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.