Final Resort. Don Pendleton

stood easy while the copilot made sure he’d done the job correctly.

      “Quick releases here, here and here,” the flyboy said, tapping each safety catch in turn. “Don’t use them, though, unless you wind up in the water. Shouldn’t happen, but it does, sometimes.”

      “Noted,” Bolan replied.

      “Another strap here, for your bag,” the copilot said. “Leaves your hands free for the cable.”

      Bolan double-strapped the smallish bag to his left hip, then accepted gloves and goggles from the navy airman. Putting on the goggles meant removing his headphones. The copilot replaced them with a set of earmuffs lacking any common link.

      “Expect some spray,” the airman told him, now required to shout. “It’s unavoidable. They’ll have dry clothes for you on board.”

      “I hear you.”

      “Ready?”

      Bolan nodded.

      “Right. Stand in the door.”

      A sea monster had risen underneath them while they hovered in the air, discussing spray and buckles. It was more than five hundred feet long, with water still sluicing from its flanks and conning tower, swirls of foam still visible on deck. As Bolan stood and watched, a hatch opened some thirty feet in front of the Poseidon’s conning tower.

      Bolan felt the light tap on his shoulder, used both hands to grip the cable fastened to his harness overhead and stepped out into space. The chopper lowered him serenely, like a hand-cranked bucket going down into a well.

      The salt spray started whipping at him when he was approximately halfway down. The helicopter’s downdraft set him slowly spinning, but it didn’t spoil his view of sailors scrambling through the open hatch below, to stand on the Poseidon’s forward deck. Bolan supposed that two of them were there to help him from his harness and get him belowdecks, while the third was sent to supervise.

      It was the military way.

      He touched down on the deck without a spill into the sea, and seconds later Bolan was without his rigging, saw it hoisting back into the air. An ensign welcomed him aboard without much warmth and led the way below, Bolan’s two escorts steering and supporting him until he found his sea legs.

      Poseidon’s skipper met him with a handshake, introduced himself as Captain Walter Gossage, and led Bolan to the conning tower, aft. Some of the seamen watched them pass, but most attended to their duties and ignored the Executioner.

      “I don’t know what you heard while you were airborne,” Gossage said, when they were standing underneath the conning tower, “but I’ve got bad news.”

      “I’m getting used to it,” Bolan replied.

      “Okay. Seems that the people you’ve been looking for have taken over a resort in Cuba. Bahia Matanzas. Ever heard of it?”

      The warrior shook his head.

      “I hadn’t either,” Gossage told him, “but I’ve got coordinates. We’re on our way.”

      Washington, D.C.

      BROGNOLA HAD BEEN WAITING for the call. He answered on the first ring of his secure line and recognized Mack Bolan’s voice at once.

      “How many hostages?” Bolan asked.

      “Based on what we have from corporate headquarters, in Toronto, there should be about eleven hundred. Two or three hundred employees, all depending on the day and time.”

      “I’ll see what I can do,” Bolan said.

      “Stay in touch, if possible.”

      “Will do.”

      The line went dead without a sign-off, something Brognola had gotten used to over time. Bolan was information-oriented, sometimes short on the amenities, which suited him just fine.

      They had a bloody job of work to do, and pleasantries were strictly out of place.

      He thought about the murdered hostages aboard the Tropic Princess. He had seen the uncut tape, shot by a member of the SEAL team, and while he had seen much worse over the course of his career, the casual brutality still left him angry and unsettled.

      Brognola tried to follow Bolan in his mind, tracked the Poseidon on its run to Bahia Matanzas, where he would meet his contact on the island.

      Brognola knew nothing of Maria Santos, beyond what he’d read in her slim CIA dossier. He hoped she wouldn’t clash with Bolan, wouldn’t slow him too much or screw things up somehow by getting squeamish in the crunch. If she knew what was coming, understood how much it meant to all concerned, maybe she’d be all right.

      Maybe—and maybe not.

      Cuba

      MARIA SANTOS LIT a cigarette, cursing her lack of willpower even as she inhaled and felt the first sweet kick of nicotine. She had quit smoking two weeks earlier, but now resumed the habit almost without conscious thought, while waiting in the darkness for a stranger who could change—or end—her life.

      That life was tense enough without the latest complication. In fact, Santos led two lives: one as a dutiful and conscientious secretary for the Cuban Ministry of Agriculture in Havana, and another as a contract agent for the CIA. One was an exercise in tedium that paid her bills; the other added spice—and danger—to an otherwise mundane existence bounded by her daytime job, a small circle of uninspiring friends, and dates with men who came expecting sex as payback for a cheap meal in a dreary restaurant.

      She could have chosen to decline the job—she had considered it, in fact; but she finally agreed, feeling a sense of obligation that confused her even now. She’d been relieved when half of the escapees turned up on the Tropic Princess, sailing off into the sunset with their mostly Anglo hostages, taking the problem far away from her.

      Now, this.

      The terrorists at Bahia Matanzas couldn’t sail away. They couldn’t fly—or, rather, most of them could not—because the resort’s helicopter seated only four passengers, in addition to the pilot. They couldn’t even drive or walk away, now that the Cuban army and security police had thrown a ring of men and guns around the great resort’s eight hundred acres.

      They were trapped, in fact, together with their hostages.

      So, how, in God’s name, did the CIA expect her to transport a stranger—an American—past all the watchers, snipers and patrols, to penetrate Bahia Matanzas? The thought had distressed her, at first.

      And then she had an idea.

      Santos only hoped the stranger who was on his way to meet her, Matt Cooper, was able to perform the trick she had in mind.

      The plan she had devised for Bahia Matanzas put her life at risk, not just her job and liberty. If caught, she might be executed on the spot, without even the semblance of a trial. But if she didn’t try, Santos knew that she would always feel as if the blood of murdered hostages was on her hands.

      That was ridiculous, she realized, but logic held no sway over emotion.

      Stubbing out her cigarette, she reached for another, then drew back her hand. She would make herself wait a while longer. Ten minutes, or maybe fifteen. An exercise in discipline, to occupy her mind while she waited for the stranger from America.

      The man who, if he wasn’t skilled and very careful, just might get her killed.

      THE EXECUTIONER double-checked the minimal gear that he’d brought with him from the Farm. He had his shoulder rig for the Beretta 93-R, two spare magazines—making it sixty rounds, in all—and a commando dagger honed to razor-sharpness, in a lightweight nylon sheath.

      That hardware wouldn’t see him through what lay ahead, but Bolan had to wait and see what was available once he arrived in Cuba and made contact with Maria Santos. Given Cuban history over the past half century, Bolan expected Russian weapons to predominate, along with knockoffs