Still, he held the upper hand, even in the silence of cynicism. For he was well aware of their own hypocrisy, and Kam Chek and Kan Khang were smart enough to know when to keep their mouths shut. During the course of the year, every village on the Thai peninsula was visited by the two warlords and their mercenary brigands. Sometimes Kam Chek would be gone for two months at a stretch, roaming the countryside at will, raping, pillaging, capturing peasants and bringing them back to work the poppy fields. No, Torquemandan thought, those two weren't fooling anybody.
He sighed. "Yes, very well, the next village. But the rest stop must not be as long as it usually is, understand?"
Both Kam Chek and Kan Khang nodded in agreement.
Torquemandan dismissed them both, then walked back over to his truck. He was anxious to get this year's march over with as quickly, as painlessly as possible. For some reason, he was feeling the strain of keeping the whole damn thing going, making sure his mercenaries towed the line.
He hoped he wouldn't end up regretting his decision to allow his cutthroats to indulge themselves at the next rest break. If there was any shit, any shit at all, he told himself, heads would roll.
And the black room would be filled to capacity.
Indeed, his torture chamber wouldn't be vacant for a long, long time.
* * *
During the morning of the third day of the march, two more prisoners collapsed, unable to get up. One of the fallen men was Ronny Brennan.
From his position at the rear of the column, Bolan saw the New York drug czar meet his doom. Ronny Brennan died exactly as he had lived. Like a maggot.
Immediately Kam Chek alerted Torquemandan, who took the warlord's Tokarev pistol and walked right up to Brennan.
Brennan looked up at his lord and master and raised his pulped hand as Torquemandan pointed the pistol at his face. Brennan was delirious, but when he realized he was about to die, terror seemed to surge renewed life into his punished body.
"N-no... please, Mr. Torquemandan... you can't... N-o-o... I don't want to die!" Brennan cried out.
Kam Chek snickered.
Torquemandan squeezed the trigger of the Tokarev, drilled a third eye through Brennan's forehead with the 9 mm slug. Then Torquemandan thrust the pistol back at Kam Chek.
Brennan was left where he lay.
Kam Chek spit on the dead pusher's body, kicked it off the trail.
As the column moved out, most of the men limping, sagging, they reminded Bolan of a great wounded beast hobbling off to its cave to die.
He turned his head to check on Grimaldi. Bolan was worried about the ace pilot.
Grimaldi's jaw was slack, his mouthline a shriveled, sun-cracked slit. His face was a mask of crusted blood and dried dust, and his eyelids drooped over bloodshot orbs. He limped along, but as he turned to look at Bolan, he lost his balance and pitched to the ground.
Bolan stopped, stooped over Grimaldi. He was disregarding Khang's order of punishment by death for helping a fallen prisoner. But yeah, he thought, maybe the rat, Davis, was right after all. He was special there. Special only as long as he was alive and able to suffer.
'Tick him up!" Mongkut shrieked. He lashed Bolan across the back of the head with his whip.
The disturbance brought Kam Chek and three guards running to the rear of the column.
"What is this, Bo-leen?" Kam Chek screamed. "He stands and walks now or I will have him shot!"
"I'm all right, Striker," Grimaldi groaned.
Kam Chek unleathered his Tokarev.
Bolan hung Grimaldi's arm around his shoulder, tugged his friend to his feet. Bolan's eyes were like two chips of granite as he looked at Kam Chek.
"You use it on him, asshole, you might as well keep pulling the trigger. It'll take more than a handful of those nine-millimeters to keep me from ripping your throat out first."
Kam Chek was stunned that Bolan would defy him. For a second, he even seemed uncertain what to do, and while he hesitated the moment of danger passed for Bolan. Kam Chek backed off, the muzzle of his Tokarev wavering from its target acquisition on his chest.
But Kam Chek had to save face. He laughed. "No, no, Bo-leen. You will not force my hand. No, no, no. You and your friend are weakening, Bo-leen. You are perhaps wishing for death at this point, oui. You will not get it. Move!" he barked.
Mongkut flayed the legs of Bolan and Grimaldi, his whip scorching air and flesh like the crackle of electricity. "You heard him, you white pigs. Move!"
Kam Chek holstered the Tokarev but draped his hand over the hilt of his sword. "He walks by himself, Bo-leen... or he doesn't walk at all."
But Grimaldi was already pulling his arm away from Bolan. He wobbled for a moment, then began trudging ahead. "What's all the fuss about anyway?"
Bolan ignored Grimaldi's attempt at humor. He could tell the guy was in a bad way. Starving. Dehydrated. Perhaps sick with malaria. Perhaps bleeding internally from his injuries. No, there was nothing to laugh about. But Bolan couldn't help but admire the guy's guts.
Still, Grimaldi, Bolan feared, was on the verge of collapsing.
