Interception. Don Pendleton

lying next to him.

      “Go ahead,” he said.

      “Striker,” Barbara Price said. “I’ve already given Jack new coordinates. We learned something urgent from that file you gave us. Something new has come up.”

      “When doesn’t it?”

      He felt the plane shift course as Jack Grimaldi cut the Saber jet onto new coordinates.

      And so it began.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Mack Bolan jumped from the jet at forty-five thousand feet, opened the canopy high and sailed miles in from out over international waters. He wore a thermal suit and used supplemental oxygen to help him withstand the rigors of high altitude.

      Over time the Executioner had come to excel in such airborne insertion operations. The nature of the deployment was such that stealth was an even higher priority than the lightning-quick speed of heliborne and fast-boat delivery methods. Often it was by high altitude low opening—HALO—jumps. He’d leave the jump plane at up to thirty thousand feet then free fall down to a height of fifteen hundred to a thousand feet, waiting until the last possible minute to deploy for short exposure over the target.

      In the HALO jumps, as in this instance, Bolan’s insertion relied not only on the extreme altitude of the plane, but on great, even vast topographical distance, as well.

      THE COUNTRY WAS an armed camp. North Korea contained a civilian population motivated and conditioned to a degree of loyalty not seen since the Spartans. To help ensure Mack Bolan’s probability in remaining uncompromised by a chance encounter, Stony Man Farm, under mission controller Barbara Price’s direction, had picked a landing zone in a remote section of very rugged terrain in the mountains above the objective. After being outfitted at a Joint Special Operations Command forward operating base in Djibouti on the way in, Bolan was now dressed in complete tree/cliff landing gear: padded suit, football-style helmet with full face mask, reinforced ankle guards. The Farm’s planning called on him to make a tree landing in an isolated valley, rappel from the canopy, then make his way down a steep crevice and into the Yellow River tributary.

      He carried nearly two hundred pounds of mission-essential equipment, weaponry and survival gear for the operation. The mission plan called for infiltration into the site by means of the river, so he jumped with a Draeger Rebreather scuba system. Such an ops plan was horribly “Hollywood” in execution as such a plethora of skills and independent stages greatly increased the operative’s exposure to the double threats of military SNAFUs, including the omnipresent threat of a mission-ending injury.

      Given the choice, Bolan would have preferred walking in, cutting through the DMZ to the south by means of routes already secured and verified by Special Forces teams assigned full-time to covert LRRP/SU ops in the no-man’s land between the north and south of the Asian peninsula.

      But as happened so often when Stony Man Farm and the Executioner were called into play, the operation depended on complete invisibility while at the same time remained hamstrung by timing. The train Bolan intended to intercept was going to be on target on time, and only for that time. The Oval Office wanted a surgical strike with no collateral damage.

      The land was arrayed below the plummeting commando in an uneven checkerboard of blacks and grays. He flared his canopy hard at the last moment, attempting to curtail his momentum as the ground rushed up. He heard then felt his rucksack crash into the copse of trees, then two heartbeats later his feet, tightly clamped together, broke through the mesh of interwoven branches at the top of the canopy. He kept his legs pressed together as gravity yanked him down through branches and tree trunks. He took several bone-jarring impacts before his parachute caught and his neck whip-lashed hard into the special support collars leaving him sore but unharmed.

      Taking stock of his surroundings, he looked down and saw he was about forty feet from the ground, caught halfway up a good-size evergreen. His chute seemed securely trapped above him, but he was too far out from the main trunk for the branches to have enough girth to support him.

      Hitting his quick-release clip, Bolan let his rucksack fall, then pulled himself along the branches of the pine tree until he was on a more stable support. He disengaged the jump harness and secured his nylon ribbon of a rappel cord from a pocket in the lower leg of his padded suit.

      He slipped the strong, flat cord through a D-ring carabiner positioned at his waist and kicked away from the tree, dropping to the ground in a smooth arc. On the forest floor he quickly removed his jumpsuit, helmet and supplemental oxygen along with the rest of his rappel harness. He made no effort to retrieve his chute and paid only cursory attention to camouflaging the gear he was leaving behind. If there was anyone close enough to stumble onto it in the dark, then the mission was probably blown in any case.

      From his pack Bolan secured first his primary weapon, a Chinese model AKM with folding paratrooper stock, and a night-vision-goggle headset. Like a modern-day version of the childhood boogeyman, he hunted at night, could see in the dark and was armed with fearsome claws. Straining against the weight, Bolan slipped into the shoulder straps of his rucksack then took first a GPS reading before double-checking his position with a compass to verify his start point. Satisfied, he set off down the steep, narrow valley toward the dull gleam of the wide river below.

      In many ways his cross-country navigation was almost more dangerous than the HAHO jump, or even than the potential difficulties he faced in his coming swim. Every model of night-vision device available offered depth perception difficulties. The scree-covered terrain was rocky and steep, making his footing uncertain, and he was cutting down not an actual path but rather a rain wash gully. With two hundred pounds on his back each step downhill sent a biting jar through his knees and lower back, threatening to turn his ankles constantly as his heels came down on loose gravel and powdered dirt. The topography was so steep and uncertain Bolan spent half the two-kilometer descent sliding on his backside as opposed to on his feet.

      By the time Bolan reached the floor of the wash he was drenched in sweat and breathing hard. He squatted among the cover of some weeds and cheat grass behind a row of dense shrubs well back from the two-lane blacktop that ran parallel to the river, resting long enough for his heart rate to recover and his breathing to even out. He washed down a couple of the “Go” pills the military gave their pilots on long flights with a full canteen of water. He then opened his rucksack and broke out the dive gear. By his watch he noted he was seven and a half minutes ahead of his pre-op planned time schedule.

      With such a strenuous overland hike and steep descent he had been unable to don his wet suit until just prior to submersion or risk heat fatigue and dangerous dehydration. He quickly stripped and donned the neoprene wet suit. Once he was dressed, he pulled on North Korean army fatigues over the insulated swim gear and retied his combat boots.

      He was stripped down to the essentials for his swim, and other than his primary weapon everything he needed was tightly fitted inside an oversize butt pack or secured across his body in the numerous pockets of his fatigues or pouches on his H-harness web gear.

      Working quickly he fit the poncho-style vest of the rebreather system over his head and shrugged it across his shoulders before pulling the neoprene hood of his wetsuit into place. He fit the mouthpiece and tested the oxygen circuit. Designed for short, shallow dives, the rebreather offered scuba capabilities while eliminating the telltale trail of bubbles of other commercial diving rigs.

      Holding his facemask and swim fins in one hand, Bolan cradled his primary weapon in the crook of his arms and crawled out from his place of concealment and into the mouth of the metal culvert running under the North Korean highway.

      Coming out the other side, he slid into the cold, sluggish water of the Yellow River with all the deadly, fluid agility of motion as a hunting crocodile. Once in the water he spit into his mask and rinsed the faceplate before putting it on and then tucked his swim fins into place around his boots.

      Submerging into the frigid and inky black he began kicking steadily into the middle of the deep river where the current was strongest. Staying about two yards below the surface, he used the luminous dials of his dive watch to judge