One down. A drop in the bucket.
The Executioner wiped his blade, resheathed it and eased his rifle off its shoulder sling. The sounds of men in camp were loud enough for him to steer by as he crept in through the trees. A moment later, firelight made it easier, accompanied by smells of whatever the crew had had for supper. Stew, he guessed, but didn’t speculate on what would be available as meat.
Crouched in a glade with trees obscuring the tropic night’s display of stars, Bolan surveyed his target. He counted huts and tents to start, then started counting heads for those still up and moving after midnight. Twelve—make that thirteen—but if the huts and tents were occupied to full capacity, the island camp could easily accommodate three times that number.
On the verge of moving in to raise some hell, he saw one of the campers moving toward a hut located on the north side of the camp. There was nothing unusual in that, except the long-haired man was carrying a hand-crank generator and a coil of wire that looked like heavy-duty jumper cables. Bolan tracked him, noting that the camp had no electric lights, and no antennae topped the hut to mark it as the site’s communications shack.
That only left one option, and while Bolan couldn’t have cared less what punishment the camp’s inhabitants inflicted on one another, instinct told him he was onto something else. Something he needed to investigate before he launched a blitz attack.
He circled to his left, remaining out of sight, watching his step. There could be cobras, but the greater danger was a careless noise that would rouse the enemy.
Not that they seemed to give security much thought. So far, Bolan hadn’t identified a single lookout, and he had begun to wonder if his targets—nothing more than common pirates—had evaded capture for so long that they believed themselves invincible.
Or, possibly, protected by some unknown persons in authority.
It wouldn’t be the first or last time bandits had struck a bargain with the law, but if this bunch thought they were skating on their crimes, they were about to get a rude surprise as soon as Bolan found out who was in the target hut, about to have a shocking night.
The man lugging the generator and its cables stepped into the hut, then reappeared a moment later, empty-handed. He sauntered off in the direction of the fire, where half a dozen others sat, passing a bottle. Seconds after he had joined them, everyone was laughing, obviously tickled by the thought of torture going on a few yards distant.
Bolan marked the attitude and their positions, filed away for future reference. If he had time and opportunity, the joke would be on them, but none would be in a position to enjoy it.
Seconds later, he had reached the rear of the hut and crouched there, listening. Two muffled voices, male and female, argued in the Malay language, all incomprehensible to Bolan. Even so, he didn’t need a translation to recognize the sound of ripping fabric and the woman’s sobbing.
Time to move. He watched the idlers by the fire as he emerged from cover, ducked around the hut and burst through its door.
* * *
MAIA LEE GAPED at the stranger who had barged into the hut. Despite the war paint on his face, she recognized him as a white man. When he spoke, saying to Syarif Hairuman, “I hope you don’t mind if I crash the party,” Maia knew he was American.
After her initial shock, her first thought was of her appearance, bound up in the chair, her blouse ripped open seconds earlier. Before she had a chance to cringe, with no hope of covering her partial nudity, Hairuman spun to face the stranger, challenging him with a burst of rapid-fire Malay. The man in black responded with a long stride forward and a hard jab with his rifle’s butt into the pirate’s face.
Maia heard bones crack as Hairuman fell, his head striking her knees before he rolled aside. The pain of impact barely registered, her mind was in such turmoil as the stranger raised one booted foot and brought it down against Hairuman’s neck. She thought the second crack had to be her captor’s spine, and felt him shivering against her ankle as he died.
The new arrival drew a wicked-looking knife, brass-knuckled on its handle, and she cringed instinctively as he circled behind her. Then the blade was sawing through her bonds, releasing Maia’s arms to let her clutch the tattered remnants of her blouse in front. Legs next, as he began to speak.
“I don’t know whether you can understand me—”
“I speak English,” she informed him.
“That’s a bonus. Are you up for getting out of here?”
“If we can manage it,” she said, rising on shaky legs.
“I like our odds,” he answered, and he flashed a smile so brief that Maia wondered if she had imagined it.
The tall man stooped and drew a pistol from Syarif Hairuman’s belt holster. She watched him check it, drawing back the slide to put a live round in the chamber. “Any chance that you’re a shooter?” he inquired.
“Try me.”
He handed her the pistol, which she recognized as a Beretta 92. The gun was heavy, reassuring, in her hand.
“Once we go through that door,” he said, “you can shoot anyone but me.”
“Who sent you?” Maia asked him.
“We can talk about that later,” he replied.
“All right. Thank you,” she added, heartfelt.
“Better wait until we’re clear for that,” he said.
She got the message. They might not survive the next few minutes, but at least she had a fighting chance. She wouldn’t die trussed up for slaughter like a hog at market.
“I’m ready when you are,” she said.
“Okay. Let’s get it done.”
* * *
TIONG KRISHNAN WAS SIPPING rum and waiting for a chance to speak with Hairuman. Krishnan, the fighting unit’s second-in-command, supposed that Hairuman would be preoccupied for some time, while he had the woman to himself, but drinking was as good a way as any to kill time. If Hairuman hadn’t emerged within an hour—
The first gunshots startled Krishnan, causing him to slop rum on his knuckles as he spun to face the sound. He was in time to see a stranger, all in black, emerging from the hut where Hairuman had caged their prisoner, an automatic weapon in his hands and spitting death across the compound. And behind him, firing a pistol, came the woman.
