Devil's Horn

by Don Pendleton

  The megaphone boomed again. "Ferang! Your answer! Now!"

  Bolan cut loose with his Uzi SMG, gave that guy his only, his final answer. The line of 9 mm parabellum slugs whined off the Huey's fuselage. Instantly, the guy with the mike flung himself behind the doorway. A second later, the Huey soared away from the ridge like a petulant sparrow whose nest had been violated.

  "Now!"

  Grimaldi bolted away from cover, charged up the hill.

  Bolan turned. He had secure cover behind the grove of trees, the clump of brush, yeah, but that cover quickly petered out, giving way to a series of trails.

  Shadows slithered up those trails.

  Muzzle-flashes stabbed through the cover from down the hillside.

  Brennan howled in terror as slugs whined off bark around his head.

  Bolan knocked the guy out with a good right to the jaw.

  It was war.

  Bolan lifted the LAW 80 to his shoulder and lined up the sights on the dozen figures bursting through the brush on the trail, AK-47s blazing.

  11

  The Huey hovered at four hundred feet. Chaika Kan Khang stood in the fuselage doorway, the whiplash of hot air fanning his face as he looked down at the hills below. The ferangs were scrambling into position along the ridge of the hill. There were three of them.

  Fools, he thought. Two forces of his mercenary army were now converging on the enemy, moving up both sides of that hill, like the prongs of a giant pincer. The white invaders would be squeezed inside those prongs, crushed like insects in those mighty jaws. They will be squashed beneath my boot heel, he thought. Or will they?

  The pang of doubt that sprang up in Khang's mind was squelched almost at once. Now was the time to watch the drama unfold, to direct the battle, he thought. This was no time for uncertainties and fear.

  But the nagging doubt kept trying to filter into Khang's consciousness. Who were these ferangs? What did they want? Yes, he had seen the carnage, the utter death and destruction that they had wreaked on his outpost and on the road, trampling his soldiers underfoot like so much powder. Whoever these ferangs were, they were good, he had to admit, and they were not just going to lie down and die. Still, they were not invincible. More than a hundred against three would be a massacre; indeed, the enemy seemed prepared to commit suicide. Even more confusing to Khang was the fact that one of the ferangs appeared to be bound, as if he was a hostage.

  Kam Chek, his hand wrapped around the gold hilt of his samurai sword, his long black hair tousled by the rotor wash, approached and stood behind Khang. His eyelids mere slits, Kam Chek stared down at the foothills where their men dispersed from the armored trucks, sliding between the trees like ants scurrying back into their holes.

  "What are we to do next, if the ferangs do not surrender?" the second-in-command asked.

  "I have already given the order," Khang answered, forced nearly to shout in order to be heard above the rotor wash. "The first wave of our troops is to assault. If the enemy engages us, we will encircle and overwhelm them with our superior numbers and firepower. But I have given express orders not to shoot to kill."

  "How can that happen, sir? If our men come under fire, surely they will not care if the enemy is taken alive or dead — so long as to kill the enemy means saving their lives."

  A thin smile slashed Khang's lips. "You did not hear my orders then. The enemy is to be wounded, or at the worst crippled. But they are to be taken alive. Our men have already been warned that whoever fires the killing shot will not live to see the sunset. We must find out who the enemy is, and what they are doing here. The entire operation here is now jeopardized by their presence. Only a thorough interrogation and imprisonment, and perhaps later their deaths, will satisfy the great white lord on the hill."

  Kam Chek nodded, understanding now. Torquemandan. Kam Chek didn't really like to think of the ferang as the "lord on the hill," but he had no choice. Torquemandan was all-powerful on the peninsula. He was master of the Devil's Horn, yes, and his money was all-powerful, too, and plentiful. No, neither Kam Chek nor Kan Khang could argue with the hand that fed them. Nor were they about to bite that hand off.

  "In the event that they cannot be taken alive immediately..." Khang began, then turned to look behind him.

  Behind Khang and Kam Chek, a group of eight prisoners sat on the bench along the wall. With eyelids drooping over bloodshot eyes, faces bruised and battered, torsos streaked with black lines of dried blood, the prisoners looked back at their tormentors with empty stares. Only one prisoner injected defiant hatred into his eyes, spit on the floor. Khang decided that ferang would be the first to die. Khang could not tolerate impudence.