Never to get up again.
Tremain looked back at Bolan. The Executioner looked the ex-CIA agent in the eye.
Bolan hoped Tremain read his stare. Tomorrow was the time, Mack Bolan thought. Tomorrow would bring either freedom or death.
Hang in there, Jack, Bolan thought. One more day.
One more lousy goddamn day in hell. Another handful of endless miles.
Bolan sensed that the strain of the forced march was at last eroding the morale and the physical hardiness of Kam Chek and his butchers. Fast.
Bolan saw Tremain nod, then face front.
A sign.
Tomorrow, yeah. If only they could hold out that long.
20
Bolan's mind was made up. It was time to act. Time to live, or time to die. He had long since reached a point where it took all his willpower to avoid acting prematurely against the barbarism of Kam Chek and Kan Khang. Up to the present, the warlords had held all the right cards. Now their own cannibalism was about to deal them a losing hand.
The column of prisoners had reached a plain that was set inside a hill-ringed valley. The procession halted just outside the village, which comprised between thirty and forty large thatch-roofed huts, yakas built from grass and bamboo. Sprawling rice paddies and maize fields surrounded the huts. A dragon-bone pump, rabat, jutted against the thickening gray veil of dusk to the far north of the village. Hogs and oxen waddled down the village's intersecting streets, which quickly became congested with men, women and children walking away from their huts to greet the mercenary army.
Khang's army, right, Bolan thought, as Mongkut called for the column to halt. Pillagers. Rapists. Thieves. The villagers didn't exactly appear eager to receive these twentieth-century Huns with open arms, Bolan noticed. Children pressed their bodies against their mother's skirts. Fear, anger shadowed the faces of the Thai men. From somewhere in that tightly packed mob, a baby cried.
Right away, the transport trucks, jeeps and animals were separated from the prisoners. The vehicles were lined up at the end of a long trail. The trail paralleled a murky stream, which tumbled down from the forested mountainside and gurgled its course past the village, flowing south.
Quickly corraled, the animals were fed and watered by the prisoners.
Kam Chek, Kan Khang and more than half of their brigands, however, didn't have time for such trivialities, Bolan noted. The low laughter of the barbarians, as they lumbered into the village, carried easily to Bolan's ears.
Bolan felt the adrenaline rush, a fire racing through his veins, burning away, it seemed, every trace of exhaustion and pain. With grim determination he steeled himself. He was ready.
Bolan sat down next to Grimaldi, after accepting his pitifully meager ration of food and water from a guard. As chance would have it, Bolan saw that this particular guard toted Bolan's AutoMag. Raking his gaze over the encampment, Bolan counted the
enemy numbers. They were thirty strong. More than half the enemy force, including Torquemandan, the Devil's Horn members and the camp pigeons, had gone into the heart of the village.
Meanwhile, Kam Chek, Kan Khang and the other mercenaries wasted no time taking the women they wanted. Within seconds, the streets were clear, except for the sentries stationed in front of the huts where orgies were taking place, to ward off any attempt by the village men to save their women from ravishment. Several of the village men tried pleading with the guards, but the guards merely laughed in their faces and pushed them away.
The guards who had been left on the outskirts of the village to watch the prisoners seemed disappointed, resentful at having been made to wait their turn to expend their damned-up lust. Tough luck, Bolan thought. And their luck was going to get a whole lot tougher.
Bolan finished his scanty meal as, one more time, he went over in his mind the details of the breakout. Thirty AK-47s, his AutoMag and the seized M-16s and Uzi subguns against one hundred men. Though they were better nourished and rested than their captives, the march had been no picnic for the guards. Several of them had now relaxed their vigilance and were sitting propped against the trunks of areca palm trees. They smoked and ate, but kept to themselves, seeming to ignore the prisoners completely.
Only Mongkut was still very much on the alert, but even he, Bolan knew, would sooner or later have to take a break to eat or to relieve himself.
Finally, he did so. The principal whipmaster for the march called over two guards and snapped orders at them. Then Mongkut walked away, disappearing into the gloom of the jungle. The guards waited until Mongkut was out of sight before firing up cigarettes. Bolan spotted the keys to the manacles hanging from the belts of those sentries. One of the sentries had Grimaldi's M-16 slung around his shoulder.
Bolan looked at Grimaldi, saw the grim set of his expression, hard as stone. Bolan nodded to the pilot, then caught the eye of Tremain and Jones and gave them the signal. The black soldier and the ex-CIA agent turned, looked down the line, nodded at the other prisoners of their circle.
Bolan could feel several dozen pairs of eyes riveted on him. Those who were staring fixedly at him were with him now. At least, he hoped so. Somehow, the word had gotten to those men. Perhaps only one word had reached them. Escape. Perhaps, that was all they had learned, all they needed to hear. Perhaps.
