Devil's Horn

by Don Pendleton

  Together, Bolan and Grimaldi hauled the weapons crate into the jungle. A black maze of teak trees, thorny vines and creepers enveloped the three men. With the muzzle of his AutoMag pressed against Brennan's spine, Bolan urged the druglord deeper into the dark labyrinth. The suffocating stench of rot, of things dead and dying, that had marked every jungle Bolan had ever ventured into was cloying in his nostrils.

  Shadows danced on the branches above their heads, then he spotted several white-handed gibbons swinging from the vines. The monkeys screeched, hissed and spit at the intruders in their domain. Cicadas swarmed under the canopy of the treetops, chittering continuously like buzzsaws. Birds cawed from somewhere, but they were invisible to Bolan's searching scrutiny of the darker recesses. As he scraped against moss-covered tree trunks, Bolan glimpsed a giant gecko. The green-spotted lizard hung as if it were stuck to flypaper, its white eyes watching the invaders like the orbs of some mummy come to life.

  Then they heard the thunder of the explosion they had been expecting. Grimaldi stopped suddenly, jerked his head sideways as the rumbling peal hammered through the jungle. The shattered wreckage of Skyhunter belched a firewall, and jagged chunks of flaming debris blazed into the foliage. As the concussive roar died away, shrieks cut the jungle air around the three men as panicked monkeys and squirrels flew from tree to tree.

  "God!" Grimaldi rasped through gritted teeth. "The love of my life, gone forever."

  "Ain't that tough?" Brennan spit.

  Bolan had heard enough. Brennan, he realized, had become a serious liability now that guerrilla troops were on their trail. Before the punk knew what hit him, Bolan knocked him over the head with the butt of his AutoMag and dropped the guy into the brush, out cold.

  Hastily, the two warriors buried the arms behind a cluster of vines and brush, putting aside those they intended to use immediately. Bolan then hefted the M-60, draped the cartridge belt over his shoulder. Grimaldi slapped a fresh clip into his M-16, cocked the bolt, loaded the M-203 launcher with a 40 mm grenade, slung the mini-Uzi around his shoulder. He was every bit as ready as the warrior beside him.

  With grim resolve, they began cutting through the jungle. Thorny vines tore at their faces, slashed their fatigues; leeches clung to their exposed flesh. As they angled through the brush away from the flaming hulk of Skyhunter, they saw an amphibious armored transport truck lumber onto the road. Another vehicle slid in behind the troop column a moment later. Approximately thirty men in dark green camos then moved out in a skirmish line, AK-47s pointed toward the fiery ruins of the jet.

  Bolan and Grimaldi slid into cover, crouching behind the thorny roadside brush. His heart hammering in his ears, Bolan waited until the last soldier in the column had moved past his position. He checked the rice paddy, saw no sign of a rear guard.

  "You know what to do," the Executioner said to Grimaldi. "Work them from right to left. I'll go the other way."

  "Gotcha."

  "Let's do it," Bolan snarled, bursting out of the jungle, a panther lunging for its prey.

  Bolan and Grimaldi opened up simultaneously, their weapons roaring, bucking, blazing out instant death. Sprinting across the road, Bolan swept his M-60 from left to right, rolling up the enemy's left flank in a red carpet of lightning carnage. As the Executioner's 7.62 mm flesh shredders tore through green camos, Grimaldi triggered the M-203. With a whumph, the 40 mm missile streaked away from the grenade launcher, sizzling on a direct line toward the Shortland Mk3 reconnaissance vehicle. The guerrillas, caught by surprise, toppled like bowling pins. A screaming hand of flame then shredded the Shortland.

  Grimaldi unslung the mini-Uzi. Triggering it and the M-16, the two-fisted merchant of death moved away from Bolan, taking the mop-up into the enemy's rear and right flank. Like the jaws of a pincer, the two warriors crushed the enemy's flanks, driving soldiers into the center with their scissoring lead trap. Six men leaped from the back of the transport truck, but they were mowed down as soon as their boots hit the dirt. Blood sprayed through the air. Chunks of flesh sizzled as leaking, tattered corpses reeled into the flames.

