Ballistic

by Don Pendleton

  As Chou Hua Tian had spelled it out, Maia had been involved in “incidents.” Fatalities. Fann didn’t know precisely how she was involved, whether the deaths had been her doing or a by-product of what Chou called her unreliability. In any case, Fann understood that if he let his guard down, if he didn’t watch himself, his name might be appended to the growing list of dead.

  It was ironic, he supposed. He had applied for a position with the Ministry of State Security hoping to find adventure, possibly even romance. There’d been none of the latter, unless Fann counted a brief liaison with a secretary from the Personnel and Education Bureau. As for the adventure, that had been ruled out when Fann was placed in the Eighth Bureau. That was Research, masquerading for outsiders as the Institute of Contemporary International Relations. Fann was, in effect, paid to read foreign newspapers and troll the internet for any bits of information useful to the ministry. And having found them, after writing up a summary, he filed it all away.

  Now, here he was in Indonesia, on his way to an amusement park to meet an old friend who might try to kill him. How was that for high adventure?

  Fann Lieu barked a bitter laugh and locked the room behind him when he left.

  Ancol Bay City, Jakarta

  THE SPITTING RAIN HAD TURNED into a steady drizzle by the time Mack Bolan parked the SUV with several hundred other vehicles and killed its engine. Reaching down behind the driver’s seat, he found his open gym bag and removed the Pindad SS2, lifting it up into his lap. The rain, darkness and the deserted parking lot provided adequate security as Bolan checked the autorifle’s load, distributing spare magazines and 40 mm rounds in pockets of a light tactical vest. All hidden by the poncho once he’d pulled it on and drawn the hood over his head.

  Maia Lee was working on a similar makeover in the passenger’s seat, securing clips on the straight magazines of her PM2 submachine gun to minimize fumbling when it was time to reload. Bolan still hoped that the full-auto weapons might not be required inside the theme park, but he’d stayed alive this long by always being ready for the worst conceivable scenario.

  In this case, that would be an ambush on the crowded midway of Fantasy World, with countless tourists in the line of fire. As skilled as Bolan was, some of his shots at moving targets still might go awry, or even ricochet after they sliced through human flesh. That left whole mobs of innocents in jeopardy, when all they’d banked on was a thrill ride on the Power Surge, the Meteor Attack, Tornado or one of the other rides designed to merge laughter with panic.

  “Ready?” he asked Maia.

  She frowned, then nodded. “I’ve packed everything that I can carry.”

  Bolan kept his fingers crossed, hoping she wouldn’t ask him if the poncho made her look fat. She spared him that and climbed out of the SUV into the rain, remembering the hood too late and cursing softly as she raised it to protect wet hair.

  “I’ll catch a cold now, wait and see,” she said.

  Bolan turned toward the theme park’s entry gates, hoping that neither of them caught a dose of sudden death.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Ancol Dreamland, Jakarta

  Huo Zhangke loitered near the entrance to Dunia Fantasi, his hair plastered to his scalp by rain, wishing that he could tune out the incessant noise from screaming roller-coaster riders, bleating children and their whining parents, plus discordant music echoing from half a dozen sources on the midway close at hand. He had a headache, which was rare unless he’d earned himself a hangover from drinking too much rum, and it was only getting worse with the assault upon his eardrums.

  Make that one eardrum. The other ear—his right—was muffled by the wireless headset that allowed him to communicate with other members of his team spotted around the theme park. In some other time and place, the headgear might have made him stand out in the crowd, but variations on his own device appeared to be the norm for Ancol Dreamland visitors. It made them look a bit like aliens or perhaps attendees at some science-fiction gathering, especially the ones with cotton candy smeared across their faces in a range of garish colors. At any given moment, Huo thought half the babbling around him was comprised of people talking to themselves.

  Which likely made them feel at home in Fantasy Land.

