“That is—was—the Shenyang,” Brognola said. “A Chinese Guangzhou-class destroyer, designated Luyang I class by NATO for reasons best known to their brass. Three days ago, it sailed from Ningbo on the China Sea bound for the North Pacific on a test run for the HF3. You see what’s left of it.”
“What happened?” Bolan asked.
“Officially, an accident on board, cause unspecified.”
“And unofficially?”
“Langley says they were hit. Lured off-course by a false distress signal, then smacked with some kind of thermobaric weapon—a fuel-air bomb—likely delivered by an aircraft. Took out the bridge and the defensive batteries. The Shenyang was dead in the water within a matter of seconds.”
“And the HF3s?” Bolan asked.
“There’s the rub,” Brognola said. “Officially they were destroyed by fire. No detonation of the warheads, since they weren’t armed at the time. The Company says otherwise. Its eyes and ears in Ningbo claim the ship was stormed by pirates while it burned—decked out in fire-retardant suits and hoods, air tanks, the whole nine yards. Somehow, says Langley, they retrieved two HF3s, transferred them to another ship at sea and sailed away to who knows where.”
“Suspects?” Bolan asked.
“There’s no shortage,” Brognola replied. “The China Sea’s crawling with pirates, most of them Malaysian. It doesn’t get the airtime CNN spends on Somalia, but the situation’s pretty much the same. They’ll rip off anything that moves on water, ransom back the ships and cargo—or, with special lots, auction their booty to the highest bidder.”
“Beijing’s got the case to buy its missiles back,” Bolan suggested.
“Not an option, I’m afraid,” Brognola said. “Seems this deal was commissioned by another party, with an eye toward private usage of the cruiser-killers. And if Langley has it straight this time, our Navy is the target.”
* * *
SIXTY MINUTES LATER, in his room upstairs, Bolan reviewed the detailed file Brognola had compiled for him on CD-ROM. It started with depictions of the Hsiung Feng III on parade in Beijing, and in test-fire action on some anonymous seascape. The target ship, light-cruiser size, went down in something close to record time. Bolan supposed a carrier would last a little longer on the surface, but not much. The extra time afloat wouldn’t mean much to pilots in the air and suddenly deprived of any place to land their jets on hostile seas, when they were half a world away from home.
The rest of the report included speculation—any terrorist on earth who had the wherewithal to float a ship would gladly bid on missiles capable of taking out a U.S. aircraft carrier—but more specific thoughts on suspects for the lift. His sources named one Khoo Kay Sundaram as being dominant among the several pirate “admirals” who fought for turf along Malaysia’s coast, and noted Sundaram’s occasional involvement with the Chinese triads. How that played into a theft of missiles would be anybody’s guess, but Bolan knew the triads would sell anything to anyone, as long as they received their asking price.
What would they ask for two hot HF3s?
According to the CIA’s best estimate, each missile cost the Chinese government around five million dollars fresh off the assembly line. That price would be inflated for illicit sale to criminals, and if a bidding war got started, it could double, even triple or quadruple. That would mean a hefty profit margin for whoever snatched the merchandise, and tragedy beyond financial calculation if and when the warheads found their mark.
Bolan’s mind explored the problem’s several permutations. First, there was no guarantee that one militant group would buy both missiles. They were easily divisible for sale, one at a time. Likewise, the fact that HF3s were labeled “ship-to-ship” ballistic missiles didn’t rule out adaptation to a different role.
Say a boat on Lake Michigan fired an HF3 into
Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Or took a cruise on Manhattan’s East River for a shot at United Nations headquarters. How about a ride on the Potomac, with a list of targets including the White House and Congress. Or lying offshore from Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco—the possibilities were literally endless. Taking it further afield, most major capitals of Europe were accessible by water: London on the Thames and Dublin on the Liffey, Paris on the Seine, Berlin on the Rhine, Vienna and Budapest on the Danube, Prague on the Vltava. The list went on and on.
