"Amy Culp," Hal introduced her in absentia. "One of Minh's recruits, last reported in residence at his estate north of San Francisco."
"What makes her special?" April asked.
Bolan made the connection before Brognola had a chance to answer.
"Related to a certain senator?" he asked.
"Only child," Hal confirmed. "And the senator's convinced she's being held against her will. Incidentally, his friend in the Oval Office shares a similar belief."
Bolan understood the sudden urgency.
"Damage estimate?"
Hal shook his head.
"Unknown. Possible extortion, some kind of incident designed to embarrass the administration. For now, call the girl a handle."
Bolan focused on the smiling, freckled face. A handle, yeah, and the only one they had. One that turned both ways.
If Hal's suspicions were correct, they could expect an escalating reign of terror from the Universal Devotees.
Haifa million potential terrorists, and counting.
Hell, if only ten percent could be manipulated, channeled into random acts of violence...
Bolan shut off the train of thought, fully conscious of the implications.
Every day, Minh recruited more disciples for his cult. Every day he twisted and seduced more young, impressionable minds. Each day his army grew.
There was nothing the authorities could do to stop him. Not within the narrow letter of the law.
But there was something an Executioner could do.
Bolan's eyes locked with Hal's across the briefing room.
"When do I leave?"
4
The "handle" was avoiding Bolan, checking out the small apartment and its meager furnishings. He let her have the moment, waiting and watching while she got her bearings.
The drop was a walk-up flat in a four-story brown-stone, identical to others lining both sides of the street. Three blocks east of Golden Gate Park, it stood in the heart of Haight-Ashbury, aging and anonymous. The flat was secured by a phone call from Stony Man Farm to Able Team's base of operations. It was "safe" — and expendable, if worse came to worst.
In the sixties, the neighborhood gave birth to a new, restless generation, young people searching for love and peace with no strings attached. Without tools or blueprints, they tried to erect Utopia in the heart of San Francisco. In their youthful inexperience they lost direction and soon bogged down in an underworld of drugs and empty revolutionary rhetoric.
Sheep attract predators, and the Flower Generation had its share of cannibals. Bikers and bomb-builders, closet Satanists and self-styled urban guerillas — the movers and shakers of a new wave that never quite arrived. The Haight became a mecca for the mindless, burned-out drones seeking someone, anyone who could lead them to the light.
Even now there are some still seeking easy answers in a complicated universe, turning on to drugs and cults — everything from Zen and Krishna to the Universal Devotees.
It started there, in The Haight, while a younger Bolan sought answers of his own in another kind of jungle, half a world away. They had come together now, at last, and it was from The Haight that Bolan planned to launch his new offensive on the savages.
The neighborhood had changed with time, but it was still a haven for the rootless and disaffected. A person could get lost there — deliberately or otherwise — and it could shelter Amy Culp while Bolan dealt with Minh and his Universal Devotees.
He ditched the battered Cadillac, retrieving his rental car with weapons and equipment in the trunk. The nondescript sedan would merge better with the neighborhood, and by abandoning the Caddy he gave Minh something else to puzzle over. Another dead end for his bloodhounds to pursue.
The warrior had observed a change in Amy as they drove. She had lost the hunted look, but there was caution in her manner, and he caught her looking suspiciously at him. At their destination, she reluctantly followed him inside and up the dingy stairs, wary of betrayal.
Bolan couldn't fault the lady for her caution. It was overdue, but she was learning.
The hard way, yeah.
And now that she was building up the wall, he would have to find a way to get inside.
The lady turned to find him watching her. Her eyes shifted, glancing toward the single bed, and she forced a little smile.
"Okay, I'm ready."
She was opening her denim shirt, slowly and with resignation. Bolan's voice stopped her at the second button.
"Forget it, Amy."
There was confusion on her face, but she bluffed it out.
"Hey, it's all right," she told him. "I don't expect a free ride."
Bolan shook his head.
"You've paid enough already. Have a seat."
Amy perched herself on a corner of the bed, hands clasped between her knees, looking every bit a little girl as Bolan stood before her. A very frightened little girl, stranded in a woman's body.
It took a moment for the woman-child to find her voice.
"What is it that you want?"
"What do you want?" Bolan countered.
Amy laughed, a bitter sound.
"The only thing I want is out," she told him.
"You've got it," he replied.
"Just like that."
There was no disguising the skepticism in her tone.
Bolan nodded.
"Take it home, Amy."
"Home?" The voice was different, faraway. "That's funny. I used to think the church was home."
She looked up at Bolan, searching his face. He let her run with it.
"You know, I heard Minh the first time at UCLA. It seemed like... I don't know, like he had all the answers. When he left, I went with him."
She put on a little deprecating smile and shrugged.
"School was going nowhere. Anyway, I wanted Minh to notice me. It wasn't hard."
The smile disappeared. She wasn't watching Bolan anymore.
"I was his favorite," she said. "One of them, anyway. He liked me well enough to set me up for certain visitors — the ones Mitch Carter brought around. I got to see and hear things..."