  Huo’s team consisted of a dozen men and one ferocious female—Lia Yin—whom he had brought along in case their female target ducked into a women’s lavatory or used some other gender-specific ruse to dodge his shooters. All had viewed and memorized the target’s photograph, emailed presumably from somewhere in Beijing. As for the female agent’s cohort, this American no one still living could describe, Huo guessed that they would simply have to kill whoever came into the park with Maia Lee.

  Simple.

  Huo had no orders from his superior to make the killings look like accidents or heart attacks. A simple bullet to the brain would do it, and if any of the tourists who surrounded him felt a compelling urge to act as heroes, well, Huo had enough guns on the scene to deal with them, as well. A massacre wasn’t what Jin Au-Yo had ordered, but he had been crystal-clear in stating that the targets could not be allowed to slip past Huo’s soldiers.

  At any cost to bystanders and property, they had to be stopped.

  It was the kind of order Huo Zhangke preferred, no nit-picking or micromanagement from his superiors. His skill wasn’t in question, neither was his leadership ability. Simply unleash him, let him do his bloody work and then reward him for a job well done.

  Huo hoped that there would be no collateral damage, of course. The negative publicity was never welcome, was often bad for business in the short run. But he wouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep if some stupid person crossed his line of fire at a critical moment and paid with his life. Belonging to the Flying Ax Triad meant that such petty irritations were beneath him.

  Huo was content to know that he would do his job and two people would die.

  At least.

  * * *

  BOLAN AND MAIA didn’t approach the Ancol Dreamland ticket gates together. Maia took the lead and put her money down, while Bolan got into a different line and waited several minutes longer for his turn. Each moment that he spent outside the revolving gate, no view of Maia after she’d passed through, nagged at him with the thought that she might walk into an ambush on her own, before he had a chance to cover her.

  But no shots sounded from the park, and when his turn came to push through the gate, a full-height turnstile made of stainless steel, he had the brief sensation of confinement in a cage. The moment passed and he was through, instantly enveloped by the clamor of a giant fair. Alter the faces, and it could have been in Kansas, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo or Nairobi. People massed together by the hundreds, maybe thousands, challenging the elements to drown their quest for simple pleasures.

  Most of them, at least.

  One man, either inside the park already or arriving soon, was coming to betray a friend. Maia didn’t regard him as a threat, given his personality and background, but the Executioner wasn’t entirely sold on that analysis.

  Whether the finger man came dressed to kill or not, he wouldn’t be alone. The only question left in Bolan’s mind was whether he and Maia would be facing triad guns, a team from Maia’s Ministry of State Security or both. He didn’t speculate about the numbers, since he couldn’t pick a figure from thin air.

  One edge they had already, going in: none of the hitters sent to back Fann Lieu, the point man, would have seen Bolan before. They’d likely know that he was white, perhaps American, but there were other round-eyed tourists in the Ancol Dreamland crowd, and Bolan’s hooded poncho did a fair job of disguising him unless he met an enemy head-on.

  Another edge: Bolan himself.

  He wasn’t arrogant, just realistic. Bolan knew what he could do, what he had done, and he had a fair idea of how he stacked up against triad soldiers. They were killers, s
ure, but more accustomed to compliant targets. The Executioner was betting everything he had that they had never faced someone like him before.

  And never would again, after this night.

  They would be in for a surprise with Maia Lee, as well, if they came at her with the expectation that a woman was an easy tag. She’d proved herself in battle, and despite some latent ambiguity about her former classmate, Bolan thought she was prepared to treat him as an enemy if that, in fact, turned out to be the case.

  And what else could it be?

  Passing the Jaya Bowling Center, Maia fifty yards ahead of him, Bolan wondered if she’d have any hesitancy about facing other agents from her ministry, if it came down to that. It didn’t worry him tremendously, but Bolan understood that even fleeting hesitation could be fatal once the guns came out.

  As for himself, spies didn’t qualify as cops in Bolan’s view, and so they weren’t protected by the private limitation he imposed upon himself. Civilians were the worry, on this crowded killing field, and it would be a challenge not to kill or injure any when the heat came down.