  Bolan pitched a frag grenade under the frame of the armored personnel carrier. The driver flung the door open and came out firing with a Soviet AKM. Bolan pinned the driver to the door with a gut-bursting roar, his M-60 flaming, spent shell casings twirling around his head. Then the frag bomb blew, lifting the transport truck off its wheels. Driver and wreckage meshed inside a flashing red-orange mushroom.

  Debris banged off the ground near Grimaldi. Gritting his teeth, the ace-pilot-turned-hellscather emptied the clip of Little Lightning into three mangled guerrillas clawing for weapons. A line of 9 mm slugs stitched the militiamen, thrashing like fish out of water, driving them into dirt already stained black with running blood.

  Bolan stood, his legs braced apart. He checked his comrade in arms, winked at him solemnly, then surveyed the slaughter field. Flames crackled. Blood formed pools beneath the shredded corpses. Several bodies, torched by licking flames, became shriveled black mummies within seconds.

  It didn't take any genius, Bolan thought, to piece the parts of this puzzle together. Despite its constitutional monarchy and open friendly relations with other countries as a member of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Thailand was a hotbed of political unrest and military sabotage, because of its location, if nothing else. Communist insurgency was like a festering sore in the countries surrounding the former kingdom of Siam. And as Bolan knew from his grim experience in the Vietnam war, no border was safe from the iron claws of Igor. If the right people had been bought and paid for by the Devil's Horn, then the seat of political and military power in Bangkok would certainly turn its head away from their criminal activities.

  Grimaldi broke in on Bolan's thoughts. With a glance toward the personnel carrier, he said, "We might've used that transport, Striker."

  "No good, Jack," Bolan answered. He slung his M-60 around his shoulder and strode toward the outer ring of jungle. "We'd be too easy to spot from the air. And you can bet word's gone out about our arrival."

  "Yeah, you're right," Grimaldi acknowledged as he sheathed Little Lightning in a special shoulder rig. "I just don't like the idea of tromping through the jungle when we don't know where the hell it is we're going."

  "That's why we've got the playboy."

  Swiftly, silently, under the jungle canopy where animals and insects chattered and rustled, Bolan and Grimaldi made their way back to where they had left the unconscious Ronny Brennan.

  Parting the shadows, sweeping aside the vines, Bolan approached the druglord just as Brennan pushed himself up onto his elbows.

  Then Bolan froze in his tracks.

  At first, Bolan had thought it was a branch, but then the king cobra had slithered out of the brush, gliding across the jungle floor toward Brennan. Then the punk saw the serpent, too. His jaw hung agape, his eyes widened in terror at the sight of the black ten-foot-long king cobra.

  In a blur of motion, Bolan whipped Big Thunder from its hip holster. Nyuh-tyong-ahn, as the Thai Buddhists called the most feared and revered creature in that part of the world, lifted its gleaming, metallic-looking head. With its tongue darting like a red pencil tip of flame, the cobra lunged for Brennan's face.

  Brennan screamed.

  Bolan triggered the AutoMag.

  The cobra's hooded head vanished in a podburst of muck and flesh. The headless body convulsed in death throes, a long, thick whip lashing around in the brush.

  Bolan didn't waste a second trying to calm down Brennan, who was still shaking violently. Instead, he just hauled him to his feet by the collar and shoved him toward the dirt road. A second later, he thought, and we'd be on our own right now.

  Grimaldi, stopping behind Bolan, looked at the decapitated serpent and muttered, "Jesus!" Then he pulled the LAWs, the MM-1, and a satchel of projectiles out of the brush.

  Brennan's indignation at Bolan's manhandling overcame the shock and horror of his narrow escape
from the deadly cobra. "You guys are crazy. I ain't goin' nowhere with you!"

  "The hell you're not," Bolan rasped, pushing Brennan out onto the road. "You're the big production manager here. You're our ticket into the Horn. And you, Ronny, are going to be the star of the show."

  Already stumbling down the road on rubbery legs, Brennan looked behind him at the flaming killzone. He teetered suddenly.

  But Ronny Brennan looked like he believed.

  Bolan could understand the punk's anxiety. He'd been living that good life at the expense of others for every second of every day of his stinking life. He'd jerked the strings of his puppets, made others dance to his tune, while he was safe inside the walls of his fortress. But Bolan had shown the creep just how flimsy his house of cards was, and just how easily that house could be blown down.

