Devil's Horn

by Don Pendleton

  "If you don't mind me asking, what are we doing out here, Jonathan?" Brennan asked, somewhat winded from his effort to keep up with the other man's long strides.

  Torquemandan smiled, leading the way to a small stone hut on a knoll directly above the prison compound. A lone kerosene lantern hung from a bamboo post beside the hut; it bathed the stark blackness of the hut's front wall in a pale yellow light.

  Torquemandan twisted the iron knob on the door of the hut, pushed the door inward with a squeal of rusty hinges. He held out his arm, motioning for Brennan to go inside.

  Brennan hesitated, looking with an anxious gaze into the pitch-blackness beyond the doorway.

  Torquemandan reached inside the doorway and flicked a switch on the wall. A solitary naked bulb hung from the low ceiling of the room, its white light striking against the coal-blackness of the inner walls.

  Brennan looked past Torquemandan. In the middle of the room was a chair, which appeared to be bolted down. Something jutted above the back of the chair, some kind of leather headgear, maybe? Brennan noticed the straps on the chair's thick arms. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. Bewildered, he looked at Torquemandan.

  A rustling noise broke the silence of the night.

  Brennan snapped his head sideways just as Kam Chek and three guards with AK-47s stepped off the trail that led from the palace to the hut. Brennan's jaw went slack as it dawned on him what was going to happen.

  Before Brennan could bolt, Torquemandan's hand shot out, grabbed the lapel of the New York druglord's expensive white suit.

  The terror that Torquemandan read in Brennan's eyes excited him. A herculean strength seemed to explode through his arms as he effortlessly flung Brennan into the black room. It was always like this, Torquemandan knew; he always felt an enormous surge of power when he was about to play God with someone else's life.

  Stumbling, Brennan crashed into the black chair face first, two of his front teeth snapping off as his open mouth cracked against the edge. Stunned, petrified by fear, Brennan braced his hands on the floor. Cold stone. He gave a little whimper.

  Torquemandan stepped into the room. He loomed over Brennan. The sight of the man on his hands and knees below him, filled him with violent contempt. He watched as Brennan looked at the chair, raked his desperate stare around the barren room, as if searching for some way out. But there was no way out. The pure blackness of the walls always had that effect of freezing a victim with panic, Torquemandan knew. There was a stench of blood, sweat, fear, in the room that seemed to ooze from the very walls, a cloying, sickening smell that worked on a victim's senses instantly, making him wonder just what had happened here before. They always found out, Torquemandan thought.

  Brennan's eyes fell on the large black chest in the far corner of the room.

  "Is it making any sense to you now, Ronald?" Torquemandan asked with a smile.

  Shaking, Brennan looked up at Torquemandan. "Why? Why are you doing this?"

  Torquemandan's smile vanished as he drilled a front snapkick off Brennan's jaw. His foot smacked Brennan's head off the edge of the chair, and the trembling druglord dropped to the floor on his back.

  Kam Chek and his men walked into the room. Kam Chek grinned.

  "Leave the door open," Torquemandan ordered Kam Chek. "I have work to do. No one must sleep tonight."

  Torquemandan took a step toward Brennan.

  He knew that no one would sleep that night.

  The night belonged to pain. To suffering.

  15

  Voices seemed to echo through Bolan's mind. They were just a faint hum at first, then the noise grew louder to become a relentless drumbeat pounding through the depths of his unconscious mind. Pain, sense-shattering, fiery, all-consuming pain unlike any he'd ever experienced, dragged Bolan back to the hellish awareness of grim reality. With an effort of iron will, fueled by rage and a heart full of vengeance, Bolan opened his eyes. He tasted the blood and bile in his mouth. His eyes opened, their lids tugging away from the dried crust of his life's juices that had hardened on his face like weathered glue.

  Bolan groaned as he took in his surroundings. He was in a hut with some other prisoners. Eight men, he counted. They were watching him with fear, pity and silent despair written on their faces.

  Bolan struggled to sit up, raw fire surging across the slashed flesh of his back with every inch he moved. He propped himself against a wooden pole, savored for a moment the sensation of the wood's coolness against his punished flesh, then checked his injuries. Every muscle in his body ached, throbbed. He hurt bad, right to the marrow of his bones. But nothing appeared broken. He was lucky, he thought. But just how lucky was he?

