Devil's Horn

by Don Pendleton

  Bolan booted Brennan up the ramp to the doorway of the plane and climbed up behind him, then turned and cannoned a round from the AutoMag. The .44 headhunter decapitated the first goon in Bolan's field of fire. But the hitters were scrambling into position, falling out of their vehicles with shotguns, revolvers and assault rifles. Bolan shoved Brennan through the doorway, then laid down a suppressing line of fire with Little Lightning. One guy screamed, reeling away from a car door, clutching at kneecaps that were no longer there.

  In a heartbeat, Bolan pulled up the ramp, shut the door. Behind him, slugs drilled the fuselage with a relentless pounding.

  From the cockpit, Grimaldi called out, "Long time, no see, Striker. What kept you?"

  "A party," the Executioner growled back. He grabbed a coil of rope, knocked Brennan to the floor with the butt of his AutoMag, and roped the punk like a steer. The turbofan engines whined, the floorboard vibrating as the warbird geared up for Mach speed.

  As Bolan stepped into the cockpit, manned the armament controls, Grimaldi asked, "What do you think? Do we go the distance, or do you want to knock these guys out?"

  "In the first round, guy. No dancing tonight."

  Grimaldi cocked a half smile, lifted the warbird off the runway. "Roger. I always heard tough guys don't dance."

  Grimaldi flipped on the computer-control switches on the console. The target screen lit up. The sky beyond the cockpit blurred as Grimaldi banked Skyhunter. Bolan knew the routine, had trained with Skyhunter on the range at Stony Man Farm. From the air, he knew, it could pick out enemy positions with ASQ Low Light Level Television(LLLTV), and APQ-133 Beacon Tracking sideview radar simply by locking onto engine and exhaust heat. The miniguns had a saturation factor that could put four hundred bullets in a circle 31.5 feet in diameter in a four-second burst. With that kind of firepower, it was hard to miss once the system locked onto target acquisition.

  He'd seen the fearsome AC-130 fixed-wing gunships in action in Vietnam, knew Skyhunter would deliver fearsome death from above with the same earthshattering blows as the giant birds, even though its dimensions were much smaller. For guerrilla warfare. Spectre, Spooky, Dragonship had proven more than a match for the Vietcong. Although Bolan was fighting a new kind of war, a different foe from the one in the jungles of Southeast Asia, the enemy was still basically cut from the same cannibal cloth. Skyhunter was a formidable death dealer for waging war against that enemy, Bolan thought, a flying battleship, damn right.

  Three hundred meters beyond and one hundred meters below the aircraft, muzzle-flashes stabbed the darkness. The enemy was taking potshots, but they didn't have a hope in hell. Doomsday was upon them.

  The console beeped its signal once.

  "Now!" Grimaldi said, his expression grim, tight-lipped.

  Bolan squeezed the trigger of his firing stick. At the same time Grimaldi worked his minigun stick and unloaded the rocket pods. The warbird swooped over the enemy at two hundred knots. There was a brilliant flash of light one hundred meters in front of Skyhunter's nose. Like giant flares, four balls of fire lit the ground, meshing instantly into one wall of searing flames. Bolan heard the chatter of miniguns beyond the cockpit, but it was all over in the time it takes a lightning bolt to crackle across the sky.

  "Insurance time," Grimaldi announced, as he banked Skyhunter, sending the warbird back for a cleanup strafe.

  Skyhunter shrieked back over the killing field. Bolan made out the shadows of enemy numbers, running or limping away from the wall of fire. This time, the two warriors opened up at three-hundred-plus meters. Tracers blistered the darkness in front of the cockpit. Hailstorms of 7.62 lead dropped a flaming red curtain over the shattered enemy. One guy had been turned into a human torch by the fireballs, and Bolan clipped that demon with a tracking line of lead.

  Seconds later, the sky opened up beyond the tree line, gray wedges of predawn light enfilading the black veil over the carnage.

  "Where to?"

  "Out to sea, Jack. I'll let you know the details in a minute," Bolan said, then moved out of the cockpit.

  Back in the cabin, Brennan was groaning as he struggled to sit up and brace his back against a 40 mm Bofors cannon. Once upright, he found the Executioner looming over him, and his groans became edged with animallike fear.

