Aftershock - Don Pendleton

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back at Makal for one of his antics. I swear—”

      Gogin glared. “Swear what? This animal murdered our own people.”

      “I swear, if I find out that Makal’s stepped out of line, and you’re helping to cover for it, you’re going down a very deep hole,” Baydur threatened.

      “Sure. Coddle the Commies,” Gogin snarled as he slipped off the jeep’s hood. “Makal gets results.”

      Baydur stared back coldly. Sezer threw the jeep into reverse, and the two Turks maintained their glaring contest until the driver spun the vehicle around and turned toward Van.

      Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute

      VIGO PEPIS COULD ONLY watch in impotent horror as the seismic graph for the Lake Van region suddenly shook off the charts. He shot a glance at Bursa, who swallowed hard.

      “It’s at 7.4 and rising,” Zapel spoke up as she read off the graph paper. The needle was going wild. “Seven-five—”

      “Oh my God,” Bursa gasped in helplessness. “The minister of the interior just told me that they’ve lost landline communications with Van.”

      Pepis could only stare as the needle hit 7.7, and the line still didn’t stop increasing in the violence of its activity. Radio transponders on seismic sensors enabled them to keep up with current data, simply because of the vulnerability of landlines to tremors.

      He thought about the region. Van was one of the primary capitals in Turkish Kurdistan, a city of more than two hundred thousand souls, and in one of the most hotly contested parts of the country. Conflicts between the Jandarma and the Kurdish separatists were furious, resulting in thousands of refugees.

      It was the bombing of the relief workers that had masked the initial tremors leading up to this earthquake, leaving Pepis alone and unconfirmed as a prophet of doom. Now, the horrors were coming true, and he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the needle. It was a defense mechanism, because if he took his eyes off the harshly scribbled ink on the graph paper, he’d think of the ancient city, its people and all that it had suffered before.

      Van had seen endless tragedy over the centuries, from when it was first founded, eight hundred years before the birth of Christ. The most blatant horror was the deportation of millions of Armenians from the region, resulting in the deaths of more than half a million refugees, through violence or starvation. Since then, it had only been more of the same, in smaller quantities, but with no less anger or hatred. Now, nearly a quarter of a million people had been struck by the fist of an angry God. Though they were on one of Asia’s largest lakes, Lake Van’s brackish waters were useless for either drinking or irrigation.

      “The minister of the interior is on line three,” Zapel announced.

      Bursa picked up the phone and spoke in hushed, hurried tones, then hung up.

      “Vigo, the military is unable to assist,” he confided. “Whatever is on hand is all that they have.”

      “If the desalinization plants weren’t affected, there might be hope,” Pepis stated. “Otherwise—”

      “The minister wants to know how bad the aftershocks will be,” Bursa cut him off.

      “It’ll be bad. At least in the six range,” Pepis said.

      “It went all the way up to 7.83,” Zapel announced. “But it’s starting to die down.”

      “It’s going to be hell there,” Bursa said numbly.

      Pepis turned away from the graph.

      6

      Mack Bolan’s left hand dug into the loose soil, but his right hand dropped instinctively to the Ka-Bar fighting knife he’d bought earlier that morning. The blade sank into the earth and dragged for a few moments, but finally his slide toward the chomping rift below him slowed. He dug the toes of his boots into the ground and he hauled with all of his might. His war bag skidded closer to the edge, and for a moment he reached out for it before the earth seized shut, smashing the bag between stony jaws.

      The earth stopped heaving, and Bolan drew back, looking at the satchel clamped in the fissure. He winced as a flood of granite pebbles and dust hit him, eyes snapping shut to protect the vulnerable orbs beneath his lids.

      “Brandon!” Abood called. He looked up to see the young woman extending one long leg toward him. “Grab my leg!”

      Bolan hauled himself up on the knife and grabbed her ankle. With the extra leverage, he managed to crawl to the lip of the cliff. Abood slid back from the edge and sighed.

      “We lost the rifles,” Bolan announced.

      “Are you all right?” she asked.

      “No permanent damage,” he answered as he looked toward the fissure. He could see a half-loaded box of ammunition sprawled in the dirt, bullets glinting in the sun.

      “How much do you have?” Abood asked.

      Bolan checked his harness. “Four loaded magazines for the Jericho, and four more for my own Beretta.”

      “You usually carry all that ammo?” Abood asked. She shook her head. “Sorry…I forgot. You’re a spook in hostile territory.”

      “I’ll get by,” Bolan said. He looked around, then grabbed the root of a tree trunk, stretched down and pulled his knife out of the dirt. “It’s not worth the risk to climb down to grab more ammo, but the knife will be useful.”

      Bolan looked toward the city. In the frantic slide to death when the ground first shook, he’d only been concerned about keeping himself and Abood alive. Now, the city of Van had changed drastically from when he’d seen it only moments before. Columns of thick, choking smoke rose lazily into the sky from fires. Clouds of gray-white dust from collapsed buildings formed a hazy fog in the wake of the brutal earthquake.

      “Good God,” Abood whispered.

      Bolan couldn’t speak. Already his mind was racing. He was going to have to navigate through a city where buildings had been compromised. He knew that in the aftermath of such violent earthquakes, lethal aftershocks ripped through the terrain, causing nearly as much damage when shifting earth gave that one final tug that brought down weakened buildings and power lines, or split streets to expose jets of invisible, highly flammable gas into the air. In all of the Executioner’s years of warfare, he had seen only a few cities as thoroughly destroyed, and usually those were the targets of coordinated, concentrated bombing, and the destruction was spread over hours, not moments.

      “We’ve got to do something,” Abood said, breaking the numbed silence.

      “We don’t have anything to help them with,” Bolan answered. “Unless we recover those medical supplies.”

      “Don’t you have contact with your superiors?” Abood asked.

      “No. I was en route from another mission,” Bolan said. “This was sort of a pickup.”

      Abood looked at him in disbelief.

      “If the law finds out that I’m intruding in their territory, there will be hell to pay,” Bolan admitted. “Which was why—”

      “Which was why you didn’t want me along,” Abood concluded. “One of the reasons, at least. Your mystery bosses give you carte blanche in racking up collateral damage?”

      “No, my boss doesn’t want any collateral damage at all,” Bolan answered firmly.

      Abood narrowed her eyes. “Something tells me that I’m looking at your only boss right now.”

      “Are you going to conduct an interview, or do we find those stolen medical supplies and save a few thousand people?” Bolan asked.

      Abood grimaced for a moment, then her irritation dissolved and she smiled softly. “You got me there,

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