  Bolan's eyes anxiously swept over the hut seeking Grimaldi. He spotted his friend stretched out on a straw mat on the other side of the hut. Bolan stood, lost his balance for a second, then willed strength into his rubbery legs. Ignoring the solemn scrutiny of the other prisoners, Bolan moved painfully across the hut. He knelt beside Grimaldi, checked his pulse, found a heartbeat, faint but steady. A pang of grief stabbed Bolan as he examined his friend. From face to waist Grimaldi was one mass of black, blue and purple welts and bruises. Flies crawled on the patches of congealed blood on his face and arms. A lump the size of a golf ball lodged in Bolan's throat.

  Gently, Bolan shook Grimaldi. "Jack? Jack?"

  Grimaldi stirred, groaned, winced. Opening his eyes, he stared up at Bolan for a stretched second. He blinked several times, then forced a half smile. "Damn, Striker, did you get the number of the train that ran over us?"

  "Does it feel like anything's broken, Jack?"

  Grimaldi clenched his teeth. Bolan helped him to sit up.

  "Just my pride and dignity," Grimaldi answered.

  "Then consider yourself lucky, friend. Genghis Khan was in a good mood tonight." The comment came from one of the other prisoners nearby.

  "If this is luck," Grimaldi replied in a scratchy voice, "I'd better stay away from the tables at Vegas, pal."

  Bolan turned, looked at the man who'd spoken. Like all the captives there, the man looked like little more than a skeleton. Gaunt-faced. Hollow-eyed. Emaciated. In the flickering orange glow from a torch directly over their heads, they resembled scarecrows. Bolan knew that in a matter of days both he and Jack would look like them — walking dead men.

  "Allow me to introduce myself and your other roomies, friends," the man said, his voice edged with bitterness. "I'm Mike Tremain." He pointed at a black man. "That's Larry Jones." He indicated the other six men in turn. "Bill Carver. Pete Struber. Aaron Ribitowitz. Harry Karn. Jim Sellers. Paul Polanski, or Bruno, as we call 'im."

  "I'm Bolan. And this is Jack Grimaldi," Bolan said curtly, forcing the words past swollen, split lips.

  "Yeah, we know who you are, man," Jones said. "We was all there in Nam, Sergeant, soldiers for the cause, y'know — except the spook here, he didn't have no cause, 'cept maybe a little lust for a piece of the black market." He threw Tremain a hostile glance. "We were in the twenty-second Marines, fourth division. Our Huey was shot down on recon near Da Nang in '72. We been under Charlie's tender lovin' care ever since."

  The bitterness in the black soldier's voice didn't escape Bolan. The memory of the harsh ordeal these vets had endured seemed to live in their eyes, like a broken headstone, Bolan thought, a sorry tribute to what these men believed was a dirty war, a lousy damn joke that had been played on them. But Bolan saw, too, the strength in those watchful eyes, sensed the courage in this group of soldiers. Hell, he knew, they had to be good, hard as rock to have survived their fate this long.

  "You can forget about all that pride and dignity stuff, Sergeant," Pete Struber said. "It's the first thing they take away from you here."

  "And we're long since out of sympathy," Ribitowitz added with a deadpan delivery.

  "Believe me, soldier," Bolan said, his eyelids slitted as the fire continued to race like molten lava through his veins, "I can understand that."

  Grimacin
g for a moment, Bolan stooped, perched himself against the wall beside Grimaldi.

  Grimaldi touched his bruised jaw, screwing his eyes shut for a second. "Any of you guys got a cigarette?" he asked, then, as Bruno snorted, Grimaldi gave the guy a lame nod. "Guess not. Dumb question. Just tryin' to lighten the mood a little, huh."

  "And they don't serve up surf 'n' turf here neither, funny man," Struber growled.

  Carver added with a bitter chuckle, "You get two meals a day, friends, one in the morning, one at night. If you get a bowl of slop that looks like ground-up meat, don't touch it."