  Now the guy was being asked to pay up. And Ronny Brennan, Bolan could tell, didn't like it. Too bad.

  If their welcome to Thailand at this outpost was a taste of what was to come, Bolan decided, Ronny Brennan had better toughen up.

  In one hell of a hurry.

  9

  "Then it is agreed, gentlemen. We are the masters of our own destiny. We are the Devil's Horn, and there will be no others. There is no competition outside of us, and there is to be none as long as I am head of this organization. This year, gentlemen, will be a big winner. A very big winner, indeed. To us."

  Jonathan Torquemandan raised his glass of Clos de Vougeot to the twelve men gathered before him around the long oak table. They echoed, "To us." The table, heaped with plates of lamb, veal, and steak, trays of cheese and fresh vegetables and bowls of fruit, looked like a feast prepared for a king. And as Torquemandan, smiling, held his salute to his soldiers of the Devil's Horn, a king was exactly what he considered himself to be. No, not just a king, and not just any king, he decided. Hell, no. He was a king among kings. His smile broadened as his people joined in the toast to their success, and showered words of praise upon him.

  Like most of his "generals," Torquemandan was dressed in a white three-piece suit made of Thai silk. He wore a diamond ring from South Africa, smelled of four-hundred-dollar-an-ounce Belgian cologne. A handsome, dark-haired, lean-bodied man, Torquemandan was proud of the way he looked. And, as the king of kings, he was as pleased with the success of his opium empire as he was proud of his appearance. Indeed, he had come a long way, he reflected, in just twenty years — from the rice paddies of Vietnam and the shadowy black-market underworlds of Hanoi and Saigon, where, as a CIA paramilitary operative, he had created his pipeline, playing the heroin off against both the Viet Cong and the American dogfaces. Reaping profit and expanding his trade. Cutting down his enemies, while forming formidable alliances.

  But recently one of those alliances had been crushed. Several of his people had begun to echo the fears that sounded alarm bells in his own mind. And what had happened to that former alliance was no mystery to Torquemandan.

  "Have you investigated the Engels matter, Jonathan, as you said you would?"

  Torquemandan looked at the enquirer, Tuhban Mongkut, a short, stocky, and very wealthy Thai businessman who pulled the strings inside the Bangkok government, kept the pipeline open to Turkey and Germany and France. Mongkut, Torquemandan knew, was a shrewd, cunning and dangerous man. Torquemandan recalled more than one story about the fate of competitors who had crossed Mongkut up. Torquemandan knew there would be no competition as long as Mongkut was one of the top two or three "entrepreneurs" at that table. At last count, Torquemandan thought, Mongkut had a ninth-degree black belt, and it was rumored that he could kill a man merely by flicking his middle finger. But Torquemandan would believe that when he saw it.

  Still, Mongkut was different from the other men at his table, Torquemandan knew. Although none of the generals was enthusiastic about coming to the farm-compound for the annual conference and harvest — even though they stayed in large luxurious suites at the organization's Thai palace — Mongkut seemed to hold a special disdain for the palace grounds and all its comforts and lavish material trappings. No, Mongkut liked to be out in the field, beneath the broiling sun, overseeing the prisoners, working the harvest, demanding the labor force pick up the pace in his own peculiar but brutal way.

  Mongkut, Torquemandan reflected, would even march alongside the prisoners on the terrible two-hundred mile journey to Bangkok, the death march, as it had become known on the peninsula. In some ways, Mongkut claimed, the master should appear no better than the slave; that was why he insisted on walking the death march with the prisoners. He maintained that he solidified his status as "a better specimen of manhood" by showing both captives and captors that he was able to share the burden and suffering of a lesser man. Indeed, Mongkut's march was intended to show that he deserved his superior position, that he was a superman who had not forgotten his humble origins.

  Torquemandan didn't understand this philosophy at all. In his mind it was a jumble of macho bullshit. But then again, he reasoned, the Asian mind was a strange and twisted maze of ideas based on half-baked myths and legends. He had walked among the yellow men for the better part of forty-five years, and still he didn't understand them. What he did know was that Asians were not to be trusted. They were cunning, underhanded, and would slit a man's throat from behind in a flash if it worked to their advantage. They had a sense of honor and nobility, and they worked hard, sure, and that was why so many of them succeeded so admirably in the United States. Yet at the slightest whim, it seemed, they could turn into devils, barbarians. Strange, he thought, very strange, indeed.