Bolan knew he couldn’t chase the missiles willy-nilly around the world. The only feasible approach would be for him to find the thieves and nail them down before the merchandise was transferred to a buyer. And if he could take the would-be users down at the same time, so much the better.
But he wouldn’t count on it.
He had a red-eye flight booked out of Dulles International in Wonderland, leaving at half-past midnight. Nineteen hours in the air, if there were no delays—fat chance—plus downtime on the ground at LAX and Honolulu International before his feet touched down in Kuala Lumpur. From that point on he would be winging it without a plane, acquiring wheels and hardware in Malaysia’s capital, proceeding overland on lousy roads to reach the eastern coast of the peninsula, acquiring means to reach Tioman Island....
And then fighting for his life until the smoke cleared, with his mission rated either as a victory or Bolan’s last hurrah.
A muffled rapping at his door distracted him. Bolan closed his laptop, went to answer it. He found Barbara Price in the hallway, smiling up at him, the zipper on her jumpsuit two strategic inches lower than it had been in the War Room.
“How’s it going?” she inquired.
“Getting better by the minute,” Bolan said, and stood aside to let her in. He didn’t bother checking out the hallway, conscious that their on-and-off relationship was public knowledge at Stony Man HQ.
“You’re leaving...when?” she asked, as Bolan closed the door.
He didn’t have to check his watch. “Three hours, give or take. I’m packed already.”
“Do you ever unpack?”
“I’ve been living on the road so long it feels like home,” he answered. “There’s a point where what you do becomes the same as who you are.”
“That must be grim,” Price said.
“Depends on how you look at it. I sleep all right.” No point in mentioning the ghosts who sometimes visited his dreams.
“You sleepy now?” she asked.
“I catch up in the air,” he said. “I’ve got the best part of a day to rest before it’s time to rock and roll.”
“Or we could rock and roll right now,” she said, and stepped into his arms. “If you don’t mind.”
His smile was perfectly relaxed now, as he said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
CHAPTER THREE
Tioman Island, Malaysia
Bolan heard the racket made by their pursuers as the mob drew closer to the mangrove swamp. Whatever self-restraint the pirates exercised on any given day, it had been stripped away from them by his surprise attack and unexpected rescue of their hostage. He couldn’t understand a word they shouted back and forth to one another in the darkness, but their voices had the manic tone of rioters or lynchers.
They were out for payback, and it had to be in blood.
No problem. Bolan meant to see that it was theirs.
He checked the woman crouching ten yards to his left, recalling that he’d given her a name but had never got hers in return. No matter. If they managed to survive the next few minutes, there’d be time enough to chat.
If not, it wouldn’t matter, anyway.
A flashlight swept the darkness, seeking Bolan’s trail. He hadn’t tried to hide it—couldn’t, with the woman on his heels—but he had no idea how good the pirates were at tracking human prey on land. They knew he wasn’t heading inland, which propelled them toward the swamp and cove beyond.
&nb
sp; Toward waiting death.
Bolan had swapped out magazines for his HK416, stowing the one that he’d half emptied in the pirate camp and feeding the rifle a fresh one. Thirty rounds ready and waiting, each with a spitzer projectile designed to tumble and fragment inside soft tissue. He had the weapon’s fire-selector switch set for 3-round bursts, improving chances of a kill in murky darkness, but he couldn’t guarantee it would be clean. In fact, “clean” kills were rare in combat, where the norm was blood and suffering and screams.
Bolan wished there had been time to do a proper head count of his enemies in camp, but he was used to flying in the face of killer odds without specific information on the numbers ranged against him. “Shock and awe” had been a Bolan trademark years before it turned into a buzz phrase tossed around on CNN, and it was still effective.
Hit the enemy with stunning force. Drive through them like a runaway bulldozer, mangling anyone who stood and fought. No quarter asked or offered in the heat of battle, where the only currency was sudden death.
It was a tactic that the pirates had employed in their attack on the Shenyang. Now they would be on the receiving end, getting a taste of what they usually dished out.
