The screams of agony ended an hour after the prisoners broke for the night.
Inside the hut, Bolan, Grimaldi, and their seven fellow prisoners sat in angry silence. Each was lost in his own gloomy thoughts, perhaps wondering what had happened to Carver.
Ronny Brennan had been removed from the hut that morning. No one knew where the tortured druglord had been taken, or what had become of him. No one had asked. As far as Bolan was concerned, the punk had merely lain down in the bed of his choosing.
Struber finally broke the leaden hush. "Do you think he talked?"
"What if he did, man? So what?" Jones quietly growled.
"That's right," Bolan said, then looked at each man in turn. "We do it. Same plan. Same place. You'll know when."
"It's crazy," Struber protested. "We'll be massacred, for sure."
"It's even crazier to do nothing, Struber," Polanski shot back.
The soldiers and the ex-CIA man looked pointedly at Bolan.
Bolan nodded. "Get yourselves in the right state of mind. Harden up quick."
Struber let out a pent-up breath, shook his head. "I don't like it."
"Ain't nobody askin' you to like it, man," Jones said.
Silence. Plump flies and mosquitoes buzzed around the hut, dancing in the flickering torchlight.
Bolan and Grimaldi looked at each other. Bolan read the fear in Grimaldi's eyes, but the longer he held the pilot's stare, the more a grim resolve seemed to push away any shadow of doubt Grimaldi might have held about the breakout attempt. Grimaldi knew the score, and he believed. He and Bolan had been in plenty of doomsday situations together, had survived many campaigns together on the hellfire trail. Death had pressed its razor's edge more than once against their throats. But this time was different. This time they were not in the heat of a battle, with only their courage, skill and determination to defeat the enemy. This time they were not on the offensive, attacking the enemy. This time they were weakened, starved, beaten up. And their allies were a pack of miserable shackled creatures who had undergone years of punishment.
There was plenty to chew on, Bolan knew. Nobody wants to die. Never believe a son of a bitch who says he isn't afraid of death, he thought. Only an insane man, or a suicide, openly invites death. Okay, so maybe he'd invited death before. Hell, he thought he had invited death, countless times in scores of battle zones. But death, like anything else to the warrior, was something to be conquered.
So much still had to be done, Bolan knew. Too many battles still needed to be waged and won. Too many tabs needed squaring. But Bolan could not afford to look beyond the next few days. He had enough savages and soulless monsters on his hands already. And they needed to taste the cold edge of his sword.
"You think any of the guys from the other hut will spread the word?" Struber wanted to know.
"Shuddup," Ribitowitz snarled through clenched teeth. "You got a big mouth and a short memory, pal. If you end up in the black room, we're all finished for sure."
Struber spit, then lapsed into a brooding silence.
"It doesn't matter one way or another," Sellers chipped in. "We're on our own anyway." He looked at Bolan for confirmation, or perhaps denial. "Right?"
"We'll know soon."
"Ferangs!"
Kam Chek's voice shot through the hut, jolted the prisoners as if they'd been hit by an electrical charge.
The warlord stood in the doorway, a burlap sack in his hands. The bottom of the sack was dark with a crimson stain.
Bolan cursed to himself. One more score, he thought, one more score to settle up.
Scowling, but saying nothing, Kam Chek upended the sack.
Carver's head tumbled out of the sack, thudded on the dirt floor of the hut and rolled a few inches.
Struber vomited. A ripe stench began to spread through the hut like an invisible cloud. The prisoners ignored Struber.
Kam Chek tossed the sack on the floor, left the head lying at his feet. "Your friend has died a senseless and stupid death."
"You're a bloody fuckin' animal, Kam Chek," Polanski snarled. "Someday... I swear to God, someday... you'll pay."
Kam Chek appeared to be amused. "I shall remember what you have said, ferang."
"You do that," Polanski said.
Bolan scrutinized Kam Chek's face. Judging by the warlord's initial outburst and by the look of disappointment in his eyes, Bolan guessed that Carver had gone to his death without breaking down and leaking the escape plan.