  "They are worse than dead now as it is," Khang coldly continued, returning his attention to the hill. "If the enemy has come here to free these men, as I suspect they have, then we will begin a new line of bargaining. I will accept only an unconditional surrender. Nothing else."

  Kam Chek nodded. A smile stretched his lips. A low chuckle escaped his tightly compressed lips as he patted the golden hilt of his sword. Yes. He understood perfectly now.

  And Kam Chek hoped that the enemy below would, indeed, hold out and force Khang's hand.

  * * *

  Mack Bolan was not about to simply hold out.

  Trapped in the unenviable position of possible encirclement and annihilation, the Executioner began the breakout.

  With a vengeance.

  The first wave of Devil's Horn mercs streamed up the trio of trails. They howled, screeched like banshees, triggering their Soviet assault rifles. It was a reckless, pell-mell charge, meant to bewilder, frighten, then paralyze the enemy.

  Only the enemy happened to be Mack Bolan.

  As lead burned the air around Bolan, he triggered the LAW 80. The round sizzled down the hillside, coasting toward target acquisition. A millisecond later, the 94 mm warhead detonated, a direct hit on the middle trail. The fireball consumed a dozen men, cleaving limbs, shredding flesh. The blast uprooted rotten trees, hurling debris and bodies down the trail. Smoke and fire boiled over the mercs, and flying rubble pounded into the second wave of the enemy.

  Bolan gave his opponents no time to lick their wounds.

  Like a wraith, the Executioner streaked down the hillside, pitching a frag grenade, then unslinging his M-60. As the shrapnel bomb ripped through the left flank of the enemy and shrill cries of agony pierced the air, Bolan began hosing down the green-garbed mercs with a hellstorm of 7.62 mm lead.

  One guy hollered something in Thai. Most likely signaling for a retreat, Bolan reasoned.

  And the Executioner turned their retreat into a landslide of tumbling death. Swinging the chattering M-60 back and forth, Bolan chewed the mercs apart. Heads burst open like ripe fruit. Guts spilled from abdomens and lower backs were skewered open by sizzling lead tumblers. The Devil's Horn mercenaries reeled down the hillside, crumpling, slamming face first into tree trunks, hammering head down against rocks and boulders. Men screamed and died. Blood sprayed, and bones shattered like pretzels.

  Releasing the trigger, Bolan watched as the survivors fled. Then he listened to the steady whumphing from behind.

  Jack Grimaldi raked the squat, fearsome-looking MM-1 back and forth. The enemy charge up the other side of the hill seemed to ram head-on into an invisible wall. Then that wall collapsed on the mercenaries like a tidal wave. Within five seconds, Grimaldi had triggered all twelve rounds from the MM-1. The dozen 38 mm warheads cratered the hillside with a series of earthshaking, vomiting blasts. Bodies flew skyward like crimson stick figures. Smoke and flame blazed one searing line across the wave of the enemy's attack, decimated their numbers, crushing them into the ground as if they'd been run over by a giant steamroller.

  Grimaldi watched the few survivors retreat down the hillside. He was satisfied. The attack had been repulsed. For the moment.

  Looking down toward the prison camp and the field surrounding it, Grimaldi noted that all activity had ceased. As the smoke and ha
ze curled down the hillside toward the compound, he felt as if he was looking at some ghostly tableau of frozen death out there on the poppy fields.

  * * *

  "Ferangs!" Bolan heard the Oriental warlord in the Huey scream through the megaphone in an enraged voice. "You have been warned. Resistance is useless. You will see that you cannot deny Chaika Kan Khang, warlord of Thailand, indeed of all of Southeast Asia."

  Bolan froze, then crouched behind the brush beside the unconscious Brennan. He looked up at the suspended Huey and cocked his head sideways for a moment. Checking on Grimaldi, he could see him still in one piece, crouched behind the ridge, M-16 in his hands. Ready and waiting in case of another charge.

  "Ferangs, watch. Watch what your resistance has done."

  Brennan groaned, stirred to life. His eye lids fluttered open, and he struggled to sit up, bracing his back against a tree trunk. "What the hell's going on..."

  "Shut up," Bolan growled.

