Interception. Don Pendleton

of the railcar, spreading his legs wide to slow his momentum. From just a few feet away he thrust the muzzle of his AKM forward and triggered a burst.

      His rounds roared into the exposed weapon firing at him and ripped it from the soldier’s hands as the hardball slugs tore through the stock and receiver, shattering it beyond use. The soldier’s hand disappeared in an explosion of red mist, and his scream was ripped away by the rushing wind.

      Bolan spun on the slick metal of the roof and gained his feet. He pushed himself up, fired a second burst of harassing fire, then turned and sprinted in the opposite direction. As he neared the edge of the car and the flatbed containing the second shipment of missile components came into view, he saw a North Korean soldier scramble into position while trying to bring his assault rifle to bear.

      Bolan fired and knocked him spinning off the railcar. The man screamed horrifically as he tumbled over the edge like a pinwheel, bounced off the basalt lip of the track and plunged down the mountainside below like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake. Bolan leaped into the air and landed on top of the flatbed car. He ducked and slid over the side of the pile just as a North Korean soldier sidled around the end of the flatbed freight car. The soldier fired as Bolan was freeing the last of his satchel charges. The Executioner thrust his own assault rifle forward by the pistol grip, using the sling like a second hand and pulled the trigger.

      The shots were hasty and he was off balance as he fired, but he hosed the area in a spray-and-pray maneuver designed to force the man backward. He rolled over, feeling the hard edge of the wooden crate bite into his hip, and squeezed the trigger again, then broke off, recentered and fired once again.

      The bullets caught the North Korean soldier center mass and he staggered under their impact, his weapon tumbling from useless hands as Bolan let the muzzle recoil climb so that bullets chewed the man apart, drilling him from sternum to skull in a staccato hail of slugs.

      Bolan turned and slid the last satchel into place, keying up the transponder for his electronic signal. Soldiers rushed to the edge of the roof of the boxcar next to him and started firing down at him. Wood splinters flew in the air as a fire team of North Korean soldiers shot at him. He ducked behind the end of the crates and threw his rifle to one side. Green tracer fire burned past his position as he recentered the shoulder straps of his specially outfitted rucksack.

      He pulled the transmitter out of its pocket as more and more rifle fire drew down on his position. Grabbing hold of the electronic device, he turned toward the edge of the train overlooking the open valley. He sucked in two quick breaths and sprinted out from cover. Three hard steps and he was on the edge, then he kicked off and threw himself out into space. Behind him the withering fire petered off as the uniformed men on the train watched him fall, hypnotized into stunned amazement.

      Bolan felt the air rushing up into his face with surprising force. He saw the snakelike twisting of the Yellow River five hundred feet below him, then turned and hit the button on his detonator. There was a pause half a heartbeat long, then the train was blown off the mountain at the two flatbed points containing the rocket bodies and engines. A yellow ball of fire rolled out from the mountain and a wave of heat descended on Bolan as he fell.

      His fist came up to his left breast just beside the suspender of his H-harness web gear and jerked the D-ring handle. There was a pause that lasted for entirely too long in his racing thoughts as he plunged below three hundred feet and the dark water of the river came into sharper focus.

      The minichute, also called a stunt chute—of the kind used by BASE jumpers—rushed out and caught. Bolan was jerked to a stop for a moment, then gravity reclaimed him and he began to fall toward the river again, his descent slowing modestly. At fifteen feet above the surface, when the dark water of the river filled his vision beyond his dangling feet, Bolan hit the cut-away and dropped out of his harness to fall like a stone.

      He struck the cold water for the second time that night and felt it rush in over his head. Letting the current take him, his hand went to his waist where he shrugged out of his web gear and let it float away, keeping only the laptop carry case. He kicked for the surface and deployed his final piece of gear, a life vest designed to keep him buoyant in the water.

      Above his head the side of the mountain burned. Working quickly, he swam to the shore and pushed the black leather case out of the water. Putting one knee down on the gravel against the current, Bolan opened the case to make sure it had kept the water out and then resealed it. Moving quickly, he used the air-tight pouches that he had used to transport his satchel charges to insulate the carry case then, after securing it to himself, he swam back out into the fast-moving current.

      Forty minutes later he activated his emergency beacon and let the river carry him out toward the Sea of Japan.

      When Jack Grimaldi got the signal, he flew the seaplane in low under the radar and put the pods down on the choppy water beyond the breakers fronting the rocky shoreline. He knew North Korean naval units were responding as he pulled Bolan out of the situation, but aggressive electronic jamming by units of the U.S. Air Force based out of the Japanese mainland easily outclassed their counterparts in the DPRK.

      SIX HOURS LATER the Stony Man cybercrew cracked the encryption security on the laptop and things really began to roll.

      The first of the hijacked information was the most important.

      Under Kim Su-Kweon’s control, his intelligence agency had forged an alliance with the Hong Kong triad known as the Mountain and Snake Society. Mostly the deal had involved the laundering of forged American money and as a secondary outlet for North Korea’s prodigious methamphetamine production operation. But Stony Man had discovered that the use of the triad cutouts extended far beyond that.

      The Mountain and Snake Society had aggressively expanded its influence, most commonly by brute force, into any area on the global stage where there was a Chinese population presence or criminal activity already in existence on an international scale. The waterfront areas of Split, Croatia, had certainly qualified on the latter if not always on the former, and North Korean intelligence had entered into an arms trafficking enterprise with Russian oligarch Victor Bout through intermediaries of the Mountain and Snake Society triad.

      The triad subsidiary had then taken it upon itself to expand its own business interests and began performing mercenary criminal functions for Chechen, Russian and Azerbaijani mafia-style organizations. Most significantly to Stony Man had been the triad’s agreement to provide a safehouse for and act as intermediaries to, the kidnapping of the daughter of an American official in Split.

      The disappearance of Karen Rasmussen had baffled American security services who had focused their resources on known terror organizations in the area, leading them up one blind alley after another. Kim had known exactly where the young woman was being held and what was to become of her.

      Now the Executioner did, as well.

      CHAPTER THREE

      The long-range helicopter dropped out of the Eastern European night and hugged the ocean surf. Bolan looked out through his door on the copilot side and eyed the waters of the Adriatic Sea. It was even darker than the night, its water black and disturbingly deep. On the horizon in front of them a mile or so out, the brilliant lights of Split flared with near blinding intensity.

      Bolan looked over at the helicopter pilot, his old friend Jack Grimaldi. The man, dressed in aviator flight-suit and helmet offered him a thumbs-up and pointed at the GPS display on the helicopter dashboard.

      “One mile out,” Grimaldi said.

      The pilot’s face was cast in the greenish reflection of his dome lights, making his features stark and slightly surreal. Bolan reached down between them, then secured his dive bag across his body, which was sheathed in a black dry suit of quarter-inch neoprene against the chilly water below them.

      Grimaldi banked the helicopter and lowered into a hover above the rough sea. A sudden gust of wind hammered into the side of the aircraft and threatened to send it spinning into the waves. Reacting smoothly, the Stony Man pilot fought the struggling helicopter back into a level hover. The wind gust carved a sudden