Rogue Elements. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ with all hands and a Rampart Group team. MI6 had pulled strings and gotten a former British SAS sergeant hired by Rampart Group.

      Bolan tapped the file, and up popped a photo of the grinning, prematurely balding, impossibly broad-shouldered Colour Sergeant Terry Wellens. He looked like a member of the royal family on steroids.

      Sergeant Wellens, his team and the ship they’d been guarding had disappeared. Bolan had done his homework. It was shocking how many ships sank, ran aground or outright disappeared on the 70-plus percent of Planet Earth that was ocean.

      As far as MI6 was concerned, once was happenstance, twice was coincidence, three times was enemy action. Then one of the supposedly lost Rampart team members showed up on Interpol facial recognition in the Netherlands. Bolan tapped another file. The military file photo of blond, high-and-tight-haircutted, ramrod-straight Lance Corporal Jup Gein of the Bundeswehr Airborne Brigade 1 contrasted sharply with the grainy security photo of a rumple-suited, mustachioed, shaggy-haired man drinking coffee in an outdoor café in Amsterdam, but the Interpol software gave the resemblance 87 percent.

      Bolan gave it 99 percent.

      Interpol recognition software did not recognize spec ops operators at rest.

      Bolan did.

      The photo had been taken months after Gein, Wellens and their ship had disappeared.

      Trying to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions was a worldwide concern. The UK had brought its concerns to the desk of the President of the United States. The President had flexed the Farm option. Favors had been called in within the private security community, and Viking Associates had hired Bolan on. The problem was, that was exactly the strategy MI6 had used to get a man into Rampart, and their man was MIA.

      “If we’re right, and Rampart Group is involved in very bad things, they may need to not make the next couple of ships disappear, and rather than making their teams disappear, it might look better if there were bodies. Bodies of people no one will miss, like Viking bodies, but that will still raise a hue and cry and give Rampart more business.”

      “That’s an ugly little scenario you have there.”

      Bolan agreed. Reported pirate attacks on ships were genuinely down. That was because many navies of the world had deployed fighting ships into well-established pirate waters, and many commercial ships were now flying flags and advertising online that they were sporting a contingent of armed security guards. Strangely enough, despite that, genuine ship vanishings were up.

      Every instinct Bolan had honed in battles on every continent on Earth told him something was going on.

      “So how are you proceeding?”

      “Have to wait for a job and see what happens. I’ll give it a week. If we dig up nothing after that, we have to come up with a whole new plan. Meantime, I’ll mix and mingle, try to pick up some intel.”

      * * *

      Bolan went with his nose and followed the smell of coffee into the mess.

      “Oh my God!” Sifuentes enthused to a rapt audience over pad thai, mac and cheese, coffee and corn bread. “You should have seen Blue! So he cuts the first guy’s hand off, catches the grenade and hot potatoes it to me!”

      Big Abe called bullshit.

      Sifuentes sighed in memory of the action. “The next guy in? The next guy? Blue just about beheaded the son of a bitch.”

      “Bullshit.”

      “I’m talking ear to ear, Abe. Like ‘Assassin’s Creed’–worthy.”

      Ibarra leaned in. “With what?”

      Sifuentes drew one of his khanjar daggers from beneath his shirt and set it on the table. “With these. One in each hand. If you blinked, you missed it. If any of those assholes blinked, they died in the dark. It was that fast. I got one of them. With a Mini-Uzi Blue delivered with his toe. Blue got three, two with knives, one with that commandeered grenade.”

      “Bullshit,” Abe reiterated.

      “Oh, and then there was the guy climbing up the drainpipe.”

      “What happened to him?” Mendez asked.

      “We defeated him like the rest.” Sifuentes nodded in memory. “With science, and soap. Plus, he’s the guy I hot potatoed the grenade onto. He’s all messed up.”

      Bolan walked into the mess. “Hey, fellas!” He nodded at Ibarra. “Felita.”

      Ibarra smirked. “Call me B.B.”

      Big Abe shook his head. “Sifu’s talking all kinds of crap about you and he in Salalah, brah.”

      “It went ugly real fast.” Bolan nodded. “We had to improvise.”

      Mono slurped noodles. “I believe it.”

      Bolan went to the galley counter. Namzi ran a hand through his comb-over and gave the Executioner a big, red-stained, betel-nut-chewing smile. Bolan smiled back. Indonesians were considered the most smiling people on earth, and if there was one person on a ship at sea you wanted to ingratiate yourself with, it was the cook. Namzi heaped noodles onto Bolan’s tray with a Chinese cleaver that could behead an ox. “I make your chai just right!”

      Bolan bowed slightly. “You’re the best.”

      Namzi bowed back. The soldier took his tray and sat at the team table. When the team looked at him expectantly, Bolan shrugged. “Do we have a job? I spent all my money buying Sifu knives and beer and soap. I need to get paid.”

      The entire table burst out laughing. Big Abe rolled his eyes. “I’ll give you this, Blue. You and Sifu’s stories match up.”

      “Lying.” Bolan shrugged again. “Too much to remember. But I’ll tell you this.”

      Ketch spoke for the first time. “What’s that?”

      “It wasn’t good.”

      The table went quiet and hung on Bolan’s words.

      “As a matter of fact, it got really sketchy back there in Salalah, and local thugs don’t usually bring hand grenades.”

      “What are you saying, brah?” Abe asked.

      “That’s all I’m saying. Do we have a job?”

      “Yeah, we got a job.” Big Abe nodded. “A freighter going right up the Gulf of Aden, pirate alley, right past Somalia, and Yemen is at war.”

      “Destination?”

      “Yanbu, Saudi.”

      “You know, I’m new, but I had a bad feeling in Salalah, and I’m having one now.”

      “So what are you saying, brah?” Abe repeated.

      “Just what everyone already knows. I’m thinking we need to mind our Ps and Qs, watch each other’s asses, and watch the horizon, 360, 24/7.”

      Sifuentes СКАЧАТЬ