  Bolan leveled his AutoMag at Brennan. "Where is the Devil's Horn, playboy?"

  Brennan hesitated. For a second, Bolan thought the druglord would sneer, but then he seemed to weigh the odds in his mind and come to the conclusion that Bolan was the blackjack dealer. And the house was almost always impossible to beat. Still, he wasn't about to make things easy for his abductor.

  "You got all the answers, smart guy. You tell me."

  Bolan was tired of dicking around with the creep. He snatched Brennan off the floor, mashed his face against the glass of the aft window. "Take a look out there, playboy. We're two thousand feet up and climbing. See those lights over there?"

  Brennan stared through the glass. Perhaps four miles away, the lights of New York City gleamed against the murky sky.

  "That's your town, playboy. Your home. Your fortress. And it'll be your graveyard in about five seconds unless you answer me. Because I'll open the door and send you on a swan dive."

  Bolan let go of Brennan. The druglord's eyelids fluttered, then he closed his eyes as color drained from his cheeks. The soft flesh in his neck pulsed with his rapid heartbeat.

  "Thailand."

  At the moment, that was all Bolan needed to know.

  The Executioner leathered Big Thunder.

  "You heard him, Jack."

  6

  "It is time to eat, ferangs. Vite! Vite! Heh-heh."

  Mike Tremain dropped his hoe in the sludge of the ankle-deep water and sighed. Food, he thought. Thank God. He was hungry, tired and angry as usual. Today was just a day like any other day, and anger toward and hatred for his captors was the only thing that kept him going. Indeed, he knew, it was the only thing that kept him from dying from the crushing despair that drove many prisoners there to suicide.

  I must keep my heart black with vengeance for these bastards, he thought. Someday... someday... I'll get my chance... But when would that day of retribution come, if it came at all? How long was it since the Pathet Lao guerrillas had uncovered his covert operation to infiltrate the Devil's Horn? Eight years? Ten years? Perhaps time, he reasoned, didn't really matter anymore. Certainly the MIAs, the POWs there, had given up hope. He could understand their despair. Christ, Uncle Sam had written them off for good, he thought, and the politicians back home weren't about to kick up a bunch of shit in Southeast Asia again over a mere handful of dogfaces. So why should he be any different? He was CIA, after all, and in the eyes of even his own employers he had taken his chances and lost.

  Escape from this jungle hell, deep in the bowels of the Thai peninsula, was impossible, he had been told by his captors, and he was beginning to believe it. The poppy fields were surrounded by a wall of forested mountains that formed a natural barrier against any escape that was less than brilliant. A barrier, yeah. Like a fortress. Like a prison. Still, as long as he was alive, there was hope — though daily that glimmer of hope was fading — and when despair threatened to break his will like glass, he turned his thoughts to revenge. To murder.

  "Chien!"

  The screaming of his overseers made everything seem worse. No matter how weak the slave labor became from lack of food and water, the workers were always screamed at as they were forced to move at a double-time pace. Everywhere they went they were driven by whips, from their cells, to the latrine ditch, to the fields, to mealtime. They were threatened with death if they stumbled from exhaustion or didn't move fast enough.

  Now Tremain, formerly of the CIA, felt the inevitable scathing fire of the lash across his bared back. He was dreaming again, the overseer shrieked. He was loafing, and he would be punished severely if he did not move his filthy white carcass. Fuck you! Tremain screamed in his mind, though he knew he d
idn't dare say it.

  "Vite! Vite!"

  Tremain looked at the short, stocky Oriental. The hatred that blazed from his eyes did not escape Kam Chek. Indeed, his overseer seemed delighted that his brutality could stoke a seething fire of murderous rage in those he punished. The Pathet Lao soldier, Tremain thought, standing there in his dark green military uniform, his bullwhip dripping with blood, was a demon. A Hun. A Mongol. A Tartar.

  What had Genghis Khan once said? Tremain asked himself racking his ironclad memory, recalling his study of the Mongol invasion of Europe. The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters. Yeah, that was it. For some reason, those words had stayed branded on Tremain's mind. They described the savage nature of barbarian man, as he had come to know it so well from bitter experience.