  Beginning any minute now.

  * * *

  FANN LIEU HAD CASH in hand as he approached the ticket booth. Ten thousand rupiah translated to roughly nine renminbi in Chinese currency, or a little more than one U.S. dollar. It was modest enough, though he’d cringed at the number initially, prior to conversion. From what he could see as he stepped from the taxi, the park had to be making a fortune for someone in the firm that owned it.

  It pleased Fann, in a small way, to have secret business at the park. When he had filed his application with the Ministry of State Security, he had imagined learning secrets, knowing stories that would separate him from the mindless throng of ordinary office workers in Beijing. Of course, he knew that everyone had secrets, but the sort accessible to him were a special kind. And while he couldn’t share them with another soul outside headquarters—and few within—Fann Lieu felt privately empowered by the covert knowledge he possessed.

  That all seemed vaguely foolish, now that he was actually in the field and moving toward the culmination of a real-life secret mission. There was danger in the air, and while the prospect frightened him, while he was torn by guilty feelings with regard to Maia Lee, Fann’s secret knowledge still made him feel special.

  Special and intensely vulnerable now that he was actually on the scene, clearing the entrance to the park, following signs to Dunia Fantasi and, within it, Fantasi Hikayat. Toward his rendezvous with Maia on an errand of the utmost critical importance.

  As he walked along the midway, Fann tried picking out the watchers who, he understood, would have been sent ahead to shadow him. He had no practical experience with tracking anyone, and his imagination quickly ran away with him. A smiling couple with their toddler in a stroller might be agents, the child a lifelike doll concealing weapons in its pram. The clown who passed him, looking weary underneath the painted smile from hours of compulsory hilarity, could be another watcher. When an older man bumped into Fann and muttered an apology, Fann quickly checked his pockets. Nothing missing, and no covert message passed to help him with the task that lay ahead.

  He had gone through changes since receiving his assignment to Jakarta. First came guilt at being asked to use their friendship as a weapon against Maia Lee. Next came acceptance of the claim that she had somehow come to be unreliable for service to the ministry. With that in mind, Fann had experienced a sense of pride at being trusted with a delicate assignment.

  Only later, airborne on his way to Indonesia, had the thought occurred to him that he was being used because he was a small cog in the great machine, and thus could be expendable.

  Which changed nothing, of course. If Maia had betrayed their homeland and the ministry, she had to be stopped. And if Fann Lieu could play a part in stopping her, whatever his precise role, it would be a feather in his cap. A means of climbing through the ranks.

  One of the first things every child learned in the People’s Republic of China was loyalty. First to the state—or to the people, if you managed to believe the two things were identical. Next, to the family, if they were worthy citizens who did their part to help the PRC. Self didn’t enter into the equation. No man born since Mao Zedong was indispensable.

  But Fann Lieu didn’t plan to die this night.

  With any luck at all, he would survive and prosper. As for Maia, well, she’d made her choice, and she could live or die with it.

  Fantasi Hikayat, Ancol Dreamland

  DESPITE THE CRUSH of bodies that surrounded her, regardless of her hooded poncho and the rain that fell in gusts then vanished just as quickly, Maia Lee felt terribly conspicuous. It was her own mind playing tricks, she realized, but who on earth was able to escape from his or her own thoughts?

  Maia imagined, for a start, that nearly everyone who passed her on the theme park’s midway had to be able to discern her worry from her grim facial expression, made grotesque by neon lights. It seemed to her that nearly anyone could spot the submachine gun bulging underneath her rain-slick poncho, even though she clutched it tightly against her side. Perhaps the SIG-Sauer pistol tucked into the back of Maia’s jeans protruded just enough for passersby to note the bulge.

  And then what?