Kam Chek raked a cold gaze over the prisoners. "I suggest that you get a good night's sleep," he said. "We leave in four hours."
Kam Chek left the hut.
Polanski shut his eyes, squeezing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. The big man's shoulders trembled. "The bastards... the fucking bastards... I'll kill them all...."
Sellers directed a strange, blank look at Bolan. "Carver was a good man. He was a friend to all of us."
Ribitowitz looked away from the severed head. "He didn't deserve this. Christ, he didn't deserve this."
A cold ball of fury lodged in his guts, Bolan looked at each of the faces around him. Every one was clouded with sorrow and anger. The men's rage, he knew, was directed at the savages beyond the walls of the hut. They didn't blame Bolan for Carver's death. They couldn't. It could have happened to any one of them.
And the guy had made the supreme sacrifice.
Now it was up to the rest of them to make sure Carver's death was not in vain.
Bolan read murder in the eyes that stared back at him.
The prisoners were committed. Now, more than ever.
18
An hour before dawn the prisoners were rounded up.
As Kam Chek shouted orders and cursed the slowness with which the prisoners assembled, more than sixty guards quickly fastened manacles around the wrists and the ankles of the men who would be forcemarched to Bangkok. A lone klieg light bathed the scene.
Under the repeated scourge of the whips, the prisoners strapped the bales of raw heroin across the backs of dozens of horses, oxen and mules. Then the transport trucks were loaded to capacity. Finally, the heroin supply that was left over after the loading was piled in drums and barrels near the trail that led to Torquemandan's palace.
The three pigeons urged on the slave labor force. Each one of the rats carried a holstered sidearm, and threatened the other prisoners with death.
For Mack Bolan, the night seemed to have passed within the blink of an eye. It was time, he knew.
Time to face death.
Time to meet his destiny.
Time for judgment.
Time once again to win or lose.
In the Executioner's war, there was never a stalemate.
The column was formed. Under constant verbal harassment and whiplashing, the prisoners picked up the burlap sacks of pure poison. Bolan's pack was heavy. He guessed it weighed somewhere in the area of eighty to ninety pounds. He assessed the condition of the other prisoners. Some of the inmates were so weak already that they fell on their backs when struggling to get their arms through the straps of their packs. Bolan knew that many of these men were going to die; they would drop from sheer exhaustion. Others would be driven so hard, they would simply collapse, perhaps even cry out for death to take them.
It was going to be ugly. That much the Executioner knew.
As the guards used their AK-47s to prod him to his position at the very rear of the column, Bolan spotted Ronny Brennan. The druglord appeared dead on his feet. His empty gaze seemed to be focused on some point far ahead. The druglord, halfway up the column on the outer left side, his pack of heroin still at his feet, was now most definitely experiencing life on the other side of the wall. Bolan did not feel sorry for him.
Two guards converged on Brennan. One flayed him across the back, the other cursed at him, pummeled him about the head with his fists until Brennan bent and hefted the pack to his shoulders. Bolan thought he saw a tear break from the corner of Brennan's eye.
Grim
aldi fell in beside Bolan.
Steely-eyed, Bolan looked at the pilot for a moment.
"Let's hang tough, Striker, huh?"
"The only way, Jack."
"Bo-leen! Look."
Bolan looked behind him, saw Kam Chek standing beside the rear transport truck. There, he held out Bolan's confiscated M-60, and smiled.
"Very nice weapon for a ferang, Bo-leen. These, also," he said, as the armament Bolan and Grimaldi had brought with them was passed among Kam Chek's cutthroats. The AutoMag. The mini-Uzi and Uzi SMG. The MM-1 and the two M-16s with the attached M-203s. Commando knives and garrotes.
It was all there, Bolan saw. Was the fool trying to tempt him?
One of the guards laughed as he took the M-60 from Kam Chek. The savage said something to Kam Chek in Thai.
The warlord looked at Bolan. "He says your weapons will do nice work later. Perhaps on you. Heh-heh."
Laugh now, bastard, Bolan thought, you won't be laughing when I'm through with you.