  And a barbarian was exactly what Kam Chek was, Tremain knew. A heartless butcher who could experience joy only when he was torturing, killing, raping, looting.

  Kam Chek smiled. He had a sloping forehead, with high cheekbones that gave his oval face the sinister look of a death's-head. His eyelids formed narrow slits, but still they barely concealed the reptilian wariness of glittering dark orbs that hungered to see blood flow. His hair, black as coal, hung in a silken mane that brushed the knotted balls of muscle that formed his broad shoulders. His mustache, waxed at the ends to a fine needlelike point, drooped below his chinless jaw.

  Tremain had seen the Oriental kill more than one man in the field. At his slightest whim, Kam Chek would decapitate a man with his samurai sword if so much as a speck of mud happened to splash his uniform or mar the sheen of his polished black jump boots. Jump boots that Kam Chek claimed to have stolen off a Special Forces paratrooper during the Vietnam War.

  Kam Chek stood now on one of the walking boards that had been erected between the irrigation ditches. He rested his hand on the gold hilt of his samurai sword. The smile stretched his thin, bloodless lips. The breath that rasped out of his flared nostrils, blowing the mustache away from his lips, told Tremain that Kam Chek was anxious to use that sword. Again.

  "Do you wish to say something, ferang?"

  Tremain didn't want to say anything; he wanted to rip the monster's throat out with hands and teeth, spit the stinking blood and rotten flesh back into Kam Chek's face.

  Tremain's defiant silence made Kam Chek tremble with fury. "Pick up your hoe, ferang. Now!"

  Slowly, Tremain bent. As he scooped the hoe out of the mud, he glanced at the leeches clinging to his legs. Blood ran down his calves where the leeches had burst after sucking their fill. It was strange, he thought, how a man can get used to just about anything, no matter how horrible, no matter how degrading. The leeches were his constant companions, his silent, suckling enemy. Just as malaria, trench foot, beatings and insults were the only company of his time there in hell. These were things that he didn't, couldn't even think about anymore.

  Things like death.

  Death would be the final insult, he knew. Because death would deny him his vengeance.

  His boots slogging through the syrupy mud, Tremain moved slowly toward the designated eating area. He felt the blood run, warm and sticky, down his back, seep into the coarse cotton cloth of his Bermuda shorts. Sweat burned into the gash on his back. Boots and shorts were the only attire the prisoners were allowed to wear when tilling either the rice or poppy fields. After toiling under a blistering sun in the fields every day without a shirt, Tremain was no longer white, but a ferang, a white foreigner. His skin had been charred black by the sun.

  The conditions were the same for everybody, unless a man snitched on his fellow prisoners who might be contemplating a breakout. It had happened before, Tremain knew. The prisoners were sized up by their captors, who looked for any sign of weakness in a man that they could use for bribery. Brutality and treachery among the prisoners was not uncommon. Indeed, it was encouraged.

  As Tremain looked at the gaunt, bearded faces of the other prisoners, he wondered who was being broken in by the guards as a snitch. It didn't matter really, he told himself, for he would keep his head, he would steel his heart. They wouldn't use him, and, by God, they wouldn't force his hand to betray the others.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Tremain saw two guards hauling a body out of the muddy ditch. It was Maxwell. The POW from Miami, Oklahoma, had been suffering from malaria for the past two weeks. Finally, the man had dropped from exhaustion and sickness under the whip of Kam Chek. All of them had heard the terrible gurgling as Maxwell sucked in the mud and water, struggling feebly to claw himself out of the ditch, too weak to get up on his own. But the muzzles of AK-47s never wavered from the chests of the prisoners. And Tremain knew that if any of them had gone to Maxwell's aid, they would have been shot and left in the stinking pool to die alongside the suffocating POW.

  Tremain's guts wrenched with pity for the other prisoners, even though he knew they hated his guts. He was a spook to them, considered a traitor because several renegade Company agents had devoted their time in Nam to building the Devil's Horn. But, in his mind, the suffering of the other men was his suffering, regardless of who or what he was. He understood their contempt, their hatred for anything that smacked of CIA; he felt hatred and contempt himself, too, because it was obvious to him that even his own people had abandoned him. Which gave him all the more reason to seek revenge, to prove to the other prisoners that he was unsoiled by the dirt that a few of his fellow agents had smeared the Agency with.

