Shadow Strike. Don Pendleton

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       A “stepladder” was an old French police term for a street mugger who used a rock to smash the window of a hardware store, to steal a stepladder to rob a house through a second-story window. He then sold the purloined jewelry to buy enough explosives to blow open a bank vault, and used that cash to bug a truckload of drugs that he then sold for millions to a dealer. Throw a rock and become a millionaire. All it took was guts, brains and a complete lack of morals.

       “Did they take anything else from the sunken ships?” Bolan asked.

       “If you’re referring to the rods in the nuclear power plant, no, nothing like that,” Brognola said, shaking his head. “The destroyer and frigates were all diesel.”

       “Glad to hear it. Any of the crew missing before the convoy left port?”

       “Unknown. Think it might be an inside job? You could be right. There have been traitors before, and for a slice of hundreds of millions of bucks…” Brognola’s voice faded away.

       “The big question has to be how did the thieves know where to ambush the convoy?” Bolan asked. “The route had to have been secret.”

       “Well, once, very long ago, I was assigned to help guard a delivery of gold from the United Kingdom to Fort Knox. Nothing big, about half a ton.” He smiled. “They hid radio transmitters inside the wooden pallets so that the gold could be tracked every step of the way.”

       “Any chance the Brits have upgraded their system and now have GPS microdots on their gold?”

       “Sure. Probably on the pallets, and hidden inside the gold itself. Try to melt down a bar, and the heat would trigger a micropulse signal. Five minutes later, you’re surrounded by the British army, asking for their property back.”

       “Unless you melt it inside a Faraday cage to block the signal.”

       “Think Loki is that smart?”

       “They have been so far,” Bolan said. “Now, I’m willing to bet that the British MI5 are already checking on the company that manufactured the GPS dots, to see if anybody called in sick today, or recently died in a car crash.”

       “Nothing we can do to help them there,” Brognola stated honestly. “And if Loki can safely remove the tracking dots, then they can sell the bars anywhere, on street corners if they like.”

       Bolan scowled. “Not without the British being informed. I’d be very surprised if they don’t already have a huge reward posted across the internet for any information about the thieves, no questions asked.”

       “True. Which means Loki will have to sell it on the black market, and get a fraction of the real value.”

       “One or two hundred million is still a boatload of cash.”

       “Damn straight. Okay, where can they go? Switzerland?”

       “No, the Swiss banks are riddled with spies working for Interpol these days,” Bolan stated, leaning back in the chair. “And in spite of all the electronic banking done, the need for hard commodities like gold and silver is very much alive and well. The biggest underground banks are in Ecuador, Pakistan and China.”

       “Ecuador?”

       “It’s the Switzerland of South America.”

       Brognola almost smiled. The man knew the damnedest things. “Okay, but that’s only for trading small amounts of gold, right? Where could Loki go to unload so much gold in one shot?”

       “Without getting a half-ounce of hot British lead in the back of their heads?” Bolan said. He didn’t speak for a moment, his mind filled with a swirling hurricane of half-truths, rumors and outright lies, about the hidden world of criminal finance. Stealing the gold was only half the job. Now Loki would have to convert it into something usable, and more importantly, untraceable.

       Propping his fingertips together, Brognola patiently waited.

       “Barcelona,” Bolan said at last, rising from the chair and starting to pack away the campsite. “But I’m heading for Albania.”

       “Why?” Brognola demanded in confusion.

       “To talk to the people who actually own the secret banks of Spain,” he told his old friend.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Barcelona, Spain

      The blazing sun shone mercilessly on the bustling metropolis of Barcelona. The streets and sidewalks seeming to reflect the waves of searing heat like parabolic mirrors until the entire city appeared to be shining.

       Traffic had slowed to a crawl, and most of the pushcart venders had closed shop. There was no sign of tourists, and even the locals had abandoned the daylight to seek the cooler realms of basements and air-conditioned cafés.

       At a small private airport located far outside the city limits, three Hercules seaplanes sat baking on an isolated strip of cracked asphalt. One of the big planes was closed, its ramps rigidly locked in position. The other two had their access ramps fully descended, the shadowy interior of the aircraft dimly visible through the wavering heat from the ground.

       Dripping sweat, twenty men and women surrounded the hulking aircraft, AK-47 assault rifles carefully balanced in their gloved hands. The Icelanders had stripped down as far as decorum allowed. Everybody was wearing tinted sunglasses, their pale, exposed skin oily with suntan lotion.

       The gold had been divided into three parcels, and now each plane contained roughly a hundred million dollars’ worth. The sheer numbers made Hrafen Thorodensen feel slightly drunk. But it was nothing, a drop in the ocean, to what Britain would end up paying for their inhuman greed.

       “Well, any sign of them yet?” Gunnar Eldjarm demanded, tying a handkerchief around his head to stop the sweat from pouring down his face and washing away the sunscreen.

       “Speak of the devil,” Thorodensen replied, lowering a pair of binoculars.

       A small dust cloud was coming their way from the west, and as it drew closer, he could dimly see an armored truck accompanied by a dozen motorcycles. The riders were masked in combat gear, body armor and mirrored helmets, and Thorodensen tried not to imagine how hot it had to be for the guards, in that heavy equipment. Still, he did appreciate their professionalism.

       The truck and escorts braked a hundred feet away from the idling planes, and a second later the wake of dust arrived, to flow over the area like desiccated fog. The Icelanders started coughing, but held their positions, alert for any treachery by the infamous Spanish bankers.

       Before the armored vehicle had fully stopped moving, the rear doors burst open and out rushed a dozen men carrying an assortment of weaponry—American assault rifles, German autoshotguns and Russian grenade launchers.

       Watching timidly from the shadows inside one of the big planes, Professor Lilja Vilhjalms marveled at the open display of ordnance, and double-checked the EM scanner in her hands for any sign of a tracer signal or microburst. She had personally neutralized the GPS dot from each bar of gold, and destroyed them inside a standard microwave oven. The clever British had thought of everything but that. As her old science teacher had liked to СКАЧАТЬ