Her voice trailed away into nothing, and Bolan finished for her.
"You saw too much. Minh couldn't afford to let you go."
"He still can't," Amy told him. "Listen, Minh's got an army. He calls them 'elders,' but they're different. Hard. You met some of them tonight."
"How many are there?" Bolan asked.
The lady bit her lip, thoughtful.
"It's hard to say," she answered. "They come and go. I guess thirty... maybe more.''
An army, right.
If her estimate was accurate, Bolan had reduced their number by a third already.
If the estimate was wrong...
But it didn't matter, either way. The warrior had a job to do. He was committed.
"I'm going out for a while," he told her. "You're safe here. Keep the door locked, stay off the telephone." Bolan checked his watch. "I'll be back for you by sunrise."
"What, uh, what if you're not?"
There was a tremor in her voice.
Bolan handed her a card. The number on it would connect her with a telephone cutout arranged by Able Team. Any effort at a trace would terminate the linkup automatically.
"If I'm not here by six o'clock."' he told her, "call that number. They'll be expecting you. Ask for a pickup at the Phoenix nest."
"Phoenix," she repeated. "Like the bird?"
"Close enough."
Bolan let himself out and locked the door. As he hit the stairs, he was already thinking beyond the girl.
Amy was secure if she kept her head and followed his instructions. Whatever happened, she was taken care of.
The Executioner had problems of his own.
Like an army, twenty men or more, armed and ready to defend the Devotees.
"Elders," right. Read "gunners," and you have the makings of a potent hard force at Minh's estate.
Something Amy said was nagging
at him. Bolan dredged it up.
They come and go.
But where?
The implications were obvious. Reinforcements. A second force of "elders" Minh could summon up at need. There was no way to estimate their number from the data he possessed.
It was a blind spot, the kind that could get a careless warrior killed.
Mack Bolan was a careful warrior, all the way.
He had been known to push the odds, defy them on occasion, but he never acted out of ignorance. He survived this long by application of a simple formula in dealing with his enemies, the savages.
Identification.
Isolation.
Annihilation.
Simple, sure. Except every step was fraught with peril. Any false move was tantamount to suicide.
The Executioner was many things, but never suicidal. He had come to terms with death, but he didn't search for it.
Bolan needed information, a new handle on his war. With any luck at all, he would get it when he kept his next appointment.
With a mole.
5
From childhood, Nguyen Van Minh existed in a state of war.
Born on the eve of global conflict, his first memories revolved around the Japanese invasion of his native Indochina. Minh lost a brother in that war, but the greater price of freedom was a restoration of the hated French colonial regime in 1945. Ho Chi Minh, leader of the underground resistance, turned his own Vietminh guerillas on the French without breaking stride, waging a relentless "war of the flea" against the imperial giant.
Minh was thirteen when the French army was beaten at Dien Bien Phu. He was already looking toward the priestly career that devout Buddhist parents selected for him. As a youth in Saigon, he was preoccupied with learning the ritual paths to Nirvana, but he was not entirely ignorant of politics. He noted: the Geneva conference and its call for partition of Vietnam, with reunion under nationwide elections in 1945; betrayal of the conference accords by the southern government of Ngo Dinh Diem and his puppet, Emperor Bao Dai; the steady drift of Ho Chi Minh's northern clique into an orthodox Soviet orbit.
A leader of the nation's Catholic minority, Diem persecuted Buddhists — and anyone else objecting to his venal, nepotistic rule. In 1957, the countryside rose in revolt, and Diem retaliated by escalating tactics of oppression. Firing squads worked overtime, and guillotines mounted on the back of military trucks made the rounds of rural villages, killing real and suspected rebels.
In 1958, Minh's family was caught in a sweep of Binh Hoah province and each member was slain "attempting to escape." At graveside, Minh renounced the priesthood in favor of a personal quest for revenge. He traveled north, across the DMZ, seeking those who possessed the necessary skill and knowledge. He returned in 1960, with others, to organize a fledgling National Liberation Front — the Vietcong.
During his absence, American advisers replaced the French, shoring up Diem's regime with money, medicine, munitions. To Minh, they were all the same — running dogs of Western imperialism, feeding like leeches on the lifeblood of his people.
He swore a private oath to destroy them all.
On his twenty-first birthday, Minh killed his first American.
Standing in the darkness, filled with the righteous anger of his race, he tossed two grenades through the window of a Saigon nightclub and watched the place erupt in flames. Seven people died, but it was the American — a Special Forces captain, he read later — Minh remembered. It was a birthday present to himself.
There were other killings, Americans and Vietnamese alike, every one an enemy of his people. With time, Minh came to appreciate violence for its own sake, an end in itself. He tenaciously pursued his enemies, and found them everywhere.
Finally, there was victory. The Americans withdrew, and in time the southern traitors were defeated, but it brought no end to war. The push continued — against Laotians and Cambodians, against the Montagnards and others who resisted relocation in the New Economic Zones. There was work for killers in Vietnam, but Nguyen Van Minh was selected for a higher destiny.
In the name of the people he was carrying the fire abroad, exporting the war to America.