“Stop them!” he shouted at the others. “The woman is escaping!”
Despite his orders, Krishnan saw most of those who were awake in camp diving for cover from the bullets rattling past them. As he fumbled for his own pistol, he saw one man fall, a head wound spouting crimson, while another tripped and fell headlong into the fire.
Cursing at his useless men, Krishnan squeezed off two shots at the escaping figures, mortified when neither of them found their targets. Livid, he ran raging through the camp, shouting into the flaps of tents, kicking the doors of huts, routing the other pirates from their beds. They stumbled out to join him, many of them barely dressed, clutching their weapons awkwardly and wearing dazed expressions on their faces.
Krishnan pointed to the dark woods where the woman and her male companion had already disappeared, shouting for everyone to follow them and bring them back, dead or alive. Where could they go, within the next few minutes, on an island, when they were outnumbered and outgunned?
Krishnan himself ran to the prison hut and peered inside. Lamplight revealed Syarif Hairuman sprawled on the dirt floor, bloody-faced, his head cocked at an angle that revealed his neck was broken. Where the woman had been bound, slashed ropes lay on the ground like lifeless snakes around her chair.
How in the name of Ma Zu had this happened?
More importantly, how could he possibly explain it to Khoo Kay Sundaram? Krishnan’s own life could be on the line through no fault of his own, but he wouldn’t blithely submit to execution for some other person’s error.
Why had no lookouts been posted
on the camp’s outskirts? Complacency.
Why had no guard joined Hairuman in questioning the woman? Because Hairuman wanted her to himself.
That was his ticket to survival: blaming Hairuman for everything. Krishnan, after all, was only second in command, and Sundaram himself demanded strict adherence to his quasi-military form of discipline. Krishnan had no authority to countermand instructions from his chief.
That rationale might save his life, but Krishnan knew he’d be on firmer ground if he retrieved the prisoner and killed or captured her rescuer. To that end, he bellowed orders at his men, slapping and shoving those who dawdled, until all who still survived were up and running in the general direction of the woman’s hasty flight.
Krishnan stopped by his own hut, retrieved his stubby VB Berapi LP02 submachine gun and ran to catch up with his men. From the direction they were headed, Krishnan knew their path would take them to the mangrove swamp and the lagoon beyond, a dead end for the pair he was pursuing.
And if more of Krishnan’s pirates died to bring them down, what of it?
Life was cheap, and they were all expendable.
* * *
“HOW DID YOU FIND ME?” the woman asked, as they ducked and dodged through forest undergrowth.
“Save your breath for running,” Bolan cautioned. “Any luck, we’ll have the time to talk about it later.”
“And if not?”
“Then it won’t matter,” Bolan said. He listened, added, “Hurry up. They’re coming.”
“Please, at least tell me your name!” the woman said.
“Matt Cooper,” he said. It matched his passport, New York driver’s license and the credit cards he carried. If a search was run—the least of Bolan’s problems, at the moment—all the documents would check out fine, including credit history.
Which wouldn’t help him one damned bit if he was dead.
They had a lead, thanks to the chaos they had left behind them, and the men he’d shot, but it would quickly be reduced by any kind of competent pursuit. Smart money said the pirates knew Tioman Island better than he did from having studied it on various documents, and they were motivated by a fear of lethal punishment to bag him and the woman, one way or another.
Under other circumstances, Bolan could have told her that he’d found her accidentally, had no idea of who she was or why she’d been detained for questioning by men who had become his targets thirty hours earlier. No time for that while they were running, though, no breath to waste on explanations, when each one might be their last.
They were still making decent time, but there would be a lag after they hit the mangrove swamp. The Zodiac raft lay waiting for them, but he still had to untie it, drag it to the beach and launch it, making sure the woman was on board. Each moment gave his adversaries time to close the gap, and even when they’d launched, the rubber boat would be a relatively easy target on its long run to the reef.
Another danger: if the pirates reached their powerboats and followed him to sea, Bolan had every reason to expect that they would overtake and sink him on the dark and lonely run back to the mainland. He was thinking blood and sharks, but stopped that train of thought before it took him down a dead-end track to panic and despair.
He stopped, turned toward the woman and said, “Go on without me. Make for the lagoon. With any luck, I won’t be far behind you.”
“The lagoon?”
“I’ve got a boat hidden. We have a decent chance to make it if I slow them down.”
“I’ll help you,” the woman said.
“No. Listen—”
“You want me to get lost out here? What happens then?”
Scowling, he said, “All right. Find cover, then, and do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you. Otherwise, we’re both as good as dead.”
CHAPTER TWO
Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia,
thirty-three hours earlier
Mack Bolan held the rented Prius hybrid at a steady thirty-five miles per hour, cruising south on Skyline Drive toward Stony Man Farm. The farm had been established shortly after Bolan’s orchestrated “death” in New York City at the climax of his one-man war against the Mafia. It was the headquarters and nerve center of operations known to few Americans outside the D.C. Beltway—and, in fact, to very few inside it. As for those who knew that Bolan lived, albeit with an altered face and name, they could be counted on the fingers of his hands.