If the guards looked their way now...
But they did not.
Silently, Bolan and the other eight prisoners who were briefed on the plans for that deadly moment, slipped out of the heroin packs they had carried so many miles.
Leaping to his feet, Bolan made his move. The two guards were less than five feet away, and had foolishly turned their backs on him, concerned more about when Mongkut would return than about sentry duty. Some guys just have to learn the hard way, Bolan thought. He twisted, swinging his chained hands and arms behind him.
Carelessness brought the sentries to their last seconds on earth.
Rage powered Bolan's muscles. He swung his arms with the same pitiless whipping motion he had endured at the end of the guards' bullhide leather. Alerted by the rattle of chains, the guard on Bolan's right began to turn. His look of naked terror and shock became his death mask. Bolan dropped that cutthroat, his chains driving off the side of the guerrilla's skull. Bone cracked like boot-crushed Styrofoam. At the same moment as Bolan's attack, Grimaldi, gnashing his teeth, whipped his chains down over his head, shattering the second sentry's skull and lancing bone splinters into brain.
Blood and muck sprayed the faces of Bolan and Grimaldi, but they didn't even flinch under the gory shower. They could not afford to stop now for anything or anyone. Moving in the wink of an eye, they snatched the keys off the belts of the guards as soon as the dead men slumped to the trail. Like lightning, they inserted the keys, twisted the locks. They broke free of their bonds. There wasn't a second to waste now, Bolan saw, as the trail boiled up with shadows of death.
Tremain and Jones jumped the guards nearest them, caving in their skulls with swinging chain links.
Panic broke out in one wave of lightning frenzy.
At the front of the column, the guards shouted, opened up with AK-47s. A guard leaped into the jeep, and a .50-caliber machine gun roared as he cut loose with the big maneater. But the sudden chaos had already jolted the other prisoners into action.
Within a split second, though, there were casualties among the prisoners. And death.
Struber and Sellers collided with each other as slugs chewed up their chests, blood gushing away like mini-geysers from the ragged holes in their torsos, front and back. They howled in pain, then died.
The pack animals, panicked by gunfire, screamed and thrashed into one another. The skittish horses broke away first, whinnying. As a stampede broke out, the heroin sacks slipped from the backs and flanks of the terrified animals. The jellylike uncut opium burst from packs trampled by hooves.
Bolan stripped his AutoMag off the dead guard who had been sporting it, and stuffed spare clips for the Uzi SMG into his belt. Grimaldi seized his M-16 and some ammo from another guard. Eyes wild, Bolan searched the edge of the jungle to see if Mongkut was returning. There was no sign of the bastard yet. But Mongkut would show, Bolan knew, and the Executioner would be ready for the Asian whipmaster.
Bolan and Grimaldi turned grim attention back toward the prisoners and guards. As Bolan had hoped, even the prisoners who had not been in on the escape plan bolted into action against the guards as one unified body, intent on murder, committed to evening up some very lopsided scores. Outnumbered more than three to one, the mercenaries were overwhelmed by the prisoners within seconds. Even though the momentary stutter of AK-47s mowed down a dozen of the chained men, the captives were not going to be denied their vengeance, or their chance for freedom. One massive wall of human fury was unleashed, a rolling thunderhead of fists, feet and swinging chains as the inmate horde descended on the stunned guards.
Still, the hail of .50 caliber and 7.62 mm lead scythed through the hearts of many prisoners. Men screamed, spun, dropped where they stood.
Swiftly, Bolan and Grimaldi moved along the outside flank of the swirling cloud of flesh. Together, they triggered their weapons, Bolan's Uzi and Grimaldi's M-16 roaring, stitching those guards who had managed to hold their ground and were slaughtering prisoners with long sweeping bursts.
Both night warriors then swung their aim toward the jeep. A millisecond later, the cutthroat in the jeep behind the .50 caliber sailed away into the air, his jaw and half his face and skull following the flight of his body in an explosion of bone, blood and gristle. The retaliation of the .50 caliber was thwarted for the time being.
Tremain had got hold of an AK-47, which he swung like a baseball bat. The butt splintered a guard's jaw, the impact lifting the limp man off his feet.
"Take cover!" Bolan shouted at the others, as he angled toward the transport trucks.
But his order went unheard at that moment. The breakout was turning into a tumultuous venting of murderous rage, of vengeance and hatred suppressed for agonizing eternities. Groups of prisoners pummeled their captors senseless. Screams of terror lanced the air. Bones snapped and cracked like dry twigs, and there were unearthly sounding belches, as boots pile-drived into guts and vomit spewed violently from gaping mouths.
Reaching cover behind a transport truck, Bolan looked back.
Guards who had been knocked to the ground and disarmed attempted to crawl away from the human caldron of wrath. Chains pelted their bodies. