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.
Globs of matter shot in all directions as the man's head and helmet exploded.
The guard on Bolan's left brought his weapon to bear and triggered off a round.
But he was not fast enough. The retarding effect of the surrounding water gave Bolan the time he needed.
Bolan kicked himself into a sideways roll.
The bullet missed.
Bolan triggered another round that sent the diver to a watery grave.
Two murky black clouds hung suspended.
Bolan swam in a wide arc, angling well away from the underwater encounter.
There was no way for the rest of the frogman force to accurately detect the source of the exchange between Bolan and the sentries.
Voices in Spanish chattered across the frequency Bolan was monitoring. Then the frequency went blank except for static. That, too, died as Grimaldi realized what had happened and patched Bolan out of their tac net.
The terrorist frogteam was operating under a blanket of radio silence, or they had switched to another frequency.
Bolan realized the team boss would dispatch divers to double-check all the guard points while the salvage operation continued.
They would discover the missing sentries, but the Executioner had already bought the time he needed.
The towering hulk of the sunken freighter was distorted by the filtered glare of underwater high-intensity lamps at the middeck superstructure. The dead ship lay on its side on a ridge amid jagged patches of millepore coral.
The nerve center of the salvage operation appeared to be the cluster of lights. There was a lot of activity. Bolan counted five divers, and he knew there would be more inside the ship.
Bolan swam on, carefully avoiding the sharp coral fingers. At this depth, if he accidentally ripped his suit, he would die instantly. But he was too close now to even consider using his diving light.
He edged closer to the ship's midsection, angling for a ventilator cowl that would offer enough cover for a scan of the area where the illumination seemed to be brightest.
Bolan was halfway to the cowl when he saw, in his peripheral vision, two divers who seemed to materialize out of nowhere. They were approaching Bolan on his right side.
Bolan and the frogmen eyeballed each other simultaneously.
The terrorists stopped swimming, raising their shark guns.
With a powerful kick, Bolan gained the cover of the cowl. He fired the shark gun at the diver closest to him, bursting the man's air tank. The impact tore loose the terrorist's breathing apparatus.
The diver drifted upward wildly amid a burst of bubbles.
The other diver had maneuvered himself behind Bolan. Bolan swung his shark gun around. He triggered an electrical jolt that zapped the diver at the exact instant the man fired his own weapon, pointed well away from Bolan.
The explosion rumbled everywhere. But the concussion would be powerful enough for the terrorist force not to have any doubt that it came from very close.
This underwater hit had suddenly gone very hot.
When he felt the tremor of an explosion, Jesus DeSilva swam through the companionway and finned himself to a stop at a point just beyond the shimmering glare of the high-intensity lamps.
He guessed the source of the noise to be one of the underwater weapons supplied by Gurgen, the Russian adviser. But he couldn't pinpoint the direction of the blast.
'Rafael, Santos. Report,' demanded DeSilva through the communications system of his diving suit.
No response.
'Everyone, alternate frequency.'
The rest of DeSilva's team maintained silence as they activated their DDS transceivers according to the contingency plan.
DeSilva appreciated anew the expert training that he and his diving team had received outside Cardenas, in Cuba, under the careful scrutiny of Comrade Gurgen.
The frogteam leader maintained a holding pattern beyond the cluster of lights near the sideways superstructure of the downed freighter. His finger curled around his shark gun's trigger. The salvage operation was suddenly forgotten.
DeSilva glanced at his dive watch. Their air supply was running dangerously low.
'Luis, Abelardo. Investigate. Be very cautious now,' he ordered two of his divers.
'Be very cautious, my ass,' crackled Abelardo's too cocky voice.
'Maintain silence unless you have something to report,' snapped DeSilva, wishing again that he hadn't been chosen to lead this operation.
The team of terrorist divers were all weary from being squeezed by seventy-five pounds per square inch of deep-water pressure.
DeSilva had been supplied with an infrared scanning device for this mission by his Russian adviser. As he drifted, he surveyed the vicinity with the eight-inch viewer held close to his face mask.
The IR converted the darkness into a deep twilight up to a range slightly over 125 feet. At this depth there were no colors, only various shades of white and black.
He could see the coral, the sunken freighter.
No sign of anyone.