  The Huey was almost directly above Bolan now at twelve o'clock. He could see the doorway clearly, but the figures that hung back from the opening were mere shadows. Still, what happened next took little imagination and no binoculars to understand.

  A human figure was suddenly, forcibly thrust into the doorway of the Huey's fuselage and pummeled about the head until it dropped to its knees.

  "Ferangs, I know you have come here to rescue these men, no? They are Americans. POWs. MIAs that your country has forsaken and forgotten. These are your people. Their blood is on your hands for your resistance."

  Bolan saw another person, a man with shoulder-length black hair step into the doorway. For a second, Bolan thought that long-haired figure looked down at him, caught his eye and smiled. Then the man drew a sword, lifted the big blade above his shoulder.

  "My God, no," Bolan heard Grimaldi growl.

  Bolan clenched his teeth, felt the air rasp through his nostrils, hot and stinging with the acid bile of the rage that churned in his guts. He saw the blow delivered.

  Then the head sailed away from the Huey, plunged on a straight line for the hillside. A second later, the body tumbled out of the Huey.

  Bolan heard someone chuckle over the loudspeaker.

  "There are seven more Americans here. You have thirty seconds to throw down your weapons and move with your hands up to the ridge. If you do not... one man will die for every thirty seconds that you do not obey."

  Bolan hung his head, screwed his eyes shut. The mission had gone to hell. The cannibals had already sharpened their claws, and their fangs were now pressed to his throat. It was one thing, Bolan knew, to fight on and to wage war fiercely for his life, even if the situation appeared hopeless. It was quite another matter to let innocent men die because of his actions. That, he couldn't let happen.

  Grimaldi, he knew, believed this, too.

  Ronny Brennan also sensed the inevitable. The druglord smiled through his punished mouth, his grin lopsided on his pummeled, blood-caked face.

  Bolan couldn't bear to look at that guy right then. If he did, he knew he might kill Brennan. The maggot was about to claim victory.

  Bolan turned away from Brennan, slowly walked up the hill. At the crest, he looked into Grimaldi's eyes. His friend, he saw, was sharing his moment of pain. It was over. They had to surrender. There was no choice. There was no need for words. The silence spoke their personal devastation. Neither one of them could possibly have anticipated such a cold-blooded play on the part of their enemies. Had they, then, underestimated their opponents? It seemed that they had, Bolan thought. Perhaps they had made a fatal error in judgment.

  The Huey descended, landed on the ridge.

  Ronny Brennan needed no urging to get up the hill. With a smile lighting up his battered face, the drug czar hastened his strides to greet Kam Chek and Khang as the two warlords stepped out of the fuselage.

  Bolan and Grimaldi faced their captors. Bolan looked first at the blood of the executed man on the landing skid of the Huey, then at the haunted faces of the rest of the prisoners, still inside the chopper. How long would it be, he wondered, before he looked like they did, beaten, battered, dispirited, curled up at death's door? Hell, in a way, he was already one of them. How long would he and Grimaldi survive? he asked himself. Certainly they faced interrogation by their captors. And torture.

  The nightmare had only begun.

  Khang squared his shoulders. Somberly, he looked at Bolan and Grimaldi. "It was the honorable thing that you did," he barked in his clipped tone.

  No, Bolan thought, it was the only thing they could do.

  Out of nowhere, it seemed to Bolan, the surviving mercenaries of the attack force converged on the ridge.

  Breathless, Brennan finally reached the crest and pulled up before Kam Chek and Khang. He held his bound hands out to them, as if silently beseeching them to cut the ropes off. "Hey, c'mon. You guys know me. It's me, Ronny Brennan. Torquemandan's head cock."

  Kam Chek and Khang looked at Brennan as if he was some parasite that would cling to the ass of a water buffalo.

  Brennan appeared confused, then angry. "For Chrissake, cut these ropes off me! I ain't with these two jerks. They kidnapped me back in the States. Hey, I'm..."

  "Silence, ferang!" Khang snapped. His voice was raspy, nasal. "You are as nothing to me at this moment. I will let Torquemandan decide your fate. For now, not another word out of you, or I shall kill you!"

  Brennan looked dumbfounded. "Jesus!" he muttered as Khang wheeled, hopped up into the Huey.

