Interception. Don Pendleton

travel.

      Bolan surfaced after fifteen minutes and stopped kicking, letting the current carry him in among the heavy beams of the crossed pillars supporting a railroad bridge across the river. Working quickly, he stripped his dive gear and let it float down into the cold gray appetite of the water. Reaching up, he grabbed hold of a wide crossbeam and began to climb.

      He pulled himself up, hand over hand, twisting around the cross beams and climbing higher and higher. Above him the horizontal beams housing the tracks grew closer and closer and the wind picked up the nearer he drew to the lip of the canyon. He climbed with his Kalashnikov hung muzzle down across his back, and by the time he reached the top the water had stopped dripping behind him. He double-checked his watch and crawled into position, fitting himself tight into the trestle joist.

      Intelligence stated that the protocol for all military rail transports leaving the Yellow River Restricted Military Zone stopped on the other side of the bridge to allow for routine security inspections of transport documents. There were schedules to be kept, protocols to be followed, routines to be adhered to. He would have the three-minute window it took for the brakeman to change the tracks to get out from under the bridge and onboard the train without being seen by the armed sentries of the Army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the DPRK.

      The time frame itself was ludicrous enough, as any delay along the way could have thrown the whole operation into jeopardy, but such a tight schedule hadn’t dissuaded Bolan, and Stony Man hadn’t apologized during his initial briefing.

      The Executioner focused wholly on the task ahead of him and with the patience of a trapdoor spider as he lay in wait as the North Korean freight train approached then skidded to a stop in a shower of sparks and the harsh squeal of steel-on-steel. Spotlights glared down the length of the track as the military checkpoint on the far side of the bridge followed their established practice. This night the institutionalized paranoia of the DPRK would prove well founded.

      Bolan scrambled up through the girders and pulled himself onto the train track. He looked down the serpentine length of the transport train toward the lead engine and saw two men in heavy military overcoats climbing into the engineer’s compartment. The searchlight mounted at the top of the checkpoint shack began to rotate and play along the length of the train.

      Bolan began to move fast.

      He scrambled up next to the coupling housing between two railroad boxcars and out of the path of the advancing searchlight. The powerful beam of illumination ran down the train, and Bolan shrank back into the protective enclosure of the railcar’s shadow. Once it was past, he scrambled upward, climbing smoothly until he reached the apex of the boxcar.

      At the summit he slid over the end of the train and quickly scanned in both directions. Five cars down there was a gap between the roofs of the olive-green boxcars, indicating a flatbed railcar. Beneath him the train began to sway as the brakes were kicked off and the engineer let go with a whistle blast to signal the imminent movement of the long train.

      The industrial locomotive lurched to a start and began to gather speed, slowly at first but then with greater and greater momentum as the train began to push forward. Bolan hugged the roof as the train moved past the checkpoint and plunged into the sharply mountainous countryside beyond the river. He clung precariously for several minutes as the train finished gathering speed and began placing more and more distance behind it from the access station out of the restricted area.

      Finally ready, Bolan lifted up off the roof of the boxcar and began to navigate his way down the line of cars.

      THE MISSILE COMPONENTS were housed in wooden crates, but there was no disguising them if a person knew what to look for. The main crates were thirty-two feet long, holding the medium-range intercontinental rockets while additional storage boxes housed the powerful engines and the advanced computer guidance systems inside the conical tips. Stony Man intelligence had them en route to Pyongyang and from there to Iran by freighter.

      The Executioner had been deployed to send a message about the traffic of such advanced and powerful weapon systems, and he carried enough Semtex explosives in his kit to guarantee there would be no misunderstanding.

      From his position on the boxcar overlooking the flatbed where the pyramid stack of rockets had been secured, Bolan was able to count four guards. The train was traveling at full speed now and the mountain winds were bitter and harsh, driving the sentries into sheltered alcoves. Bolan felt confident he could place his demolition charges unobserved.

      He moved quickly, sliding down the iron ladder built into the boxcar. He landed on the access platform just as a fifth soldier, with NCO markings on his uniform, came around the edge of the car on the signalman’s catwalk.

      The man was shorter than Bolan by half a foot, stockily built with high, flat cheekbones and dark brown eyes that widened almost comically in surprise at the sudden apparition of a dark-clothed Occidental. The man clawed for a 9 mm Tokarev TT30 pistol as Bolan, hands empty, leaped forward.

      The man managed a short bark of surprise before Bolan struck. Lunging forward, the Executioner lifted his left knee to his chest and kicked explosively, driving the heel of his combat boot in the man’s chest and driving him backward over the railing of the catwalk.

      The North Korean soldier flipped and struck the basalt-and-gravel dike running next to the tracks in a spinning tumble before bouncing away. Then the racing train was gone and sparks flew as a burst of AKM fire slammed into the railcar next to Bolan’s head.

      Spinning, the big American dropped to one knee even as he cleared his silenced pistol from its shoulder holster. From the walkway next to the rockets on the flatbed a North Korean soldier leveled a Chinese AKM at him, aiming for a second burst.

      Bolan’s pistol chugged softly and spent brass tumbled out of its breech and off over the edge of the train, as lost in the night as the noncommissioned officer had been. The Korean sentry jerked under the impact of the 3-round burst, his head snapping and blood splashing off to the side. As he tumbled to the floor of the railcar, his partner suddenly appeared directly behind him.

      For a heartbeat the two men looked at each other, then Bolan’s rounds found the other man’s chest and he pitched forward, victim of a lead coronary. The man struck the floor of the flatbed, then rolled and was sucked away in a flash.

      Bolan leaped forward, grasped the cold metal railing in one hand and vaulted the barrier onto the railcar. The wind cutting across the exposed carriage was hard and cold. He had to move quickly. The burst of weapons fire had to have alerted the other pair of armed guards, but Bolan could only hope that the noise of the train had deafened the reports for any reinforcements positioned inside the railcars.

      The Executioner landed hard on his rubber-soled boots, which absorbed some of the shock of his impact. He went down to one knee, then came back up. His right hand tucked his pistol away as his left reached around and swung the silenced Kalashnikov from behind his back on its sling. He took up the assault rifle just as a third North Korean soldier rounded the corner at the far end of the platform, his weapon up and hunting for a target.

      Bolan squeezed the Kalashnikov’s trigger and felt the recoil of the long rifle thump into his shoulder. The heavy-caliber rounds burned across the space between the two combatants and ripped the other man apart, then Bolan caught a flash of motion out of the corner of his eye and instinctively pivoted to face the new threat.

      CHAPTER TWO

      The final guard had circled and climbed over the secured crates housing the disconnected rockets. The muzzle of the man’s weapon blazed a star pattern, but green tracer fire buzzed harmlessly past Bolan as he drew down and punched the man from his perch with a short burst.

      Bolan did not hesitate. He sprinted forward, hurtled across the body of the second man he’d killed, and charged down the length of the flatbed. As he ran, he let the silenced AKM drop to his side and pulled his ready-prepped satchel charges from their web belt carriers and rushed to put them into position.

      He moved back and forth in a huddled crouch around the ends of the rockets, working with feverish