  Suddenly Torquemandan realized that he had been staring at Mongkut for several seconds rather than replying to his question. Can this Asian devil read minds? he wondered.

  Torquemandan chose his words carefully. "Yes, the incident has been investigated, Tuhban. It was not the work of any legitimate law-enforcement agency, I can assure you all. In fact, it is believed that John Engels, who was a longtime friend and associate of mine, was murdered by a man named Mack Bolan."

  Torquemandan got the reaction he expected. Silence froze the twelve men into statues. The pudgy pink hand of Roily Woods, the three-hundred pound ex-CIA case officer for Thailand and Burma, buried among the strawberries in a fruit bowl, as if the hand were case-hardened in cement.

  "Bolan?"

  Torquemandan looked at Charlie Wells, another errant Company operative left over from those early days in Nam. Wells wras a tall, skinny, hook-nosed guy who was always fidgeting with something in his hands or cracking his knuckles.

  "I thought Bolan was dead," Wells said, and cracked a knuckle.

  "You heard all wrong, Charlie," Ken Carson, another renegade paramilitary operative, told Wells. "Bolan went AWOL again, the lone wolf on the run from every gun on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Last I heard from our source in Washington is that Bolan's been brought in from the cold again."

  "Hurrah," Wells muttered sarcastically. "So what's to keep this Bolan nut from coming here and climbing our tree, tell me that?"

  Torquemandan held up a hand in a gesture of restraint. There was a patronizing expression on his face. Suddenly, the members of the Devil's Horn reminded him of children who had misbehaved for their babysitter and were fearfully awaiting the wrath of a returning parent. Torquemandan could see where this discussion was headed, and he didn't like it.

  "Gentlemen, gentlemen, please. Let me refresh your memories. First of all, thanks to Mr. Mongkut, we have the backing, the unofficial support, of key government and military officials in Bangkok. Therefore, we are allowed to work free and undisturbed here. Secondly, we have more than three hundred, mind you, three hundred Khmer Rouge and Pathet Lao guerrillas in our employ, not to mention soldiers of our own placed strategically in Turkey, Beirut and Marseilles — the French Connection, gentlemen, as you know, is no misnomer.

  "We own, we control, we dominate, an empire that reaches across Asia and Europe, which extends across the entire continent of North America. This empire nets
us close to thirty billion dollars a year. Gentlemen, the projected estimate for this year's harvest is fifty tons, from this field only. At the present rate of production in the Triangle alone, we stand to double our profits in six months."

  Ken Carson whistled.

  "That's right, Ken," Torquemandan said, smiling, nodding. "Our biggest harvest to date."

  "What about the march?" Mongkut asked, his gaze narrowing. "How will a little more than a hundred men carry fifty tons of uncut scag?"

  "Each man will carry one hundred pounds," Torquemandan explained, then held up his hand to silence Roily Woods. "I know, I know. That's far short of the manpower needed. We will use oxen, mules, transport trucks, whatever. The road is rough, it's long and treacherous, cutting through some of the worst terrain in Thailand. Many of you have ridden on the march before... you know how it goes. I daresay that about three-quarters of the prisoners will not make it this time out. Therefore, as you will soon see, nothing has really changed since last year, gentlemen.

  "Many of these prisoners are Americans, POWs, MIAs taken away from the Vietcong by myself, specifically to work the crop. The march is the culmination of their effort. To test their strength of character..." I've got to stroke Mongkut's ego a little, he thought, you never know "...will be their reward. Some are tough and strong, and will last. Others are weak, and will not be able to bear their own cross. Once again we shall see who will survive this test of character."

  "You make it sound like some kind of game, Johnny."

  Torquemandan leveled a hard-eyed gaze on Carson. The ex-case officer could be an arrogant fool at times, Torquemandan believed. He had warned Carson more than once not to refer to him as "Johnny." If a man could not command respect from his peers, then just what the hell good was he, Torquemandan wondered.

  "I am from the Darwinian school of thought, gentlemen. Only the strong will inherit the earth. Whoever drops on the march to our processing laboratories in Bangkok... well, he will be left where he dies. As usual. And there will be no exceptions."