Council of Kings te-79

by Don Pendleton

  He saw Bolan and cocked it, bringing it up to fire.

  "Don't!" yelled Morgan.

  Bolan pushed Morgan away and swung the Colt up to the guard. Bolan waited for a split second to see if the guard would fire.

  The guard brought the gun up until it pointed at Bolan's face.

  Bolan blew away the guard's face.

  Mike whimpered in fear. He shook.

  Bolan kicked each man in the head, swiftly and surely. He pulled the keys from Morgan's pocket, as the man slumped and groaned. A whistle blew shrilly somewhere in the building.

  Bolan tore open the drawer and stuffed the papers into his shirt. Blood from the guard's head flowed between his boots in a crimson rivulet. Then came the sound of rushing feet.

  Bolan slid out the workroom door. Two guards rounded the corner, SMG's at the ready. They pulled up to fire. Bolan sent the first spinning back with a roaring blast from the Colt. The second gunner tore the wall open with slugs. Bolan closed his eyes against the spray of hot plaster and crouched, then fired at the muzzle-flash. The room fell silent.

  Sirens screamed across the tarmac. A troop carrier pulled up, guards spilling from the back. Bolan sprang, making for the other door.

  In the bright heat outside, Bolan put on his mirror sunglasses and holstered his gun. The truck was idling, its driver ready.

  Bolan walked up and shrugged. "I can't find that asshole anywhere," he said.

  The driver looked down at him. "What the hell is going on, anyway?"

  "I don't know," Bolan said, opening the door of the truck and yanking the driver out. The driver sprawled on the tarmac as Bolan shifted into gear and roared off.

  * * *

  There was a soft crack of billiard balls. Carpet spread beneath his feet.

  There were women here.

  Colonel Harlan Winters, known as "Howlin' Harlan" in the officer corps, looked up from his whiskey at the officers' club and nearly choked.

  "Bolan," he managed to get out, "how the hell did you get in here?" Winters looked furtively around the room.

  Bolan turned his back to the rest of the room and stood at ease beside Winters. From inside his shirt he withdrew a sheaf of papers. He lay them on the polished wood of the bar in front of Winters.

  "You shouldn't have risked coming here."

  "I'm safer here," replied Bolan.

  "Jesus Christ," muttered Winters as he scanned the papers. "You were the one who blew open this heroin thing?"

  "They accused me of killing Jim Naiman in order to shut me up," Bolan said.

  Winters read on compulsively. Bolan stole a glance behind at the officers' club. They might have been in Nevada someplace, from the looks of it — carpeting, lamps, pool table. In the next room a movie was showing.

  Sentimental music sounded through the wall. Bolan listened to the dialogue. A woman was trying to dissuade her soldier from going to war.

  Bolan ordered a drink. Who was the actor?

  Henry Fonda? No, Ronald Reagan.

  The voices were distorted as they came through the wall.

  "You're a special man, Bill. You have courage. More than I do, I guess. Please stay."

  "I'm not so special. I just fight for what I believe. As long as there's a bully to fight, I'll be there..." The music swelled; they were probably kissing on an airstrip or a ship.

  Winters whistled and looked up. Bolan caught the faint breath of whiskey.

  "This is a dirty business, isn't it?"

  "As dirty as it gets."

  "Look, my advice is don't get too hot about it. I've been hearing rumors about the CIA transporting raw heroin for the Laotians in return for raids on VC camps inside the Laotian border. Maybe we need that."

  "We don't need what we're getting now. The VC in the Mekong get anything they want — weapons, supplies, anything. The so-called intelligence we've been going on is useless. Our boys are getting slaughtered. Buddy knew it on that mission."

  Winters took a thoughtful sip of his drink.

  "You're right about the intelligence. I could do better with a Ouija board. But we can't let the VC keep Laos as their supply depot. Anyway, it's too late now. The whole thing is under official investigation."

  "Who's doing the investigating?"

  "The CIA. Top level, here in Saigon. Putnam himself is heading the investigation."

  "Putnam?"

  "What's the matter?" Winters had seen Bolan's face freeze.