  Bolan didn't like the sound of that. His suspicions about what the man was driving at triggered a new wave of rage in his belly. "Why's that?"

  "You know that guy you tried to help out there today?" Karn said.

  "What about him?"

  Seller's mouth twisted in an ugly sneer. "'Cause he'll come back, served up as ground meat. That's fuckin' why, Sergeant."

  "Christ!" Grimaldi groaned. For a moment he hung his head.

  Bolan's jaw muscles tightened, his guts knotted up into a coil.

  "You can eat the rice," Jones said.

  "But don't bitch about the gourmet cooking," Struber supplemented in grim mirth. "You two guys got off easy today. You knocked off most of the cream of their troops, took out a big chunk of their friggin' mercenary cutthroat outfit. Thank your lucky stars that your reputations preceded you, or you'd be dead meat already and some poor bastard would be spooning you out of a bowl in the morning."

  Tremain snorted. "Don't worry, I think that little practice is pretty much over. Genghis started his cannibal routine about a month ago. The other day Torquemandan got wind of it, we heard, and put a stop to that bullshit right away."

  "It seems the head creep," Seller interjected, "is afraid of an epidemic breaking out. Imagine that. They'll cut your guts out and tie 'em around your neck for talking back. But a little plague scares 'em to death."

  "Don't worry 'bout no plague, Sergeant," Jones said. "If you survive this next week you'll get all your shots."

  "I suggest you two get a good night's sleep," Carver told Bolan and Grimaldi. "Today we got off with a short work day, because of the ceremony for our new arrivals — that's you. We got four more days to finish scraping the plants. Deadline, deadline, deadline. Timetable, timetable, timetable. That's all you'll be hearin' from now till then. And the whip'll bite harder every day from here on in. By tomorrow afternoon you'll think a friggin' viper's biting at your back."

  "Twenty-hour work days coming up, friends," Ribitowitz rasped. "The ones who don't get worked or whipped to death will wish they had."

  Struber jerked a nod at Ribitowitz. "He's talking about the big parade, Sergeant, in case you didn't know."

  "The death march," Jones acknowledged. He shook his head wearily, anger creeping into his eyes. "Two hundred miles to Bangkok with maybe a hundred pounds of scag on our backs. Then it's a two-hundred-mile hike back. You drop out, they leave you right where you are. If you're still breathin' and don't get up, Genghis'll put a bullet in your brain and roll ya off the trail into the ditch. And you try not to be the first few sorry suckers to fall out, either. They'll have one of these Mongols carryin' a flamethrower, and they'll put the torch to ya. Fuckin' Genghis gets a big kick when he sees the first few dudes drop from exhaustion. He likes watchin' guys burn up almost as much as he likes whippin' all the skin off them."

  "Shades of Bataan, huh," Bruno Polanski growled, looking Bolan dead in the eye.

  Bolan thought about the forced march that awaited all of them. No, he had never experienced the hell that those American and Filipinio GIs had suffered at the hands of their Japanese captors, after Wainwright ordered the island abandoned. But Polanski's words reminded him of the reason for his being there.

  "What are the chances for an escape?" Bolan asked, point-blank.

  Carver let out a soft whistle. "Boy, you don't waste any time, do you?"

  Bolan ignored the man's cynicism. "There has to be some point on this march where it could be pulled off. Maybe the midway point. At night. The guards will be just as tired as the prisoners, just a little better nourished, that's all. What about it?"

  Tremain looked at Bolan with astonishment, then anger. Yeah, Bolan figured these guys would have hashed over the idea of escape before this, and they had obviously arrived at a dead end. But even though a mass breakout would be a last desperate act, having perhaps a one-in-a-thousand chance of succeeding and leading to inevitable death if it failed, there was still that hope. Bolan could see their minds were chewing over the possibility. The prisoners realized the odds, though still incredibly long, had shortened slightly with the arrival of the two tough though battered newcomers.

  Struber was the first to voice an objection. "Nah. No way, Sergeant. It hasn't even been tried, not in the terms of one mass uprising by all of us, anyway. We'd be shot dead before we ever got out of the friggin' starting gate."

  "With that kind of thinking, Struber," Bolan said, "you're beaten already."