After the President of the United States, the high man on the ladder at Stony Man was Hal Brognola, Bolan’s second-oldest living friend. The big Fed had been front-line FBI when Bolan went to war against La Cosa Nostra, and had met him for the first time in Miami, when the Executioner had dropped in uninvited on a summit meeting of the syndicate. From that point on, their paths had crossed repeatedly, and Brognola became an ally in the struggle that began when Bolan lost his family to Massachusetts loan sharks.
The rest was history.
Bolan finally was admitted through the gate into the Farm property and drove toward the farmhouse. The first sign of life that he saw beyond the gate consisted of three figures waiting for him on the long front porch. Brognola in the middle slot, a gray man from his hair on through his Brooks Brothers attire, standing with his hands in pockets, no smile as he spied the Prius, tracked its progress; on his right stood Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller. Sparks of sunlight glistened on her hair. The denim jumpsuit she was wearing fit as if it had been tailored for her slim athletic form. To the big Fed’s left, Aaron Kurtzman—aka the Bear—sat in his wheelchair, dead legs a cruel memento of a hostile raid on Stony Man. He was the Farm’s resident cyber-genius, supervising staffers who could do almost anything conceivable with a computer—and some things that weren’t conceivable to lesser minds.
The trio on the porch waited for Bolan as he stepped out of his car, leaving the key for someone else to tuck the vehicle out of sight. Nobody moved until he’d climbed the porch steps, then the hands came out all around to shake his.
How long since he’d last visited the Farm? Two months, maybe three? He often met with Brognola off-site, in the vicinity of Washington.
“No problems on the drive down?” Brognola inquired, his tone perfunctory.
“Smooth sailing,” Bolan said.
“Good deal. We may as well head for the War Room, then.”
Bolan was last into the house, catching a sidelong glance from Barbara Price that bolstered his impression of a crisis on the boil. He trailed the others to an elevator, joined them in the relatively spacious car and stayed away from small talk on their short drop to the basement. In the War Room, Brognola moved automatically to his chair at the head of a conference table with seating for twelve. Bolan sat to his left, Price on his right, while Kurtzman powered his chair to the far end of the table, large hands hovering over a keyboard console there. His first touch brought a giant flat-screen television on the nearby wall to life, its silent screen sky-blue.
“What do you know about a Chinese missile called the Hsiung Feng III?” Brognola asked.
“Rings a bell,” Bolan replied. “Something their navy’s using now?”
“Correct. Hsiung Feng translates as Brave Wind. It’s manufactured by the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology, in Taiwan.”
“Taiwan?” Bolan frowned. “They’re selling weapons to Beijing now?”
“It’s an oddity, I grant you,” Brognola replied. “Chungshan develops systems for Taiwan’s civilian space program, such as it is, but it also works closely with the PRC’s Ministry of National Defense. So far, the company has produced China’s whole range of antiship missiles— Hsiung Feng I, II, IIE and now III. They also produce the Kung Feng and Thunderbolt-2000 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems for China’s army, plus the Sky Sword infrared guided air-to-air missiles for Beijing’s air force. On the side,
they build Taiwan’s Sky Bow surface-to-air missiles. Talk about your glaring conflicts of interest.”
“I guess it works for them,” Bolan observed.
“Whatever. We don’t know much about the HF3, except that it’s a Mach 2 class supersonic missile designed to target surface vessels. It uses a rocket-ramjet propulsion system, with two side-by-side solid-propellant jettisonable strap-on rocket boosters for initial acceleration and a liquid-fueled ramjet for sustained supersonic cruising. It’s a wingless design with four strake intakes and four clipped delta control surfaces aft. Uses an X-band monopulse planar array active radar seeker with digital signal processing. Carries an SFF/EFP warhead—that’s Self-Forging Fragment Explosively-Formed Projectile, if you’re curious—weighing around five hundred pounds. Top range, right now, is something like eighty to one hundred miles. We think.”
Bolan had to smile. “I thought you didn’t know much about it.”
“Bare bones,” Brognola replied. “First time it was displayed in public, it came complete with a sign that read Aircraft Carrier Killer.”
Not good. During the Vietnam War, America’s Navy had scrapped its classic battleships, retiring the big-gun boomers in favor of long-range aircraft carriers, supported by missile-bearing cruisers and destroyers. A guided missile that could neutralize that power might change everything in the Pacific—and around the world.
“Sounds grim,” Bolan acknowledged. “But I’m betting we’re not about to tackle the Chinese navy.”
“You’d win that bet,” Brognola said. “There’s nothing we can do about deployment of the HF3 to Chinese ships. Unfortunately, someone else has intervened to grab a couple for themselves.”
“Someone?” Bolan echoed.
Brognola looked past him toward Kurtzman. “Aaron?”
Kurtzman’s fingers danced over the keyboard, bringing the flat screen to life. Its first image was newsreel quality, shot from the air, depicting the blackened hulk of a fire-ravaged vessel at sea.
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