  She had passed police in uniform already, strolling past, examining the crowd with baleful eyes. If anything was out of place with Maia, surely they would be the first to see and challenge her. Or were they just too lazy, lulled into a kind of apathy by their assignment to a playground? Would that change if one of the civilians streaming past them pointed Maia out, accusing her of—what?

  The firearms that she carried were illegal for civilians, and her ministry credentials carried no weight in Jakarta. She would be detained for questioning, and if the guns were matched to bullets taken from the men she’d killed since coming to Jakarta with Matt Cooper, it meant murder charges. Indonesian law prescribed execution by firing squad for convicted murderers, terrorists and drug traffickers, which theoretically left her in mortal jeopardy on two counts, if arrested.

  But no one raised the hue and cry as Maia passed among them, hoping Matt Cooper was somewhere behind her, or running along a parallel track to her left or right. Maia’s garb, in fact, betrayed nothing to anyone. The park employees dressed as ancient Greeks and Egyptians, staked out at scale models of the Parthenon and pyramids, looked more bedraggled from the rain than most of the tourists around them. They weren’t on the lookout for fugitives, gunmen or spies.

  Lucky for me, she thought.

  She was supposed to meet Fann Lieu somewhere around a looming plaster model of the sphinx. No more specific details were available, likely because Fann didn’t know the park himself and had had no access to a detailed set of photographs before he chose the spot. He could have worked from pictures on the internet, or he may have been instructed by a planner at the ministry.

  Someone who wanted Maia neutralized.

  Well, she would meet Fann Lieu, but Maia didn’t mean to play the game his way.

  And if he tried to take her down himself, it might just be his last mistake.

  * * *

  THEME PARKS WEREN’T the kind of recreation mode that Bolan normally enjoyed, preferring as he did the peace of solitude or easy moments spent with his surviving friends. He understood the urge to join a crowd, of course—to run, scream, gobble greasy food then squander money on a dizzy ride to bring it up again—but all that struck him as a child’s pursuit, something that normal folk outgrew around the time they came to terms with puberty.

  The mob at Ancol Dreamland obviously disagreed.

  Maybe the park provided a release from numbing office work or a welcome contrast to manual labor. Perhaps some parents hoped their children would be so exhausted by the park that they’d sleep through the night, despite sugar infusions that could keep an army marchin
g strongly. No doubt a few young men—and women, too—used Ancol Dreamland as a precursor to pillow talk.

  More power to them, Bolan thought. To him, it was a little slice of pseudo-happy hell on earth, complete with screams and flashing lights that simulated flames.

  But it could still get worse.

  When Bolan chose an urban battleground, his first thought was the risk to innocent civilians. He would fight wherever trouble found him, but if given time to lay a plan, he wouldn’t choose a hospital, a shopping mall or a crowded theme park as his killing ground. This time, of course, the choice had not been his. He had to cover Maia while she met her former classmate, watching out for hunters in the crowd, among the booths and noisy rides—throughout the whole damned park, in fact.

  Impossible. But he would do his best to keep her safe and deal with anyone who threatened her, leaving the so-called friend in Maia’s hands.

  Exactly what she hoped to learn from placing her head on the chopping block eluded Bolan. Part of it was personal, no doubt, maybe a hope that she would be proved wrong about Fann Lieu’s betrayal. Bolan thought the odds of that occurring rested somewhere close to nil, but life could still surprise him every now and then.

  But if Fann Lieu was playing straight, what then? Would he come bearing information that would help them find the missiles, even track down Jin Au-Yo? Bolan already knew Fann wasn’t trained in fieldwork, and the last thing either of them needed at the moment was a desk jockey hanging around to cheer them on. Moral support was great with family and friends, but it was useless on the battlefield.

  So far, he’d spotted no one who stood out as obviously dangerous, but scouting shooters in a mob like this was difficult at best. Toss in the countless hiding places that a theme park offered, and it was a nearly hopeless task. For all he knew, there could be snipers riding on the Ferris wheel, bushwhackers hiding in the men’s room toilet stalls. Until they made an overt move, they were invisible.