  Bolan felt a sense of desolation sweep through him, of justice torn and shredded, scattered to the winds.

  "Putnam is the one running the operation." Winters threw up his arms. "Listen, Colonel," Bolan said urgently. "You have to stash those papers away until I find a way to get around Putnam. I'm dropping out of sight. I'm going back to the Mekong."

  Winters leaned forward and looked piercingly at Bolan. "Don't go back to the Mekong now, Mack. Anywhere but there. We're getting casualties way beyond anyone's predictions. It's a mess, a bloodbath."

  Through the wall came heroic music. Must be near the end of the movie, Bolan thought.

  Winters continued uneasily. "You've been too much at the front line, Mack. You're starting to get that look in your eye."

  "You know how it is as well as I do," said Bolan. "There is no front line. The front line is everywhere."

  Winters stopped Bolan before he walked through the door. "Mack, be careful you don't go over the edge. Nam does that to people."

  Bolan knew now, standing in that officers' bar, just how Buddy felt when he was shaving his head. "I'm already over the edge," he said.

  * * *

  Mosquito netting hung diaphanous in the moonlight. Bolan felt the fatigue working on his mind as he stood over the bed. He must be careful now. For a moment Buddy appeared in hallucination, squatting on the floor with his knife at Bolan's feet.

  Bolan pulled back the netting. Vu Quoc Thanh lay sleeping. The moon mumped him with a corpselike pallor.

  Bolan sat on the edge of the bed. Thanh shot upright, feeling for his gun.

  Bolan grabbed him by the wrist until he gained his senses. Thanh wiped the sweat from his neck and torso, finally his face.

  "What is the Council of Kings?" whispered Bolan.

  Thanh faced him, the moon behind him glowing on his shoulders. His face was in darkness.

  "The Council of Kings is the name given to those who run your war."

  "The Pentagon?"

  "No. Intelligence. The people who sell the war to the generals and the money-makers. The people who give your country a reason to send its youth to their deaths."

  "What do they have to do with the heroin?"

  Thanh waved the question away with a bony white hand.

  "The heroin is a minor thing, useful to the Council for making deals, making money. But you and your people are being lied to. Many times I tried to warn the American intelligence people that the VC were strong — stronger than they could imagine. But they would not listen."

  "Why not?"

  "They wanted to tell their people that they could win the war. Now they are finding out that I was right, but they cannot admit it. For years I told them, but they ignored me."

  "We can win it. If we can only cut off the VC supply routes..."

  "You don't understand. This country has been invaded and occupied by foreign armies for thousands of years. The people here have always driven them out, sooner or later. Don't you understand? The only way to win this war is to kill every man, woman and child."

  Bolan did not know what to say. He looked mutely at the figure crouching beside him.

  "You have already started to do that," continued Thanh. "Look at what you do in the villages. Are you making friends there? You give the Vietcong more supporters everywhere your army goes."

  "But the camps — we get more and more people in our camps..."

  "Simply because the people must avoid the American bombs. You cannot promise these people anything that the French have not already promised. Look where it go
t the French. We will always win."

  Bolan sat rooted to the bed. There was a heaviness in his limbs he had never felt before. He had suckered Thanh with his talk, and the guy had fallen for it.

  "Did you say "we"?" asked Bolan.

  "No," said Thanh, reaching for a cigarette. "I didn't."

  Bolan sprang. With one big hand he smothered Thanh's face, pressing down into the bed. He rose over Tharth and sank his knee into the smaller man's gut.

  "You joined them, didn't you, Thanh? It was you who got to Buddy first."

  Thanh looked up at the big bastard who held his life in his hands. Bolan saw that his eyes held fear, but no more than fear. He could see that Thanh had expected it to end this way. Had expected it since childhood.

  Bolan gently took out his knife and cut into Thanh's throat, holding him until the body stopped jerking.

  Then he ransacked the room feverishly. In his pocket Buddy's ear began to twitch. Bolan ignored it. He knew it was fatigue and not reality, but all the same he felt the ear jump as if it were alive. Thanh's bowels had let go, and the room had begun to smell of the foulness of death.