  "Into the chopper with them!" Kam Chek ordered his surviving soldiers.

  The mercs jabbed their rifles into the spines of their new prisoners.

  Kam Chek had a final word for the man who appeared to be the intruders' leader. He looked at Bolan and smiled. "You will be very sorry, ferang, that I promise. By tomorrow, you and your comrade here will be longing for death. You will beg for it. But it will not come. We will deny you the pleasure of simply dying."

  Kam Chek laughed.

  An icy chill went down Bolan's spine.

  12

  The Huey landed in a clearing north of the poppy fields. As Bolan and Grimaldi, their hands tied with rope, stepped out of the fuselage, several of the prisoners stopped scraping the poppy bulbs, looked toward the chopper and its passengers. But the workers' scrutiny of Bolan and Grimaldi ended with the sharp crack of whips flaying their flesh, driving them back to work.

  Bolan froze, grimaced in anger and sorrow. He felt as if the rotor wash pounding over him held him rooted to the spot. The cruel slave drivers went about screaming at the workers, striking their exposed backs with lashes. Bolan wanted to wrap his hands around the throats of the bastards with the whips. Damn! If only he could...

  But Bolan had caught a glimpse of the look in several pairs of those tortured eyes. He recalled the fleeting defiance and hatred he'd seen in the stares of the imprisoned men who now filed out of the Huey. No matter what their suffering, they were still alive. And, yeah, where there was life there was still hope. At the moment, that was all these men had to cling to. Hope, and a burning desire for revenge.

  And it was all he and Grimaldi had, Bolan knew.

  "Move!" Kam Chek snarled at Bolan, shoving his new prisoners ahead.

  Bolan, Grimaldi and Brennan, accompanied by a cadre of twelve AK-47-toting guards, were led up a steep trail. At the top of the trail were massive stone steps, a statue of a three-headed dragon, and a stone railing that surrounded what Bolan guessed was a pool. The palace loomed beyond the dragon statue, gleaming white, majestic.

  "I don't understand you guys," Brennan whined at Kam Chek and Kan Khang. "You gotta know who I am. You can't treat me like I'm one of these jerks. You just can't, for Chrissakes, you just..."

  "Silence, ferang!" Khang barked menacingly. "I will not warn you again. You are wearing my patience thin. I would just as soon kill you, you filthy, cowardly ferang. I am a good judge of men. And you are a germ. You are dirt. You are no good."

  Brenna
n looked away from Khang. "Fuckin' gook," he muttered under his breath.

  "Did you say something?" Khang snarled.

  Fear flashed through Brennan's eyes. "Naw, I didn't say nothin'..."

  Boot heels clicked on stone as the three captives were ushered up the steps.

  Moments later, as he reached the top of the steps, Bolan faced the principal target of this search and destroy mission against the Devil's Horn. Jonathan Torquemandan. Fanatic admirer of the infamous Spanish inquisitor. Butcher. Cannibal. Human poison. Although there were four other guys in white suits beside the stone railing, it wasn't hard for Bolan to pick out the head cannibal. Torquemandan was all arrogance and self-importance. Bolan got the impression that the guy wanted to burst out laughing when he saw the new captives.

  Brennan instantly began whining his case. "Mr. Torquemandan, hey, it's me, Ronny Brennan. From New York. I was here a coupla years ago. You remember? Hell, how ya been?"

  Bolan could tell that Torquemandan was not impressed; indeed, the butcher looked threateningly at Brennan.

  But the druglord continued to make explanations as the three of them were halted in front of Torquemandan.

  "These two jerks hit me, Mr. Torquemandan. Busted up a coupla my places and then kidnapped me."

  "So is that how they found me here? Did you lead my enemies to me?"

  Bolan saw Brennan go limp with sudden fear, the bombast driven out of him by a few accusatory words.

  "It's B-Bolan, Mr. Torquemandan. The fucking bastard, Mack Bolan. You got him. I got him here for you!"

  Brennan paused, as if to let the news, which he obviously hoped would be startling, sink in to Torquemandan. But the warlord of Thailand betrayed his surprise by only a flicker of his eyes as his cold stare fell on Bolan for a second.

  "If you please, Mr. Brennan," Torquemandan chided him. "We do not use that kind of language here."