added to the financier's features.
A heartbeat pause.
'Get out of the boat,' said Bolan. His voice had the same command of Jericho's attention as the extended barrel of the AutoMag. The seconds were running out on the plastique.
Jericho obeyed. He climbed from the lifeboat. A patina of sweat glistened below his hairline despite the coolness of the early hour.
'I don't know who sent you,' Jericho said. 'But I can double whatever you're getting.'
'I want Evita Aguilar,' growled Bolan.
Jericho blinked. 'Evita? She's not here.'
'Where is she?'
'Who sent you? I'll triple whatever you've been paid. If you're working for the Libyans ...'
A noise came from the northeast.
Grimaldi, coming in for the pickup. Right on schedule.
Which meant there were seventy-five seconds remaining before the plastique blew.
Leonard Jericho did not appreciate that the approaching helicopter was not his. Victory flashed in his eyes.
Bolan triggered the AutoMag, blowing away Jericho's left ankle, effectively amputating his foot.
Bolan stepped forward and knelt atop the stunned, silently shrieking man, pinning Jericho's neck to the deck with his leg. He grabbed a handful of Jericho's hair and banged the back of the guy's head down hard to get some more of his attention.
'I want Evita. Tell me where she is.'
The financier gasped for air. The pain of his shredded ankle was numbed by breathtaking shock. Blood pulsed from the wound, swilling around bone shards to form a widening puddle on the deck.
'Evita was taken from here... an hour ago...'
'Where to?'
'I swear to God I don't know! Santos... took her. Libya? Business finished here... Thatcher was aboard last night... paid and gone...'
Time was running out. But this man was talking.
'You're not Jericho.'
'Let me live, please, I beg you!'
'I'm here to collect dues from Jericho.'
'I'm not Jericho, you're right... you said it yourself.'
Surprise.
Jack Grimaldi was hovering at two o'clock off the
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
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
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.