When the loading was finished, there was a half-hour wait. Bolan wondered what the hell the delay was all about. As he stood in line, the pack of heroin seemed to grow heavier by the moment, a lead weight rooting him to the spot.
Finally, the members of the Devil's Horn appeared along the trail. Ten scumbags, Bolan counted, including the chief cannibal, Torquemandan. They were all dressed in smart white three-piece suits. Not a rumple. Not a speck of dirt. Most of the slime didn't, or couldn't, look at the prisoners. Instead, they walked straight to the transport trucks, where they climbed into the cabs.
Bolan noticed a fat guy, whom he guessed must weigh more than three hundred pounds, take a seat in a jeep. A tall skinny guy followed the fat man into the jeep. Bolan suspected the skinny dude had a problem with his nerves, as he kept cracking the knuckles of both hands. Bolan hoped to shatter that guy's nerves for good.
Grimaldi was grimly watching the odd pair, too. "Who the hell are they supposed to be? Laurel and Hardy?"
No, Bolan thought, sick dogs — who need to be put to sleep.
A moment later Kam Chek approached Torquemandan and conferred with him about something. While they were still talking, Chaika Kan Khang, dressed in his green military blouse and slacks, walked to the head of the column. His medals rattled with his swaggering gait.
"Workers of the Imperial Revolutionary Army. Listen!" Khang clasped his hands behind his back, jutted out his chinless jaw. "Many of you have marched before. You know what is required of you. You know what must be done. For those of you marching for the first time, I will go over the rules. Listen carefully. You will only be told once.
"First, there is to be no talking among any of you for any reason. Even a word is punishable by death. Second, and most important, you will do exactly as you are told, when you are told. Disobedience is punishable by death. You must not at any time fall down. Exhaustion is punishable by death. You will not at any time relieve yourself until we break at night. Soiling yourself is punishable by death.
"There are those of you who are weak, we know this. The weak will die soon enough. There are those of you who are strong. You will survive. Under no circumstances are the strong to help or encourage the weak. This is punishable by death.
"Today, we will cover thirty-five miles. We will accept nothing under thirty-five miles, and if we must settle for less, ten of you will volunteer for a firing squad. Every day after today, we will cover no less than thirty miles. I hope that this is acceptable to you."
Bolan saw several pairs of shoulders sag, heard pent-up breath rasp the steamy air. Despair had already gripped several of the prisoners. Despair this early, he knew, meant certain death for those experiencing it. Thirty-five miles, he thought, was going to break the backs of the weaker men. A good day's march for a soldier was twenty miles, with food and water in the belly, and no more than a sixty-pound rucksack.
Khang stood in silence for several moments. He seemed to be studying the prisoners. Finally, as if to drive one more nail into the coffin, he said, "I wish you luck."
At last, the doors of vehicles slammed. A moment later, engines coughed, growled to life.
Kam Chek screamed for the prisoners to move out, as rays of golden light glowed in the sky to the east.
Whips cracked, scorched the legs and the buttocks of the prisoners.
A cry of pain rose from somewhere near the front of the column.
Mack Bolan choked down a groan of pain as he commanded his own wooden legs to move.
The death march began.
* * *
The first day of the march quickly turned into a trial of endurance. The only way to defeat his suffering under the whip and carry the weight of the heroin pack, Bolan knew, was to will himself not to think about it.
After several miles of forced marching, with the frequent bite of the whip against his legs and Kam Chek shrieking insults at the prisoners, the effort of not thinking about the ordeal began to seem impossible.
One foot in front of the other. One yard, one mile at a time, Bolan told himself. He tried turning his thoughts to other people.
Like Hal Brognola. Where was he at this moment? What was he doing? Bolan felt a half smile tug at the corner of his lips. The big Fed was probably worrying right now about the two Stony Man warriors. Bolan pictured Brognola chewing his lower lip, maybe popping a couple of antacid tablets, chomping on a cigar. The Fed was a good man with a tough job.
Then Bolan's mind went back to better times long since gone. He thought about his childhood, the teenage years, the often painful time of growing that children experienced as they groped their way to adulthood. He stopped short, though, when his thoughts turned to the tragic loss of his family.
