'We do. The ship's radioman was in touch with the terrorists before radio contact was broken and the ship went down. We were fed the information by a mole in one of the terrorist groups.'
'What's the official status on the sinking?'
'Maritime SOP hasn't turned up a thing,' said Hal. 'The terrorist group already has a salvage operation under way. A Soviet-trained frogman crew set out from Belem on the Brazilian coast yesterday afternoon. We learned of all this only a few minutes ago. The terrorists have their whole network trip-wired for this thing, and the intel came to us secondhand. That's why it took so long for the news to travel. The CIA has lost contact with two of their people inside the coalition. They've already written them off as having been terminated.'
Brognola had then given the coordinates to Bolan and Grimaldi.
The Stony warrior and his pilot had briefly touched down at a secret U.S. military air base in Honduras for refueling, equipment and ordnance. Then this fast flight southeast.
It was Brognola's idea to have Phoenix Force flown in to back up the Executioner and Grimaldi.
Grimaldi's voice crackled again.
'Here we go, Striker. Get ready.'
Bolan saw the target at that instant: a 100-foot commercial deep-sea fishing vessel, bobbing on the gray Atlantic.
The Harrier lanced in with its specially mounted machine guns yammering away.
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
