Road Of Bones. Don Pendleton

him into the line of fire and ending it with head shots.

       Which left one.

       Bolan emerged to find the last man standing with a pistol pressed against the naked woman’s head, half-crouched to use her as a human shield.

       The soldier found a vantage point beyond the ring of light and stopped there, took a second to unfold his submachine gun’s stock and raise it to his shoulder. As stubby as it was, the little room-broom hadn’t been designed for sniping, but at forty feet he thought the shot was doable.

       His weapon had a flip-up rear sight with a front cylindrical post. Its eight-inch barrel produced a muzzle velocity of 2400 feet per second, slower than the full-size AK-74, but an insignificant difference at what amounted to point-blank range.

       While his target shouted, sounding more agitated by the moment, Bolan found his mark and held it—just above the guy’s left eyebrow, with the SMG’s selector set for semiauto fire. One shot, and if he missed it…

       Crack!

       A crimson halo wreathed the gunman’s head as he slumped over backward. Bolan thought the naked woman gasped but wasn’t sure. He crossed the open floor to reach her, opening a knife in transit. Keeping his eyes averted as he slit the duct tape at her wrists and ankles, he reached around to cut one side along her rib cage.

       Finally, he met her eyes and saw the fear behind them. When she asked him something, Bolan couldn’t understand it.

       “Slow down or speak English,” he suggested.

       “Da. Yes. Who are you?”

       “A friend, sent to get you.”

       “Friend?” She didn’t seem to recognize the term.

       He nodded. “We need to go. Do you have any clothes?”

       “Shredded,” she told him, covering herself belatedly as best she could with slender arms. “They thought I wouldn’t need them…after.”

       Bolan scanned the killing ground and saw a sport coat draped across a second chair, almost outside the ring of light. He collected it and passed it to the woman while he thought about the rest.

       The man who’d used her as a shield was several inches taller than the woman, but he had a narrow waist. She’d have to roll the cuffs up on his slacks, but it could work if she cinched up his belt.

       “You mind a pair of hand-me-downs?” he asked, his back turned as he began to strip the corpse.

       “What do you…oh. No, those will do for now. My shoes are over here somewhere,” she told him, moving gingerly toward the rim of shadow. “With my bag, I think.”

       Bolan kept his head turned as she came to get the slacks. When she was covered, buckling the dead man’s belt, she told him, “Don’t forget their guns.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      Japan, seven hours earlier

      Bolan was in the middle of another operation when the call came. He’d been wreaking havoc on a drug pipeline, tracking the flow of heroin from Yakuza controllers through the Philippines, on to Hawaii, where it spilled into the veins of addicts.

       He was up against the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s most prosperous Yakuza Family and one of the world’s largest criminal organizations, with an estimated forty-five thousand oath-bound members and countless other close associates. Aside from heroin, the syndicate made billions annually from gambling, human trafficking and prostitution, internet pornography, 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