  Struber stiffened but backed off, and fell into a brooding silence. Bolan didn't have time to worry about wounded pride. He needed winners from that moment on. Any doubts at all about their chances of success meant doom. It was time to start separating the fat from the lean.

  "I suggest you keep your voice down, Bolan," Tremain said, then jerked a thumb at the bamboo wall that supported his back. "The walls, friend — they have ears. Big ones."

  "We got us some real bad apples in here, pal," Karn said. "Camp snitches. They'd turn you in for a pack of cigarettes."

  "We got us one pigeon here in particular, man," Jones said his dark eyes still lit with anger. "A dude by the name of Davis. He's already turned in a dozen mates. Every time he does he gets a carton of smokes, a bottle of Burgundy and a fuckin' ten-course meal from the Mongol himself."

  Sellers snorted. The hatred in his bloodshot eyes seemed to further inflame the redness of those sunken orbs. "We call the SOB Virginia Slim. Christ help me if I ever get my hands on him..."

  "Virginia Slim," Tremain added, "will turn you over to Genghis if he even thinks he smells an escape attempt. You can kiss your raggedy ass goodbye if that happens. It'll be the black room for you."

  Bolan had known from the moment of his capture that he would have to watch his step, that certain inmates could prove deadly in their cowardly treachery toward the others, just for some special privileges granted them by the hand of the whipmasters. Pigeons were always damn sorry excuses for men, any way you sliced it, Bolan knew. A Judas goat among their ranks here could be the worst enemy of the whole savage lot.

  Bolan decided to carry on working up an escape attempt, though he might have to go about it in a different way. Time was wasting, indeed time was killing them all. Bolan had to win their confidence now, and begin laying the foundations for the breakout. When the attempt was made, it would have to be fast, brutally violent, and would have to make use of the element of surprise. And most, if not all, of the prisoners would have to act together as one body of lightning fury during the initial seconds of the breakout. First, though, Bolan needed more facts about the march.

  Bolan had noticed something else about his fellow prisoners. Though they knew there were spies among them, these inmates made no attempt to lower their voices, nor did they seem concerned that snitches were roving about the hut, listening to their conversation. No, these soldiers had reluctantly but angrily accepted their fate. Their attitude was that what would happen would just have to happen. Death hung over every head there for every second of every day. Dying seemed to mean very little to these men anymore. If the opportunity for escape presented itself, or if someone presented it to them, men with so little to lose would bite, he knew. They would surely go down fighting, screaming out all their pent-up rage and frustration in the obscene face of death, seizing the moment to pay back the men who had enslaved, tortured and dehumanized them. Bolan sensed that the hope to break free of their bonds s
till rested in their hearts. Once a good soldier, always a fighter. These prisoners were broken in many ways, on the verge of total defeat. But maybe, Bolan thought, just maybe... the light would shine. It would have to, he knew. Doing nothing meant certain death, or long-term enslavement and torture, which, in his mind, were the same thing.

  "What about this forced march?" he queried. "Tell me about it."

  The eight men exchanged glances. Bolan read in their hesitation a sudden fear. Judging by the anxious expressions on their faces, he could guess they felt as if they were being pushed into something they all wanted, but were afraid to put into motion themselves. Hell, yes, he was about to open a potential Pandora's box, and they were being asked to act, to begin to make their dreams of freedom a reality.

  "Let's tighten up this circle," Bolan suggested, and waited for a response.

  Then Bolan noticed the hostile glances the others directed at Tremain.

  "What makes you think everybody here can be trusted, Sergeant?" Struber said.

  "What's to make me think that they can't?"

  Jones looked at Tremain. 'This dude here's CIA for starters. It's thanks to his buddies that we're rotting here in the first place, man."

  Tremain shook his head, disgusted. "You believe these guys?" the CIA man growled at Bolan. "I've been here for seven years, I've made it through seven marches side by side with each and every one of them. I'm beginning to think their bitterness is matched only by their stupidity and naiveté."

  "Fuck you, pal," Struber quietly snarled.

  "I was never involved in any black-market operations, assholes," Tremain rasped. "I've told you that before. You can believe it or not. I don't give a shit anymore what you think."