Road Of Bones. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ extortion, gunrunning, stock fraud and labor racketeering.

       It had been five days since he’d taken on the mission, and the Executioner was close to wrapping up his game. He’d taken out the clan’s first and second lieutenants, along with a couple dozen soldiers, and was planning a lethal surprise for the clan leader.

       But then he got the call from home.

       Drop everything and disengage, for now. We have a Level Four emergency.

       Something in Russia, Hal Brognola told him, speaking guardedly despite the scrambled line. There was a job that absolutely couldn’t wait, lives hanging in the balance.

       One life in particular.

       How fast could he get from Kobe to Yakutsk in Sakha Republic? Bolan ran the calculation on his laptop while he had the big Fed on the line. His destination was located nineteen hundred miles northwest of Kobe, travel time dependent on how soon he booked a flight, the aircraft he obtained and when it could take off.

       “Charter a plane ASAP,” Brognola had instructed him. “My dime. Call back when it’s arranged, and you’ll be met by someone from the Company. They’ll have the details and your basic kit. I’m sending through a file right now.”

       Bolan opened his email, waited thirty seconds, then said, “Got it.”

       “Good. I’m here until you call about the flight.”

       The soldier cut the link and checked his watch. Eight-fifteen on a Saturday night in Kobe meant that it was 6:15 a.m. on Friday morning in Washington, D.C., thanks to the international date line. Brognola was a day and fourteen hours behind, but would be tracking the Russian event in real time.

       Whatever it was.

       Bolan booked his flight before reading the file. A charter company at Kobe Airport could put him aboard a Learjet 60 in two hours, if he had five grand and change to spare. Confirming that, Bolan was told the flight should take about four hours, which would put him on the ground in Yakutsk somewhere in the neighborhood of two-thirty to three o’clock on Sunday morning.

       Fair enough.

       He skimmed the file then, hitting the essentials, knowing there’d be ample time to study all its details in the air. Two agents of the FSB—Russia’s Federal Security Service, successor to the infamous KGB—had been collaborating with the CIA and Interpol to blow the whistle on a network of corruption that involved the upper echelons of government and commerce in the Russian Federation. The specifics weren’t provided, being strictly need-to-know, but Bolan got the picture.

       There had always been corruption in the Soviet “worker’s paradise” under one-party rule, but the floodgates had opened with Communism’s collapse in 1991. Overnight, the world’s largest state-controlled economy was jostled into line with what some pundits liked to call the “Washington consensus,” adopting the alien concepts of liberalization and privatization.

       The net result was economic chaos.

       Liberalization meant eliminating price controls, which sparked hyperinflation and near-bankruptcy of Russian industry under President Boris Yeltsin. While Russia’s elderly and others living on fixed incomes watched their lifestyle go to hell, shady entrepreneurs and black marketeers spawned under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika restructuring movement of 1985-90 rose to the top of the heap like scum on a stagnating pond. The Russian Mafia, formerly an underground network of thugs and swindlers, went public—then global—in an orgy of bribery, extortion and violence.

       The result, inevitably, was a backlash of opposition, translated into widespread support for antireform candidates. Yeltsin’s campaign to Westernize Russia by fiat, including dissolution of Parliament in September 1993, sparked open rebellion in Moscow. While Spetsnaz troops stormed Parliament, killing 187 dissidents and wounding more than four hundred, separatists in the Chechen Republic were charting a course toward civil war and a new age of domestic terrorism.

       Meanwhile, a handful of wealthy oligarchs secured a stranglehold on Russian banking, industry and the mass media, throwing their weight behind Yeltsin’s reelection campaign in exchange for sweeping concessions. Public dissatisfaction with flagrant corruption and the endless war in Chechnya propelled the ex-FSB chief to the presidency in 2000—but what had really changed?

       Only the names of those in charge, as far as Bolan could tell. The president ran with the oligarchs as the previous one had, while using his office and their widespread power to muffle dissent. The watchdog agency Human Rights Watch branded the man a “brutal” and “repressive” leader on par with the dictators in Pakistan and Zimbabwe. Rumor linked his backers to the assassinations of several investigative journalists, while Scotland Yard suspected Russian intelligence agents of murdering an ex-FSB whistle-blower in London.

       Now, if Brognola’s information was correct, another Russian agent’s life was on the line for trying to expose corruption at the top. Bolan wasn’t sure what he could do to help, but he would try—without expecting any radical reform of a society that had been steeped in mayhem, graft and privilege since Grand Duchy of Moscow was established in the fifteenth century.

       And do his best, damn right.

       The Yamaguchi-gumi would be waiting when he finished up in Russia. If he finished. If he lived.

       And after that?

       Another pipeline would take up the slack, of course. No victory was ever final in the hellgrounds. Only those who fell were out of action. Their intent and motivation would survive.

       Raw greed and malice never died.

       As long as Bolan lived, there would be more work for the Executioner.

       But at the moment, here and now, he had a plane to catch.

      * * *

      BY THE TIME Bolan arrived at Kobe Airport with a small suitcase and laptop in a carry-on, the Learjet 60 was already fueled and waiting. Its two pilots were wrapping up their preflight checklist, while a young receptionist—bright-eyed and fresh-looking despite the hour—signed Bolan in and ran his credit card.

       It was a limitless Visa, embossed with the name of “Matthew Cooper,” which matched Bolan’s passport of the moment, and his California driver’s license. In fact, the alias aside, his credit card was perfectly legitimate. Whatever bills he managed to accumulate from month to month were paid in full from Stony Man Farm, in Virginia.

       When all the paperwork was done, the receptionist thanked Mr. Cooper for his business and directed him outside to board his flight. Bolan hadn’t booked a return flight, since he’d have to judge the situation on the ground once he arrived. Returning to Japan might not be feasible. Indeed, he wasn’t sure that any airport service would be open to him once he’d managed to collect his package from the kidnappers who presently had custody. There were too many ifs for him to plan that far ahead.

       If he was met, as planned, at Yakutsk Airport.

       If the contact he had never met before provided proper gear and workable directions to his target.

       If he found the agent he was on his way to save still breathing, fit to travel.

       If he managed to extract the subject without getting either of them killed.

      Then he could think about СКАЧАТЬ