Fourteen seconds to detonation.
Bolan could not allow the talkative Jericho imposter to die here. He was invaluable now for the information he could give about the boss cannibal. And about Eve, which is where Bolan came in.
The guy was losing plenty of blood. A tourniquet in the chopper, a quick airlift to medical help, and he would be fine for some hard questions.
Suddenly the guy went for broke and rolled his dice one last time. A Colt .38 snubnose was in his fist, yanked from concealment and zeroing in on Bolan.
Eleven seconds.
The Executioner darted to the right. The AutoMag and the guy's .38 fired as one. The wounded man's slug went wild. Bolan's did not.
Ten seconds.
Whoever the impostor really was, his meat was nailed to the boat's deck by a .44 headbuster that had ended his life forever.
His stupidly untaught-out course of action had confirmed for sure that he was not Lenny Jericho.
Bolan leathered Big Thunder and sidestepped the latest dead man. Timing was everything now.
He climbed the railing of the Traveler's side and dived. It was a dive that expertly knifed the glassy waters of Exuma Cay to propel him down deep.
The underwater concussion from the exploding yacht was painful, like being hit by a steel door. But it lacked the shrapnel of hot yacht pieces and hurtling ice picks of fire that would have deafened and torn him if his dive had been shallow and he had surfaced one second prematurely.
He broke surface as debris from the disintegrated Traveler sizzled in the water about him.
A blown-out hulk was all that remained of Lenny Jericho's yacht and those dead men aboard it. The hulk began to sink as Bolan watched.
Grimaldi held the Hughes in a low hover, directly over Bolan's head, with the rope ladder dangling within easy reach. Bolan gripped the ladder and began pulling himself upward from a sea made suddenly choppy by the rotors. Grimaldi eased them away from there with a gentle increase of power.
The waters of Exuma Cay pulled away below him. The sea was a dark turquoise blue, tabletop smooth again in the rising sun as if nothing had happened.
Bolan preferred it that way.
He tugged himself up to the last rung of the rope ladder and hoisted himself into the bubble-front chopper.
"More pestilence of fire, Colonel Phoenix!" beamed Stony Man's premier flyer. "You nearly blasted me away from you forever."
"Should have ducked like I did," smiled Bolan. "You knew I was going to thunder it."
"That I did," said Grimaldi, subtly maneuvering the controls as if the whirlybird was a part of him. He glanced at Bolan through silvered glasses. "You got wet. Anything else?"
"Yes and no," muttered Bolan. "The yes turned out to be a no, so to hell with him." He pushed his damp hair back from his brow, unzipped the top of his blacksuit. "To hell with anyone who comes between me and Eve. To hell with them."
"Got you," nodded Grimaldi, well aware of the grim message in Mack's soft-spoken words. "Just point me where you want me to go."
3
It was late afternoon.
Heavy draperies shuttered out the cool winter sunshine from the Stony Man War Room. The only illumination was reflected off a screen that dominated one wall.
Bolan had returned to Stony Man from the Bahamas a short twenty-five minutes earlier. The lightweight Hughes, equipped with auxiliary fuel tanks for distance, had sped them over reefs of sand and coral, then over the lush tropical forests of scattered islands, at speeds of over 150 knots to a government airfield outside Miami, Florida.
At this moment, Jack Grimaldi was ensuring that the F-14 Tomcat jet, which had flown them to Washington from Miami, was readied for further short notice.
Three people, besides Bolan, were present at the briefing.
Aaron Kurtzman. Hal Brognola. April Rose.
The screen was filled with the image of a male face. The visage was highlighted by hard eyes and a scar down the left cheek.
Kurtzman's well-modulated voice supplied the data.
"Raoul Santos. Lenny Jericho's people found him doing life for a double knife murder in Kingston involving the rasta drug trade. A contract job. The wife and child of a government investigator were tortured before he cut their throats. That was the only time he was ever caught. There's plenty more, if you want to hear it. They call him “The Butcher.”"
"How long has he been with Jericho?" Bolan cut in.
"Jericho paid the guy's way out of the slammer in 1980," supplied Hal. "Jericho takes great care to keep the connection secret. The media image Jericho has created for himself is some sort of a modern Robin Hood. He's almost a folk hero — the smart con artist who got away."
April could not take her eyes away from the face of Santos on the screen.
"A mother and child... What does he do for Jericho?"
"Whatever dirty work needs doing," said Hal, "and there's plenty of that in Jericho's world."
"And Santos has Eve," grunted Bolan. "What about the Thatcher character?"
Kurtzman punched up another head shot, this time front and profile.
It was a craggy face dominated by steely eyes that were impossible to read. The jawline was that of a determined military man in middle age.
"General Arnold L. Thatcher," said Kurtzman. "I put through a tracer when the computer kicked his name out, and the Pentagon's Internal Affairs Division was very interested in what we wanted to know and why. They're in it with us now. The general is chief of security at a classified base in the Rockies, north of Denver. The installation is a storage depot — part of the army's NCB program."
Bolan knew those initials. Nuclear, Chemical and Biological.
He scrutinized the frontal portrait on the screen. He saw a brokenness and a cynicism in the face that stared blankly back.
"Thatcher is two days into a five-day leave and no one's been able to run him down yet," reported Brognola. "But considering his sensitive position in the NCB program, the Pentagon and the CIA are of course giving this top priority and we should have our hands on this bad general soon enough.
Internal Affairs launched a backtrack investigation and they came up with a bombshell this afternoon that confirms he's the Thatcher we're looking for.
The general took a medical leave late last year. His hospital records showed treatment for stomach problems that were supposedly cleared up. But the Pentagon investigators found more — they asked the right questions of the right people in the right way.
General Thatcher has seven months to live. He's dying of cancer. He's ripe for a sellout. Maybe he's trying to establish financial security for his family after he's gone."
General Thatcher's likeness disappeared from the briefing-room screen. Comfortable indirect lighting filled the room.
Bolan spoke first.
"Jericho bought something from Thatcher, or paid Thatcher to do something.''
"The connection is Libya," said Kurtzman. "Those are the Jericho impostor's words. And Hal's got major information coming up."
Bolan lit a cigarette.
"I think Eve Aguilar pieced the whole thing together," he said. "Manny Mandone was aboard the yacht. There was a lot of strange stuff going on. And she knows all about it."
Kurtzman turned from processing continuing data.
"I'm glad to hear that the woman is thought to be alive. But why is she alive? She should be dead. I don't mean to be brutal, but we must consider this."