  Kam Chek ordered Tremain to sit down in the mud. Three guards, dressed in spotless green uniforms, ladled the food from a rusty cast-iron vat. Seated, Tremain took his bowl. For a moment, he stared at the gummy slop. Clouds of flies and mosquitos swarmed around his head, dipping into the bowls, picking at the black chunks of meat.

  Tremain ate. The meat had been charred black, and it stuck in his throat like glue. With the one cup of the brackish water that was issued at mealtime, it was impossible to rinse the bitter taste of the broth out of his mouth, much less wash the food down. He thought it was strange that their captors had stopped feeding the prisoners rice, instead replacing the daily meal with this thick, foul-smelling broth. Beef broth, Kam Chek called it. The change of menu had begun perhaps a month ago, at about the same time that the random killings of prisoners had started.

  "Eat, eat, ferangs," Kam Chek said, standing in the shade of a tree beside the group of thirty-odd prisoners, his hands on his hips, the oily smile frozen on his lips. "Tomorrow, we begin the harvest. And you will need all your strength, out. Heh-heh."

  One of the prisoners groaned. They all knew what Kam Chek meant. Despair cut its razor-sharp edge through Tremain. He looked up, beyond the rice field. In the distance, near the foothills of the rolling green chain of mountains, stretched perhaps fifteen acres ready for the harvest. The poppy plants had reached maturity. The rainy season was over, and the time had come. It was what they spent all year working for. And dying for.

  The sun, like some burning, hooded red eye, as much Tremain's enemy as Kam Chek, had slid halfway down behind the mountains of the Central Cordillera. Long shadows now stretched over the delta plain. A hot wind breathed in from the Gulf of Siam, gently swaying the acres of greenish poppy plants on their tubular stems.

  Harvest time, Tremain thought, and understood completely the grim mood that had dropped like a shroud over the gathered prisoners. Harvest time meant twenty hours every day in the fields, scraping away the white sap of the green seed pods that were exposed after the brightly-colored petals had fallen off. Harvest time meant a two-hundred-mile forced march to Bangkok, carrying perhaps ten tons of compact morphine bricks and bundles of the pungent jellylike opium. Harvest time, he knew, meant death. As he looked at the heavily-lined, hollow-eyed faces of his fellow prisoners, he couldn't help but wonder who in the punished group would die this time, and who would survive.
Survival, he knew, meant endurance. One way or another, he would make this march his last.

  As the prisoners ate, Kam Chek walked out of the shade, and stood before the prisoners, smiling. Tremain noticed the strange laughter in the slave driver's eyes.

  "Bastard," someone muttered under his breath.

  "Eat, eat," Kam Chek urged. "It is good to see that you do your comrades justice, Kermin and Smith and the others, well, my friends. Qui they would be pleased if they could see you now, very happy, indeed. You do your comrades justice."

  Tremain saw one of the prisoners, a black POW from Cleveland called Larry Jones, look up and level a stare of burning hatred on Kam Chek. Some of the other prisoners stopped eating at that moment, too. There was something particularly disturbing about Kam Check's manner, and Tremain sensed the hatred around him about to explode on this barbaric Oriental.

  "What the hell's that s'pposed to mean?" Jones growled, referring to the prisoners Kam Chak had named, men who had recently died at the camp.

  "Heh-heh. I am surprised none of you have asked about your comrades. Where is your esprit de corps, eh? Why have you not asked about the ceremony you are always allowed to perform in memory of your fallen comrades? Normally, you are allowed to bury them in the courtyard, out?"

  Tremain's stomach turned over. His hands began shaking violently. What in God's name...

  Suddenly Kam Chek slid the samurai sword from its leather scabbard. He stood, legs splayed, as if daring someone to charge him.

  "What... wh-what are you saying?" another prisoner croaked. "What did you do..."

  "Ferang," Kam Chek hissed. "You are a fool."

  Tremain's head spun as nausea seized him. He dropped the bowl into the mud, bile rising in his throat. He heard someone behind him gagging, retching, smelled the vomit as it splashed into the mud beside him.

  Kam Chek's slitted gaze seemed to hide his eyes completely. "What do you think you have been eating for the past month?"