There’d been no time or opportunity in camp to judge the woman’s capability. She’d fired her pistol on their run for cover, which was something. Bolan couldn’t say if she’d hit anyone, but at the moment it had hardly mattered. Now, after her ordeal and their mad dash through to the mangrove swamp, he guessed that she’d be shaky in the face of further mayhem, maybe crashing as fatigue and nerves kicked in. He would be satisfied if she stayed out of sight, without distracting him. Whatever she contributed beyond that would be gravy, if she didn’t accidentally shoot him.
And, then again, she might surprise him.
Bolan harbored no illusions with respect to female warriors. Going back to Viking days, if not beyond, there had been women who bore arms beside their men and left their mark on history. In Bolan’s own campaigns he had known several who fought as hard and well as any man—better than most, in fact. If this one measured up to that standard, she’d be an asset in the fight to come.
And either way, he hoped there’d be a chance to find out why the pirates had detained her for interrogation at their camp.
A wedge, perhaps, to help him peer inside their world. Before he started tearing it apart.
The voices on his trail were louder now, approaching swiftly. Bolan crouched behind his weapon, waiting for a target to reveal itself.
* * *
TIONG KRISHNAN WAS worried that his men were rushing forward too precipitously, but he shared their anger and their sense of urgency. He dared not try to call them back, knowing that it would be a waste of time, one more voice added to the clamor they were raising as they ran on through the midnight forest.
Racing into danger? He had every reason to believe so, but the risk was necessary. Taking time to creep along in silence only gave the woman and her rescuer more time in which to slip beyond their grasp, and that meant punishment for Krishnan when the news reached Khoo Kay Sundaram. Better to lose a few more men and stop the runners than to let them get away.
Full speed ahead, then, while he trailed the pack. No reason why the leader should be the first to fall.
Krishnan stumbled on a root, cursing, but caught himself before he sprawled headlong into the dirt. It cost him seconds, but he lurched back to his feet, palms stinging where they’d scuffed the earth, and snatched his submachine gun from the ground. Embarrassment mixed with his anger drove Krishnan on in greater haste.
He’d nearly caught up with the pack again, when someone in the front ranks started firing. Krishnan glimpsed the muzzle-flashes, wondered if his men had actually spied a target, then he heard one of them crying out as if in pain. It struck him then that the shots were being fired by someone else. His men had run into an ambush and were dropping now, returning fire without direction as they fell or dived for cover.
Krishnan ducked behind the stout trunk of a kapur tree that loomed above him, forty meters or more. His ears ringing with the sounds of combat, he took time to sniff the night air, picking out the scents of gunpowder and stagnant water. They were near the mangrove swamp that rimmed the nearby cove. Advancing farther meant wading knee- or hip-deep through the marsh until it cleared and they could see the beach.
But that wasn’t their goal this night. The man and woman they’d pursued from camp had turned to fight. Were they alone, or had the rescuer brought reinforcements when he came to Tioman?
The only way to answer that was to press onward, face the guns and overrun them. Now, before his men could falter, Krishnan had to exert authority and drive them forward.
“Move ahead!” he shouted at them, without leaving cover.
It seemed to Krishnan that their counterfire became more concentrated then, perhaps with the location of a target. He received it as a hopeful sign and called out more encouragement.
“Attack! Kill them!” he commanded.
Slowly, by inches, the assault advanced.
* * *
MAIA LEE WAS CAREFUL not to waste her ammunition when the shooting started. Her weapon was a Browning Hi-Power standard model, and she had fired four rounds already while fleeing from her captors. That left ten shots, if the pistol had been fully loaded when she grabbed it from Syarif Hairuman’s dead body, since there’d been one in the chamber and the magazine could hold thirteen. If he’d been careless with his loading, though, who knew how many rounds remained?
Make each one count, she thought. Sell your life dearly at the end.
