knew there were no windows on the first floor, leaving the front and rear porticos, with buttressed stone archways too narrow to accommodate greater than three men abreast, as the only means of entry from ground level.

Two guards armed with Fabrique Nationale Herstal P-90 submachine guns stood at the entrance beyond the helipad, their presence negating any possibility of unauthorized access. Bolan hadn’t expected to waltz through the laboratory’s front door, but he wanted to view it nevertheless. He took the opportunity to examine his opponents’ hardware.

In addition to their submachine guns, the sentries wore shoulder holsters carrying FN Five-seveNs. Weighing a mere 1.6 pounds, the Belgium-made pistol used the same 5.7 mm ammunition as the P-90, fed from a clip holding twenty rounds. Although the lightweight handguns lacked the punch that a 9 mm Glock or a Smith & Wesson .45 might deliver, its bullets were available in a version with steel-hardened tips that penetrated Kevlar, making them the ideal choice when anticipating an assault by law-enforcement personnel.

Pulling his goggles over his eyes in order to see the pockets of infrared security placed randomly around the monastery’s perimeter, Bolan inched away from the helipad. The natural foliage was plenty thick to provide good concealment, but it was also short, forcing him to circle the building by alternating between a low crawl and half-crouched sprints until he came to the side he had selected ahead of time from the satellite photos.

In person, the side wall was exactly what he expected. It was close enough to the woods to enable a swift approach, and angled in a way that placed it out of sight from the driveways leading to the front and rear entrances. Most importantly, a window approximately sixty feet off the ground, which Bolan believed was the lab’s only escape route, gleamed brightly against the cold stone walls under the enhanced ambient moonlight created by the goggles. Dropping to one knee, he scanned the wall and area directly beneath, ensuring there were no infrared sensors.

From one of the pouches on his web belt, he withdrew a folding titanium grappling hook tied to a coiled length of thin cord resembling braided dental floss. Developed at NASA by the same team responsible for giving the world Velcro, a three-hundred-foot length was fine enough to fold entirely into the palm of his hand while possessing all the strength of mountaineering rope.

After locking the grappling tines into their open position so they formed a claw resembling an eagle’s talons, Bolan stepped from the woods. While walking toward the building, he began swinging the hook in an increasing arc above his head, playing out the line until he felt the proper tug. When the twine started vibrating slightly in response to the pull exerted by the hook’s momentum, he twirled and snapped his wrist with the finesse of an accomplished fly fisherman, releasing the grappling hook onto a trajectory that sent it sailing over the two-hundred-foot-high wall more than thirty feet to the left of the lab window. Using a hand-over-hand motion to pull in the slack, he found that the hook had caught purchase on his first try.

Before scaling the building, Bolan pushed the goggles onto his forehead where he’d be able to pull them quickly into place if needed. He checked his watch. Two patrolling guards were due to make their rounds within ten minutes, but if they stayed true to the schedule Homeland Security had recorded throughout the previous three weeks of satellite flyovers, Bolan had plenty of time to make his ascent.

Drawing the Beretta from his shoulder holster, he checked the sound suppressor while making sure the safety was off. With one hand, he placed the pistol under the strap holding his knife sheath in place on his outer calf where it would be readily accessible. With the other, he grabbed the thin cord and pulled with all his weight. The line remained taut, and after taking a moment to secure the rest of his gear, he began walking up the side of the fortress like a human fly.