Sky Hammer by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Barcelona, Spain

The body had washed up on an isolated length of shoreline in Spain. It was bloated from a long immersion in the water, and had been nibbled upon by numerous fish, but the corpse was still recognizable as having once been a beautiful young woman.

The small boys who found it were horrified, and ran home screaming to their parents about a dead mermaid in the tide pools. After lunch, the weary father had gone for a look. He returned in less than an hour and called the police.

In due time, a constable arrived with a van and took a lot of photographs, just in case this was some rich person fallen overboard. The French Riviera wasn’t far away, and the drunken fools who owned priceless yachts, but could never be called sailors, liked to power around throwing wild parties and causing trouble. Many times before there had been bodies on the beach where the tide and currents deposited them unceremoniously.

The Barcelona morgue attendants chilled the body to firm the softened flesh, then took fingerprints and sent them off to Interpol, hoping the woman was a wanted criminal and there was a huge bounty for her death. But alas, she merely soon turned up as a missing person—a Kimberly Nia Stone from Athens, Greece, missing these past few days, last reported seen on the French Riviera.

The body was covered with marks that couldn’t be disguised as fish bites or coral damage. She had been tortured before death, slice and burned. Possibly raped, but after a few days in the sea, that was impossible to tell. Bruises were literally everywhere on the battered body. The morticians in Greece would have to repair the damage and handle the grieving family. Reverently, the morgue attendants packed the body into a refrigerated coffin to retard further decomposition, and arranged for the body to be sent home by air. Just another lost soul in the ocean of human misery.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

THE STOLEN CADILLAC sat idling in the alley, while its passengers quickly performed one final check of their weapons. There was not going to be another mistake like in Paris.

Many years earlier, several men met inside a jail in Algiers, and were surprised to discover they were fellow Hungarians. Cutting a deal with a guard, the prisoners escaped during the next full moon, killing another guard who had been sleeping with the wife of the first guard, thus paying for the loan of a knife, a brass key and a map. Broke and hunted, the escaped prisoners had to steal clothing, food, cars, then guns, and rob a bank to eventually reach home alive.

But by now the pattern had been set: a strong distrust of the vagaries of authority, and a liking for the dark freedom of criminal activities. The four banded together, forming the Blue Moon, and set about forging a criminal empire.

Twenty years later, their children sat in a stolen El Dorado, assault rifles in hand, watching the back door of the ALSF headquarters.

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