LITMIR.BIZ

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INTERPOL intelligence had managed to get a line on Sevan’s movements, they’d expected him to end up back at the walled town of Artakar, twenty miles east of Tumyanan, where the Jadur clan ruled it and the surrounding mountainous countryside with a heavy hand. Every village and farm in ten kilometers had been co-opted by the syndicate, with large rewards for reporting any suspicious behavior, and illegal shipments of contraband ranging from heroin to guns to women often stored in farms before being moved on to their final destination.

      The mission had been straightforward: Bolan would go in, alone, infiltrate the headquarters, kidnap Sevan and extract him to an airfield near Tumyanan, where Jack Grimaldi waited to fly them both to Washington, D.C. No one in European law enforcement would know he was in-country—the Armenians were as free with their bribes with law enforcement as with anyone else, and rumors ran rampant of corrupted police officers and administrators in a half-dozen countries. In and out, no muss, no fuss, the whole operation had been scheduled to take no more than thirty-six hours.

      That deadline had passed two days ago. When Sevan hadn’t showed up, Stony Man Farm had put out cautious feelers about what was behind the deviation. A change in plans, or was the entire mission some kind of smokescreen or diversion? Careful intel-gathering and analysis by Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman and Akira Tokaido, members of Stony Man’s cyber team, revealed that the criminal ringleader had been held up by a supposedly minor matter involving a meeting with Salvatore Gambini, one of the heads of the Italian Mafia with whom the Armenians were very close. The meeting had run long, with the two crime family heads celebrating their partnership. When he’d heard about the change in plans, Bolan had cursed not being able to try to get to that one. There were few things he liked better than capturing two scumbag mobsters for the price of one. Gambini would simply have to wait until another day.

      Instead he had sat and watched and waited, preferring to take the chance of staying to capture the mob leader rather than leaving and attempting to pick up his trail another day. The longer he stayed in place, however—even with moving his base camp once already to obscure traces of his being here—the odds were greater that he would be detected sooner or later.

      Although the Jadur patrols didn’t come out this far, Bolan couldn’t take a chance on a shepherd or farmer stumbling across his base of operations. His low-slung, camouflaged tent was covered by the native grasses so artfully so that an intruder would have had to step on it to discover it. When the flap was closed, it was just another grass-covered hillock among a cluster of them scattered on the mountainside. Bolan had been living on cold MREs—meals ready to eat—and doing anything outside the tent under the cover of darkness, using night-vision goggles to see if the moon was obscured. He hadn’t lit a fire, awakening on the brisk autumn morning to heavy frost and a chilly tent, nor showered in the past two days, as well.

      Despite the uncertainly and rough conditions, Bolan lived for situations like this, pitting himself against both the elements and his enemy. Unlike just about anyone else who found themselves in this situation, he thrived on the challenges of remaining undetected while completing his mission, no matter what obstacles might be thrown in his path.

      All of which brought him back to the moment at hand, and the two men walking just a few paces away from his hidden lair. The odds were good that they might be part of Aleksandr Sevan’s mob. On the other hand, they might be two farmers, perhaps a father and his eldest son from a nearby farm, out hunting game birds. Either way, if they found Bolan, the odds were very good that they were both going to die. While he tried to avoid civilian casualties—that was the kindest term he could use to refer to any of the population of the area—these tough, hardy mountain people had compromised themselves by accepting deals with the devil that lived in the walled city.

      Sevan’s control of the region was ironclad, and Bolan couldn’t take the chance of anyone seeing him and telling the mobsters. His mission was too important to risk because of a chance encounter. Therefore, he waited; every sense locked on what he could hear and smell of the two men, and stood ready to execute both of them, even while hoping they would simply keep walking.

      “Doesn’t look like they’ve spotted you, Striker,” a voice said in his ear. Bolan didn’t reply. The voice came from Akira Tokaido, about six thousand miles away in the Stony Man Farm Computer Room, watching the two men through the 1.8 gigapixel eye of an ARGUS camera mounted on the underbelly of a Predator Hawk drone flying overhead at 15,000 feet. “Hunting rifles are confirmed. I think they’re old Mosin-Nagants. Anyway, they’ve passed your site, and are moving south-southeast, still walking and talking. Looks like they’re headed down the mountain. We’ll keep tabs on them in case they come back your way.”

      Even with the all-clear sounded, Bolan waited until the men’s conversation faded from hearing before he uncurled his fingers from his pistol and replied. “Copy that.”

      “That was way too close for my comfort,” Kurtzman grumbled. Bolan imagined him watching several monitors at once from his wheelchair while drinking from a cup of his abominable coffee that was always brewed 24/7 at the Farm. “Far be it from me to second-guess you, Striker. We’ve backed you on a lot of high-risk missions before, but even before the delay, this one seems a bit, well—”

      “Suicidal?” Akira offered.

      “I was going to say high-risk, but if the combat boot fits...” Kurtzman’s voice trailed off

      Slowly, cautiously, Bolan unzipped his observation port and stuck out his camouflaged high-powered binoculars. First he spotted the two hunters, watching them for a few seconds as they trudged away from him. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Tokaido or the incredible technology watching over him; it was just that, when out in the field, Bolan preferred to always verify what information came his way with his own eyes whenever possible.

      “Duly noted, Bear.” After the hunters had disappeared from view, Bolan turned his attention to the walled city below him.

      There was a pause from Stony Man and Bolan imagined the two men, Kurtzman grizzled and older, Tokaido younger, with his ever-present earbuds pressed into his ears, exchanging puzzled glances. “You’ve seen the plans,” Tokaido said. “It’s a fortress, and I’m not talking about one from the Middle Ages, either.”

      As he studied the high stone walls, with lookout towers cleverly built in so they seemed to be a part of the medieval defenses, not to mention the small army of alert guards and attack dogs backing up a twenty-first-century web of high-tech surveillance equipment, Bolan had to admit that Tokaido was correct. Even so, his mouth curved into a sardonic grin.

      “Yeah, but if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be any fun sneaking in, now would it?” he replied. “Look, I appreciate the concern, but we’ve been over all this before.” Bolan didn’t drop his field glasses while talking, just continued scanning the city on the plateau beneath him. “It’s a complete stealth op. Infiltrate, acquire the target, exfiltrate, all without anyone being the wiser.”

      “Yes, and that all sounds great,” Kurtzman replied. “The part that concerns me is our intelligence showing that more than sixty percent of the town’s inhabitants are members of the Jadur clan mafia. It’s one thing if you were sneaking into a village of civilians, but about two-thirds of the people in this place are some kind of criminal, and we know the Armenians don’t mess around. It’d be one thing if we had Phoenix Force on hand to back you up—”

      “But they’re busy in Australia right now, so, I’ll just have to do it real quiet...” Bolan trailed off as he spotted a caravan of black SUVs coming up the lone dirt road to the main gates of the village. Sleek and squat, they boasted tinted windows and were undoubtedly armored.

      “Akira, you see what I see?”

      “The small fleet of sport-utes at the gate? Roger that.” Bolan heard the faint click of keys as the whiz kid accessed information. He kept his eyes glued to the four-vehicle procession, which was swept underneath with mirrors for bombs, as well as what looked like electronic sniffers.

      After a minute Tokaido came back on. “They originated from Erebuni Airport, south of the capital city of Yerevan. Left there at 10:30 a.m. and traveled straight through until they reached their

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