Minh devised a cover for himself, simple but effective. He became a refugee, his family murdered by a tyrant (true enough), carrying a new gospel to the West (also true, in a way).
His church, the Universal Devotees, was Minh's crowning achievement. Father Ho taught him the guerilla is a fish, swimming in an ocean of people. In America, Minh was a fish out of water — until he fabricated his own artificial sea. A reservoir of followers and hangers-on to do his bidding, mask his purpose. In his mind, there was poetic justice in his plan, using the spoiled children of the capitalist pigs as a lethal weapon.
As a gentleman of culture, Minh appreciated poetry.
They were half a million strong, and growing. He already saw results, but the best was still to come. Soon the Devotees would realize its full potential, working from within, generating chaos. If all went according to plan...
Amy Culp's defection was a deviation from the script, but Minh felt capable of dealing with it. Her escape, with the aid of outside forces, was something else again, potentially disastrous.
His defenses were penetrated, soldiers lost. The girl was gone, and with her knowledge of the church she was a menace — while she lived.
Setbacks, certainly, but Minh had learned to live with problems, cope with adversity. The patient warrior was usually victorious in the end.
A knocking on the study door distracted him from private thoughts.
"Come."
Tommy Booth entered and closed the door. Minh studied his chief of security: Tommy's normally intense face wore a haggard look he hadn't seen there before.
The Vietnamese kept his voice low, barely audible across the room, so Tommy had to move closer if he wished to hear.
"So?"
The soldier spread his hands, a helpless gesture.
"Gone," he said. "We lost her."
"And my elders?"
"Eleven down," Tommy told him. "Somebody tore them all to hell."
"Somebody," Minh repeated, frowning. "A confession of your ignorance. Give me facts, Tommy."
Booth absorbed the slap without expression. He cleared his throat and began again.
"Okay, fact. Some...an unknown intruder... took the girl away from Mike and Gary. Killed 'em both. Then he took her in the Cadillac and crashed the gate, wasted two more soldiers at the checkpoint.
"And fact. Two carloads of men overtook them on the road — five, six miles west — and all of them are dead. I checked it out, and it looks like a friggin' war zone."
Minh winced at the profanity. He disliked any form of personal excess.
"Your professional assessment?" he inquired.
Tommy frowned.
"Professional's the word, all right," he answered. "Somebody led those boys around the block and met 'em coming back. They were good — handpicked — but they couldn't measure up."
Minh made a sour face. His voice was tight.
"Again 'somebody.' Is there any indication of our enemy's identity? His strength?"
Tommy shook his head, dejected.
"Lester — at the gatehouse — lived long enough to say there was one man in the Caddy with the girl. No way to tell about the ambush. From the looks, it could've been an army."
"No."
His military mind was circling the problem, probing for solutions.
"I do not think an army. If our enemies were certain..."
He let the statement trail away, unfinished. Leaning back in his swivel chair, Minh made a steeple of his fingers and focused on them. Calling up the monastic training of his youth, he made his mind a blank, the better to concentrate his full attention on the puzzle.
If his enemies were conscious of the plan, if they had evidence to move against him, federal officers would be knocking at the door with arrest warrants. The Americans were formalistic in their dealings with su
spicious characters, affording common thugs a battery of rights that often made conviction an impossibility. If police overstepped their bounds, the fact was trumpeted on radio and television, plastered all across the headlines. Frequently, it was the officer who found himself in court.
Minh was thankful for the ignorance of enemies. He could work within their decadent society, use their precious laws and Constitution to protect himself.
A subtle man, he also appreciated irony.
But if the girl had not been rescued by police — which she almost certainly had not — then his problem remained unsolved.
There were agencies, of course, which handled covert operations for the government. Once again, however, the Americans roped themselves with limitations and restrictions: their CIA could only operate outside the country, and the FBI was strictly a domestic agency, under constant scrutiny from critics in the press. Coordination was a problem, and Occidentals seemed to take a masochistic pleasure in reviewing every foible, every failure of their "secret" agents.
The Soviets, of course, had no such weakness, and Minh thought at once of Mitchell Carter. The man himself would not be capable of such a daring rescue, but he could hire professionals, even as he had recruited Tommy Booth and Minh's troop of "elders." It was not beyond the realm of possibility, and yet...
Minh frowned as he wrestled with the question of a motive. On the surface, Carter was an ally, but it never paid to underestimate the KGB's duplicity.
Minh viewed the Russians with particular contempt. If Americans were greedy pigs, the Soviets were little more than traitors, their epic revolution long degenerated into something like a form of leftist fascism. He could tolerate Carter and the KGB, as his country tolerated Soviet "advice" and "guidance." They were necessary evils, and would someday outlive their usefulness.
Mitchell Carter might have outlived his usefulness already.
If he had participated in the girl's escape, for whatever reasons of his own, Minh would see him dead.
He had planned to kill the man, looked forward to it from the first day of their association. Hanoi would not object if he could demonstrate that Carter had betrayed them. Minh would probably receive congratulations for initiative, perhaps promotion.
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