The deck crew never knew what hit them as the Harrier flashed by overhead like a giant firebreathing bird skimming the water surface for food. The pounding machine guns strafed every inch of the deck, filling the air with splintering wood and shreds of tumbling bodies and blood as blistering lead killed every living thing.
Then the Harrier banked in a smooth curve. Grimaldi eased the warplane back to a stationary hover off the port bow of the boat.
Nothing moved down there. Lifeless bodies were sprawled all over the pulverized deck. The boat rode the rolling crests of the waves like a ghost ship.
"Here we are, Striker," crackled Grimaldi.
"Hold it right here, Jack."
The Harrier maintained stationary hold.
The hellbringer in the passenger seat slid back the Plexiglas cowling, then stood to begin a final equipment check.
Brognola's intel was that the Liberian freighter had touched bottom in five hundred feet of water.
Conventional scuba-diving gear would not be practical below three hundred feet, so the Executioner was snugly togged in a Deep Diving System suit, courtesy of a Marine Corps scuba unit in Honduras.
The space-age scuba suit worn by Bolan was made of a special neoprene with an alloy helmet featuring a closed-circuit rebreather unit that eliminated telltale air bubbles from the helmet and adjusted the pressure not only within the suit, but within the sinuses and other internal air spaces within the diver's body. The suit's safety depth: twelve hundred feet.
But this scuba suit did have its shortcomings. It was designed for staying down no more than forty minutes, and Bolan would need to spend time in a decompression chamber when he came up.
Bolan activated the DOS and adjusted the harness on his air tanks.
He was armed with a sheathed knife at his left hip and a specially designed shark gun. At one end of the underwater weapon was a rod capable of sending off a six-thousand-volt electrical charge. The gun also fired 41.8mm bullets propelled by carbon dioxide through a barrel above the shock rod. The bullets were designed to explode on contact.
Bolan climbed onto a wing of the Harrier and moved cautiously away from the fuselage, avoiding the jet engines to either side of the cockpit.
"Last chance to change your mind," warned Grimaldi.
"You know better, Jack," replied the blitzer on the wing. "Keep trying to raise Stony Man. Black out communications with me once I'm under. Try to intercept any signals from down below. That's the enemy. We still don't know if they have backup standing by."
"And you come up in forty minutes."
"Precisely forty minutes."
"And if you don't make it up in forty?"
"Then I won't be making it," Bolan replied in a matter-of-fact tone.
"We've had no goddamn recon of what's waiting for you down there," Grimaldi said suddenly. "I don't like it, Striker."
"Neither do I. What's that have to do with anything?'' was Bolan's parting shot.
He adjusted his fins. He was ready.
Bolan again felt a twitch of concern at the communications breakdown with Stony Man Farm. And where the hell was Phoenix Force?
He knew a nuclear bomb in the hands of terrorists was unthinkable in the already bloody arena of Central and South American political terror that was advancing year by year toward America's border.
He put those thoughts aside. It was time for action.
"Good luck, soldier," said Grimaldi.
The Executioner gave a clenched fist and thumbs-up sign to the pilot, then stepped off the Harrier's wing.
Bolan plummeted a fast twenty feet into the frigid, turbulent depths of the sea, disappearing from Grimaldi's sight.
2
Bolan sliced smoothly into the dark underwater void. The raging turbulence of the ocean's surface and the whine of the Harrier faded to throbbing rumbles, then to nothing.
The instant he was submerged, Bolan executed a forward semiroll and dived straight down, swimming with arms close to his sides, pedaling hard with both fins. He did not switch on his diving light.
As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he detected a faint, wavering illumination from the sky.
Below, he could vaguely make out patterns of pinpoint lights moving about like fireflies on a summer night in Massachusetts.
Bolan swam deeper and deeper away from the filtering rays of the sun. The gloom reached out as if to smother him and increasing pressure tightened around his body.
A school of fish fled at his approach.
He continued angling toward the waving lights in the uneven depths.
A sixth sense alerted him to approaching danger from above and to his left. He rolled sideways as a massive presence glided ominously past him, missing him by inches.
He would have to risk switching on his helmet dive light. He hoped that it would not distract the distant salvage crew from their work around the jumbled shadows of the sunken Liberian freighter.
He activated the light just in time to see the great white shark turn around in a graceful curve before coming at him again.
Bolan rolled and kicked. He registered a momentary impression of the razor-sharp serrated teeth ringing the shark's big mouth.
Then the killer beast was past a second time.
Bolan floated, immobile.
The shark banked again at a distance of some twenty-five meters, then came in for another head-on swipe at this unexpected meal.
Bolan did not want to use the shark gun's bullets to stop the creature. He would need the underwater rounds when he confronted the terrorist frogmen below.
He triggered the gun's electrical mode when the great white was a half meter off, its long, ugly head homing in on Bolan's midsection.
The high-voltage charge stunned the massive beast. It became twenty-eight feet of senseless meat.
Bolan moved in and finished the job with his knife.
This man-eater could not be left around to recover and screw up the mission later on. And the shark's corpse would distract others of the species who could be infesting the vicinity.
Hoping like hell that he had seen the last of deep-sea predators, the Executioner flicked off his helmet light and resumed his descent, moving toward the activity below.
Bolan was gaining on the movement of busy lights when he came across the first ring of the terrorists' defense. Two sentries in full scuba gear, armed with weapons that looked similar to Bolan's shark gun, were drifting slowly. He saw divers stationed as sentries in either direction, barely discernible in the distance.
The leader had established a classic perimeter: evenly spaced teams of divers around the salvage operation. These divers would be in radio contact.
Suddenly Bolan's headset crackled with voices conversing in Spanish. He grinned.
Grimaldi had homed in on the terrorists' frequency and patched it to Bolan.
Bolan's rudimentary grasp of the language told him that either the sentries had no idea of his presence or they were laying a very skillful trap for him.
He took out the two-man team closest to him, swimming up behind one guard and severing the jugular with one knife swipe.
Bolan released the corpse.
The man's body floated upward, trailing the inky cloud spreading into the darkness overhead.
The other guard sensed the commotion and spun around, bringing up his weapon in Bolan's direction.
Bolan stroked the shark gun's trigger and another six-thousand-volt charge zapped living flesh.
The terrorist's body executed a restrained shudder as his hands released the shark gun. Stunned, the diver curled into a fetal position.
The Executioner swam in and finished him with the knife, releasing the body to float upward.
Another sentry team saw the activity and reacted instantly. These two divers split up, tracking their own weapons on Bolan. But they were not fast enough for The Executioner.
Bolan flicked the shark gun to kill mode and triggered a round at the diver on the right before he could warn the others.