www.mirabooks.co.uk

      Special thanks and acknowledgment to

       Charles Rogers for his contribution to this work.

      The Old Testament teems with prophecies of the Messiah, but nowhere is it intimated that that Messiah is to stand as a God to be worshipped. He is to bring peace to the earth, to build up the waste places—to comfort the broken-hearted…

      —Olympia Brown

       1835–1926

      Gavi Arkhangelov is no messiah. Bring peace to earth? He seeks war. Build up waste places? He plans to level cities with nuclear bombs. Comfort the broken-hearted? The man intends to sow pain and sorrow. But the best-laid plans can be destroyed. And they will be.

      —Mack Bolan

      For my friend, Billy C.

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      CHAPTER FOURTEEN

      CHAPTER FIFTEEN

      CHAPTER SIXTEEN

      CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

      CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

      CHAPTER NINETEEN

      CHAPTER TWENTY

      CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

      CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

      CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

      CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

      EPILOGUE

      CHAPTER ONE

      State of Sinaloa, Mexico

      The Executioner’s fist crashed across the sentry’s jaw.

      Guard duty was dull duty the world over. The man had spent more time and attention lighting his cigarette than he had the darkness around him. The flare of the lighter had instantly killed his night vision. In the same instant Bolan was on him. Teeth and tobacco went flying. In the sentry’s defense he was deep in his homeland, deep in the desert, the roads were all watched and all military and police units in the area had been thoroughly penetrated and bribed to alert his organization to any movement.

      No one was expecting a single, hostile American to come floating down out of the sky six hundred miles south of the border into Mexico.

      Bolan hit the guard again. This time his open hand chopped into the side of the sentry’s neck like an ax. The Executioner raised his hand for a third blow but the man was already falling unconscious to the ground with a concussion and half of his carotid arteries and nerves crushed. Bolan let him fall and caught the man’s rifle before it could clatter to the pavement. The G3 assault weapon was Mexican Army issue and probably stolen. The man was most likely ex-Mexican Army issue, as well. Bolan knelt over the sentry and found that he was indeed wearing Mexican military dog tags beneath his windbreaker. Gasca, Victor, was a private. Private Gasca was out of uniform. Mexican military officers and enlisted men moonlighting to do work for the cartels was as old as the war on drugs. Gasca was also wearing a white card key around his neck. Bolan removed the key and ran it through the lock on the warehouse door. The light on the lock blinked green. Bolan pulled his night-vision goggles down over his eyes and slid inside into the darkness. The light-enhancing optics took the barely discernible glow of the stars shining through the skylights and magnified it thousands of times, turning the inky blackness of the warehouse interior into a harsh, grainy, gray-green world.

      Bolan subvocalized into the microphone taped to his throat. “I’m in.”

      Fourteen hundred miles away in Virginia Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman sat in Stony Man Farm’s Computer Room and gazed at satellite imaging of Bolan’s position in Sinaloa. “Copy that, Striker. Begin radiological survey.”

      “Copy that. Commencing survey.” Bolan pulled the Geiger counter out of his web gear and powered it up. The IDR-Monitor 4 was a simple Geiger-Müller type that measured alpha, beta, gamma and x-radiation and was about the size of an old style walkie-talkie. The device’s main component was a tube filled with argon gas. Argon was inert, but it would briefly conduct electricity when a particle or photon of radiation passed through it. The tube amplified the current into a pulse. The pulse was what created the typical clicking, static sound Geiger counters made. The faster, uglier and more staticky the sound was, the more radiologically uglier the ambient environment was.

      This night, gamma radiation was the subatomic particle of choice.

      Gamma radiation was always around. It was constantly bouncing around the cosmos, but usually in amounts a human being would consider infinitesimal. However, gamma rays were the most dangerous form of radiation emitted during a nuclear explosion. Unlike solar radiation, gamma rays were not stopped at the skin level. They passed completely through the body like a freight train, damaging every cell in their path and creating breaks in the DNA strands. Victims of exposure suffered horribly before they died, and survivors would pass on their damaged DNA in the form of birth defects to their children. You didn’t need a nuclear explosion to get gamma radiation. It was emitted from spent nuclear reactor fuel at very lethal levels. Mixed with conventional explosives, nuclear material would go on killing long after the effects of the explosives had been dealt with.

      Gamma radiation was the “dirty” in dirty bombs.

      Bolan muted the audio signal on the IDR-4 and began running his sweep through the warehouse. He waved the counter slowly over and around each pallet and crate, keeping his eye on the tiny dial to see if the needle jumped. It was barely twitching, but it was twitching. “Bear, I have slightly elevated levels of gamma radiation.”

      “Give me a count,” Kurtzman replied.

      Bolan watched the needle tremble at the very lowest end of detection. It was far less than the exposure one would get from an X-ray imaging at the doctor’s office, but it was still abnormally high for a nonmedical or nonindustrial warehouse in the middle of Sinaloa. “I’ve got ten kV.” Bolan