  Nothing escaped Bolan's hand. He knew the thing was somewhere in the room, though he could not say how he knew. From the bookshelf he withdrew a worn copy of Les Misgrables.

  Holding it by the spine, he let the contents fall from between the leaves. It lay there on the desk, downy and tattered like a piece of litter.

  Buddy's map.

  * * *

  Bolan sat in a padded chair, looking at a picture on Putnam's desk of the man's family at Disneyland. They were stuffing their faces with cotton candy. Bolan closed his eyes against the image. Morning sun glared through the office blinds. The door opened for a senior bureaucrat looking well groomed in a gray suit. Maybe he was taking someone to lunch. He crossed the room and thrust his hand toward Bolan, the essence of ease and authority.

  "Dick Putnam. You're Johnson?"

  "That's right," said Bolan. "Phil Johnson."

  "You know something about this heroin thing?" asked Putnam, settling himself into his chair behind the fortress of a desk.

  "Yeah," said Bolan. "I know a lot about it. I know you run the operation. You use the dead bodies of American soldiers to ship your heroin. I know you lie about the strength of the Vietcong. I know you get a lot of innocent kids killed or maimed for life." Bolan was surprised at his own sureness. He was a young man unused to going too far. Putnam's face had become a mask of hate and panic.

  He sat immobilized. Bolan continued to drive words home like a jackhammer.

  "You scar people. You use them for your own purposes and then kill them. You killed Naiman and blamed me for it. You use your position of trust as if it were your whore."

  Putnam's eyes darted to the photo of his family.

  Bolan drove on mercilessly. "You could say I know something about it. I lost a buddy because of you."

  Furious, Putnam reached across the desk and grabbed the picture frame as a weapon. Bolan smashed his fist down on Putnam's, breaking the hand and shattering the glass and the frame that it held. Putnam cried out, his face white and twisted with pain, and he put his injured hand between his thighs.

  Bolan reached around Putnam's throat and pulled him across the desk with a powerful jerk of his shoulder. Putnam lay wheezing, his head on the desk, the corners of his mouth wet with spittle.

  "It's not me you want," the CIA man gasped. "I answer to others. Please..."

  "I'll bet you answer to others," Bolan said. He spread his fingers around Putnam's neck and jaw and applied pressure. "What others?"

  "The Council," Putnam hissed against the constriction around his throat.

  "Who on the Council?"

  Putnam looked at his assailant in panic. Bolan pressed down hard.

  "Civilians," the guy squealed. "They're not soldiers... nothing to do with the war. Except Heiss. Karl Heiss..."

  "And the civilians?"

  "Gunrunners. Just gunrunners and money-men. They buy the heroin."

  "Names." Bolan introduced more significant pressure.

  "Marcello. Andriola. Canzonari. That's it...."

  This rat was living up to its name. Bolan pulled the remains of the map from his pocket. Putnam clamped his jaws shut. Bolan loosened them with a punch to the temple, then pulled them apart until Putnam's fillings gleamed in the sun. "This is for Buddy," he said. "Don't you ever forget." Bolan pushed the map into Putnam's mouth and rammed it down his throat until Putnam gagged. Bolan turned to leave. At the door he looked back. Putnam rolled off the desk, his right hand hanging useless and discolored. The CIA man began to began to vomit, retching painfully.

  "Chew that over with your Council of Kings," Bolan said. He slammed the door and marched down the corridor, moving purposefully out of there. Bolan knew a little more about himself now, a lot more about brotherhood and loss. And he knew for absolute sure that he would survive to shove injustice down the throats of many more vermin to come. He had heard the names — and had just heard the call. And he was still so damn near over the edge. So he prayed for his family, because he was scared, and he vowed that he would never voluntarily share this dreadful war with his kin, his mother and father, his sister, Cindy, and younger brother Johnny, all back home. And then Bolan prayed that in his personal war to come, the inevitable war seeded in this corruption called Vietnam, the enemy would be his and his alone. No buddies. And now, back to war. Back to Mohawk time in the Mekong...

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