Shadow Strike. Don Pendleton

“It’s been a while since we last met face-to-face, Striker,” Brognola said. “I’ve had an awful lot on my plate.”

       “Yeah, so I’ve heard.” Bolan released his grip. “Come on, I have a camp set up over here. Canvas chairs, sandwiches and beer.”

       “Now you’re talking,” Brognola said amiably.

       Following a zigzagging path through the field of broken slabs and boulders, Bolan finally led Brognola into a small clearing. There were a couple of canvas chairs set up near a foam cooler. There was also a battered canvas backpack on the ground nearby, an M-16/M-203 assault rifle combo lying on top.

       “Expecting company?” Brognola asked, scanning the nearby rocks for suspicious movements.

       “Just prepared for it,” Bolan said, sitting in a chair and flipping back the lid of the cooler. Inside was a six-pack of beer, a couple deli-wrapped sandwiches, several grenades and a 9 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun with a sound suppressor attached.

       Brognola tried not to chuckle. The man never missed a trick. “Okay, the last I heard you were in Brooklyn checking on a smuggling ring.”

       “It’s out of business.”

       Yeah, Brognola knew what that meant. The smugglers were dead and buried.

       “So what were they moving? Drugs, illegal aliens, slaves, DVRs, pornography…?”

       “Weapons.”

       He frowned. “Saturday night specials or—”

       “Damn near everything, including North Korean underwater mines.”

       “Damn! How many?”

       “Couple of thousand.”

       “Who the hell would want those in Brooklyn?”

       “You tell me,” Bolan said, and gave the man the full details of the matter.

       “Loki…nope, never heard of them,” Brognola said, massaging his jaw. “That’s the Norse god of mischief, right?”

       “Pretty much. Not necessarily evil, just a pain in the ass. Which makes me wonder if the thieves were sending a message with the name.”

       “As if they want people to know who stole the mines?” Brognola said with a snort. “I don’t like those implications. Sounds like a suicide message. Maybe it was a mistake.”

       “That’s not how I read it, and Loki was good enough to take Mad Mike in his own backyard.”

       “Yeah, good point. Amateurs, but not fools.”

       Bolan then told him about the Squall.

       “The combination of old weapons and advanced technology bothers me. Any idea what they’re planning?”

       “Wish I did,” Bolan said. “Hal, are there any known terrorist groups that operate out of Iceland or Greenland?”

       “Hell no. Those countries don’t even have armies! They’ve got nothing worth stealing or blowing up. Nothing major, anyway.”

       “Then this might be a personal matter.”

       “Swell,” Brognola said with a scowl.

       “Did you bring the files?” Bolan asked.

       “Of course.” The Fed reached inside his flannel shirt to remove a plain white envelope. “A couple of these needed presidential clearance, but the White House owes you big time, so no problem there.”

       “Good to know.” Bolan started riffling through the top secret documents. Where his fingers touched the paper, it turned brown. “Damn, all these are dated yesterday. Anything happen within the past couple of hours? Anything in water? Mysterious explosions, ships lost at sea, river tunnel collapse…anything odd like that?”

       “Sorry, no,” Brognola said, then frowned. “Wait a minute, yes, there was. Just a couple hours ago a British naval convoy went missing off the Azores, all hands lost.”

       “Any reason given?”

       “An unexpected storm.”

       Finishing his sandwich, Bolan arched an eyebrow. “A summer storm…near the Azores Islands at this time of year?”

       “Well, that’s what the prime minister is saying,” Brognola said with a shrug. “Anyway, the British navy went absolutely ape-shit over the sinking, and scrambled two wings of RAF jet fighters out of their base on Gibraltar to sweep the area.”

       “Not helicopters?”

       “Nope.”

       “It’s impossible to rescue drowning sailors in something flying at Mach 3,” Bolan stated, crumpling the paper into a ball and depositing it back into the cooler. “The jets were doing a recon, not a search and rescue.”

       “Obviously. Think those stolen mines sank the convoy?”

       “Could be.”

       A cold breeze blew over the mountains of boulders, carrying the smell of distant plant life mixed with the reek of diesel fumes.

       Bolan leaned forward. “Okay, Hal, what was stolen? A member of the royal family, a new type of message decoder, nerve gas or nuclear warheads?”

       “Give me a minute.” Pulling out his smartphone, Brognola tapped in a number and held a terse conversation. Then he texted somebody else and made another call.

       “They stole gold,” he stated at last.

       “Just gold?” Bolan asked.

       “A lot of it. According to my contact in MI5, the convoy was carrying a full consignment of refined ore from the Imperial Gold Mines UK down in South Africa.”

       “How much gold are we talking about?”

       “Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth, maybe more. The Brits aren’t talking. The Reliant was a big ship, and those are very lucrative mines.”

       “Damn well guess so.”

       “Now, the U.S. Navy had an attack sub in the area patrolling the deep waters, and offered to help with the search and rescue,” Brognola said slowly. “But the British government refused any assistance.”

       “On an S and R?” Bolan frowned. “Those jets were looking for the thieves.”

       “That would be the logical assumption.”

       “Any chance the RAF blew them out of the water?”

       “No way. The Pentagon had a Keyhole spy satellite orbit over the area only minutes behind them. If the Brits blew up anything, even a submarine, we would have seen the oil slick and flotsam.”

       Furrowing his brow, Bolan said nothing for a few minutes. “Tiffany said that the people who stole his mines used a Hercules transport. A Herc could carry a hell of a lot of bullion. If the terrorists are hauling gold, they’d need more than one. Any reports of a couple of Hercules planes being stolen recently? That would give us someplace to start looking for the thieves.”

       “Not that I’ve heard. But if they rented the aircraft, then they wouldn’t be considered missing for days, maybe weeks.”

       “That would be the smart move,” Bolan said.

       “Striker, this is starting to stink to high heaven of a French stepladder.”

       “That possibility occurred to me,” Bolan growled, setting aside the remains of his sandwich.

       “Swell.” Brognola sighed, throwing the squashed beer can at the cooler. It hit the plastic rim and bounced inside.

       A “stepladder” was an old French police term for a street mugger who used a rock to smash the window of a hardware store, to steal a stepladder to rob a house