It was no good. He couldn't focus on any happy memories from the past for more than a few seconds, and frustration brought his cold rage surging to the surface.
His head was filled with the sound of Kam Chek's voice, with the savage's cruel words about his family's sudden, horrible end. All over again, Bolan felt the pain, a deep, clawing, clinging pain that knocked the breath right out of his lungs. No, though he would never forget, for now he must not remember. The past was gone forever. He had to stay in the present, or he was dead. He must feed the vengeance. And he must not forget for one second why he was here. And what he had to do.
After every half mile or so, Bolan would check on Grimaldi. The guy had been by his side for what now seemed like forever. He was holding on, but strain was already showing in his eyes. His stare seemed to swallow itself. Bolan loved the guy, the damn fool, he thought. Jack shouldn't be here. Bolan wished to God that Jack had gotten sick back in the States, had broken an arm or a leg and stayed home. But he knew Grimaldi too well. The ace pilot would have badgered, cajoled, pleaded with everybody within earshot to make the mission. He would have made himself such a beautiful, loyal pain in the ass to everybody...
Bolan turned his thoughts once again to the escape. He steeled his will back to vengeance, to the fight he so desperately wanted, to the destruction he so feverishly sought to wreak on the house of cards that was the Devil's Horn. As he marched he looked at the backs of the heads of the prisoners in front of him. These men had suffered too much, endured and survived more horror than any man had a right to be asked to bear. It was time to remove that weight once and for all. Forever.
The sun rose higher. By midmorning it cleared the jungle line. The temperature mounted, the heat was a fierce blaze, a sucking vortex. Swarms of flies and mosquitoes buzzed around the column. The insects picked at the blood and sweat that sheathed every face and body there; they resembled a rolling black blanket on the backs and legs of the pack animals. Chains rattled, a maddening din of tinkling metal. Engines rumbled in a sense-numbing drone. When the procession hit a dirt path that snaked through the forested hills, the lead trucks kicked up balls of boiling dust, and prisoners and guards alike became brown, dirt-caked mummies. The stench of sweat, blood and animal dung filled the air. Bolan quickly got used to
the smell, indeed he focused on it to help clear his senses when fatigue began hardening to a cementlike heaviness in his limbs.
The guards, Bolan noted, changed shifts by the hour. Thirty AK-47-wielding cutthroats would march with the column while the relieved force would climb into the backs of the transport trucks. While resting, the guards ate bread and ham, drank greedily from their canteens, smoked cigarettes and laughed. They taunted the prisoners, dangling food and water before their hollow eyes like a carrot to a rabbit.
The whole enterprise was an abomination, Bolan thought. One perverse, goddamn twisting of life. A flaunting of godliness by devils who held the power of life and death.
For a brief moment, as a hot breeze punched a hole in the dust cloud and the column began moving down a steep slope between the foothills, Bolan spotted the other prisoners of his circle. Jones, Ribitowitz and Struber led the three-man-wide column. Karn and Tremain marched almost at the middle point, and Polanski and Sellers were four rows ahead of Bolan and Grimaldi.
Bolan made a quick assessment of the situation. There were five transport trucks, two armored personnel carriers and the jeep with the mounted .50-caliber machine gun. From the other prisoners, Bolan had learned that a relief force of Khang's mercenaries always waited for the column near the processing laboratory that was their destination. Tremain estimated this force at fifty guns. Another force of thirty cutthroats had been left behind at the fields to guard the leftover stock of heroin. But the heart of Torquemandan's mercenary army was here on the march, Bolan knew. He would have to cut out the heart first, then sever the head at the laboratory, and finally chop the legs off the body back at the field.
That was the plan of attack. There was only a slim chance, Bolan realized grimly, that the breakout attempt could be pulled off. He was counting on an initial moment of confusion and panic, on the part of both the guards and the prisoners who had not been informed of the plan to break out of bondage. Bolan knew that he, Grimaldi and the prisoners of their circle had to seize the initiative swiftly, and jolt the other prisoners into action by the sudden move.
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