Or better still, hope that the stranger who had rescued her—this man who called himself Matt Cooper—could kill the rest himself.
Maia had never been particularly violent, except where her profession had required it, but her ordeal in the pirate camp had stripped her of all mercy, even as it did her dignity. Hairuman would certainly have killed her soon, most likely after passing her around the camp to entertain his troops, and anything that happened to the bastards now was simply payback for the misery she’d suffered at their hands.
But if the stranger’s plan fell through, she hoped to have a bullet ready for herself.
Maia’s first target came in from her left, out of the darkness, having left his friends to try a one-man pincer movement. She glimpsed him first at the periphery of vision, swung around to meet him with the Browning gripped in both hands, elbows locked. The pirate had his rifle braced against a hip, prepared to fire it when she shot him one time in the chest and put him down.
It was a good hit. Even if he wasn’t killed outright, the bullet should have struck his heart—or, at the very least, torn through the major arteries that pumped blood to the lungs, perhaps even the great aorta. Dead or dying, he wouldn’t rejoin the fight.
Nine rounds remaining in the gun. She hoped.
Matt Cooper was firing short, controlled bursts from his automatic rifle, dropping targets left and right. Maia hadn’t time to admire his method, but she felt a sense of gratitude and something that reminded her of hope. She’d given up on that when she was taken prisoner, convinced that she would soon be dead and that the end would be a sweet release from suffering.
But now...
If there was any hope at all of getting out alive, she’d go down fighting for it, tooth and nail.
The pirates, startled and disorganized when Cooper first started shooting at them from the darkness, had begun returning fire. Most of their shots were hasty, flying high and wide, but one came close to parting Maia’s hair and made her duck back under cover of the nearest mangrove’s roots. Waist-deep in brackish water, trying not to think about what might be squirming in the muck around her feet, she peered into the shadows lit by muzzle-flashes, searching for another target.
There! She saw a shadow-figure edging closer, lettin
g others spend their ammunition while he closed the gap to bring Cooper within effective range. Her eyes were sharp, or she’d have missed him creeping forward like some kind of giant lizard, belly to the ground.
At first sight, he was too far off to risk wasting a pistol shot, but if she gave him time he just might solve that problem for her. In the meantime, Maia scanned the battleground for any nearer targets, then came back to focus on her chosen mark, ready to shoot despite the range, if it appeared he was about to fire at Cooper.
And was he aiming now? It seemed as if he might be peering down his rifle’s barrel from a range of twenty yards or so. It was far from ideal, for handgun shooting in the dark, but Maia couldn’t take the chance on having Cooper killed or disabled by a gunman he had overlooked in the chaotic swampland skirmish.
Aiming for the bulk that was her target’s head and shoulders, praying that she didn’t have her sights fixed on a dead log by mistake, Maia exhaled and squeezed the Browning’s trigger. She felt it jolt against her palm and saw her target slump back out of sight.
A hit? A near miss that had spoiled his aim? If she had wounded him, was he disabled, even dying? Or would he recover from a simple graze to fight again?
A burst of automatic fire sprayed stagnant water into Maia’s face. She fell back, sputtering, but kept her weapon pointed toward the enemy, ready for anything.
* * *
BOLAN SAW two opponents rise from cover on his right and charge toward his position. Maybe they were fed up with the waiting game, or angered by the losses that their side had taken in the ambush. Either way, it left them in the clear and he took full advantage of the moment.
Swinging toward the runners, Bolan took the closer of them first, a 3-round burst above the belt line, 5.56 mm
manglers virtually disemboweling his mark. The pirate went down screaming, lost his weapon as he fell and started thrashing through the final agonizing moments of his wasted life.
The second gunman saw or heard his partner fall, thought better of his charge, but by the time he changed his mind it was too late to turn. Bolan had found him, framed him with the HK416’s red-dot sight and sent three rounds downrange that nearly took his head off at the upper lip. Stone-dead before he fell, the pirate went down like a sack of dirty laundry falling from a second-story balcony.
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