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.
Suddenly a voice blurted in DeSilva's headset.
"Wait a minute. We see something." It was Luis, excited exertion obvious in his voice.
"What is your position?" demanded DeSilva.
"He's seen us!" cried Abelardo across the communications frequency. "Santa Maria!"
There was no more.
DeSilva felt a clammy sweat form beneath the second skin of his diving suit.
A heartbeat later, he felt another concussion.
DeSilva swam cautiously in the direction of the forward deck. He avoided the lights amidships. He continued to scan the deep with the IR as he propelled himself along.
"Everyone turn off your diving lights," he instructed his team of divers. "Seal off entranceways into the vessel. We've been infiltrated, but we can isolate them. Work together."
Jesus DeSilva had liked nothing about this mission from its inception.
He and his team had diligently searched the passageways of the sunken ship, which were decorated with ghastly, water-rotted corpses of sailors.
And DeSilva's team had not yet found the nuclear device!
The divers had just completed sectoring off another portion of the ship when the rumbling explosions had alerted DeSilva of this penetration.
Jesus DeSilva wondered how many of his men were already dead. He wondered if the mother ship above was attacked.
Who was attacking? he wondered.
The terrorist diver swam on with extreme caution, scanning the murky depths with the IR. He knew he held a slight advantage over whoever was trying to get into this death ship.
DeSilva's antagonists would not be carrying the IR, he knew. Such instruments were bulky and would hinder the swiftness of their attack.
Yet there was no sign of diving lights since he had ordered his men to black out.
Then he realized the penetrators were attacking blind, relying on the high-intensity lamps to guide them!
DeSilva curtly ordered the lights extinguished. The undersea world became black as pitch.
DeSilva grinned to himself.
Now the attackers would be easy marks for him, with the infrared scanner.
It was time to kill or die.
3
Grimaldi held the big Harrier at a sustained hover thirty feet above the choppy ocean where Mack Bolan had disappeared, almost a half hour before.
The pilot tried to ignore a nagging worry that plagued him.
He and Bolan had survived plenty of action together, on lots of hot missions in both Bolan's old Mafia war and in the Executioner's hits out of Stony Man. He had seen the Mafia-busting Bolan "die," then to be reborn as Colonel John Phoenix, under full White House sanction.
Yet through all those battles, the man born Mack Samuel Bolan had never changed.
No way.
Grimaldi knew the blitzing guy better than just about anyone, maybe even better than April Rose, because Jack had seen so much more of the real, unleashed fury of this incredible fighter. Shared combat forged strong bonds of friendship.