LITMIR.BIZ

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more in the breach than in the observance, Baltic gangs had more in common with outlaws from south of the border. They were full-bore savages, respecters of no one and nothing, as likely to wipe out a family as to bide their time and take down one offending member on his own.

      So Bolan had his work cut out for him, and that was nothing new.

      He finished off his last burger and hit the road.

      Northbound on Interstate 95

      THE MAIN DRAG from Washington, DC, to New York City was the I-95, a more or less straight shot for 225 miles, four hours’ steady driving at the posted legal speed.

      Bolan used the travel time to think and plan, which were not necessarily the same thing. Planning was a kind of thinking, sure, but it required at least some basic information on terrain, opposing personnel, police proximity and average response time. Even weather factored in. A wild-ass warrior pulling raids with nothing in his head but hope and good intentions might as well eliminate the middleman and simply shoot himself.

      Bolan’s rented Mazda CX-5 had a full tank when he started rolling north from Washington, meaning he wouldn’t have to stop along the way. He wore the Glock and had his long guns on the floor behind the driver’s seat, concealed inside a cheap golf bag he’d bought in Arlington, midway between the gun shop and the burger joint. The small crossover SUV had GPS and cruise control, two less things for him to think about while he was looking forward to the shitstorm in New York.

      Brognola’s digital files included various addresses and phone numbers, both for Melnyk’s gang and Brusilov’s, along with photos of the major players on both sides. Bolan could find their homes and hangouts when he needed to, plot them on Google Maps and make his final recon when he reached the target sites, to maximize results and minimize civilian risks. An app on Bolan’s smartphone had the city’s precinct houses plotted for easy reference and made him wonder, as he always did, how seventy-seven patrol districts wound up being numbered 1 through 123.

      Go figure.

      He had certain basic limitations, going in. Bolan’s weapon selection in Virginia covered close assaults and sniping from a distance, but he’d had no access to explosives or Class III weapons: full-auto, suppressors and so on. He could absolutely work with what he had and make it count, but tools dictated tactics on the battlefield, as much as the terrain and numbers on the opposition’s side.

      The good news: Bolan had a built-in conflict he could work with, Russians and Ukrainians reflecting the eternal strife between their homelands. They had lit the fuse already. Bolan’s challenge was to keep it sizzling, fan the flames and do his utmost to direct the final blast so that it damaged only those deserving retribution.

      Making things more difficult, while waging war on two fronts, was the fact that Bolan also had to gather intel on Stepan Melnyk’s connection to the massacre in Washington. If the man had supplied the tools, as Hal suspected, was it strictly business, a labor of love, or a mixture of both?

      Behind that question lurked a larger one. The conflict in Ukraine had been confused from the beginning, talking heads on television squabbling over whether Russia planned the whole thing as a power play or simply took advantage of a split within its former subject country. On the ground inside Ukraine and in Crimea, both sides longed for US intervention to assist in the destruction of their enemies, but military aid had been withheld so far, as much because of gridlock in DC as obvious concern about the right or wrong of it.

      Could the attack in Washington have been a false flag operation? Viewed from one perspective, it made sense: unleash a handful of Ukrainian fanatics in the US capital, to swing the people and the government against their side. Whether America weighed in against the rebels overseas with military force or simply closed its eyes to Russia’s not-so-covert moves against them, the result would be identical, handing the independence movement yet another grim defeat.

      That wasn’t Bolan’s problem, on the face of it. He couldn’t solve the troubles in Ukraine that dated back to sixteen-hundred-something, any more than he could cure the common cold. Bolan was not a diplomat, much less a peacekeeper. He was a man of war—The Executioner—and he had a specific job to do, first in New York, then following the bloody bread crumbs eastward, settling accounts as he proceeded.

      By the time Bolan got to Newark, he had a sequence of events in mind. It was a plan of sorts, but flexible, bearing in mind that things would start to shift and change the moment that he squeezed a trigger for the first time. Nothing would be static, much less guaranteed. The battle would unfold, and Bolan would be swept along with it, correcting course whenever he could manage to, otherwise going with the flow until it crested and the losers drowned in blood.

      It was familiar territory. Names and faces changed, but otherwise it felt like coming home.

       2

      East Village, Manhattan

      The hub of Ukrainian culture in New York City—known for decades as “Little Ukraine”—was located in the neighborhood of East Village. An estimated sixty thousand immigrants inhabited the area immediately after World War II, and while that population dispersed throughout Manhattan’s five boroughs over time, two-thirds of the city’s eighty thousand ethnic Ukrainians still remained in the old neighborhood, with its familiar markets, restaurants and shops, dwelling in the shadows cast by All Saints Ukrainian Orthodox Church and St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic Church.

      Like any other group of new arrivals, from the first European colonists to the latest Hispanic and Afro-Caribbean waves, the vast majority of Ukrainian immigrants were hardworking, law-abiding individuals with nothing on their minds except adapting to the land of opportunity. And just as certainly, a small minority were criminals at home, maintaining that tradition in the country they had adopted.

      Mack Bolan had his sights fixed on that clique, as he launched his campaign in Little Ukraine on a crisp autumn evening, around the dinner hour.

      His target, chosen from the list Hal Brognola had provided, was a restaurant on East Sixth Street, halfway down toward Avenue B. The place was called The Hungry Wolf, known as a favored hangout for the thugs who served Stepan Melnyk. Bolan’s drive-by recon had revealed that the restaurant was closed to walk-in diners for a private party. Two men on the door guaranteed that no tourists wandered in by accident.

      Was it a celebration of the carnage in DC? Some kind of session called to lay out future strategy? Or did the outfit gather periodically to let off steam after a hard week of extortion in the neighborhood?

      No matter. They were in for a surprise, regardless of the reason for their banquet.

      Bolan perched atop a seven-story office building opposite The Hungry Wolf, with a clear view inside the restaurant through two large plate-glass windows. Peering through the Leupold sight mounted on his Remington bolt-action rifle, he felt almost like a guest invited to the party, moving in among the four-and six-man tables, touching-close but unseen by the men whose night he meant to spoil.

      For some, it would be their last night on Earth.

      The Model 700 was not designed with war in mind, though Remington did sell a special “Entry Package” model for urban police departments, and the US Army had adopted an altered version, dubbed the M24 Sniper Weapon System in military speak, for long-range use in combat. Bolan’s civilian version held four .300 Winchester Magnum rounds, one in the chamber and three in a round-hinged floorplate magazine. Its barrel measured twenty-four inches and could send a 220-grain bullet downrange at a velocity of 2,850 feet per second, striking with 3,908 foot-pounds of cataclysmic energy.

      All good news for a sniper on the go.

      Bolan had been in place awhile, spotting the restaurant’s arrivals as they entered, scanning faces already seated at tables when he took his post. Stepan Melnyk was nowhere to be seen, but Dmytro Levytsky was making the rounds, slapping shoulders and laughing at jokes

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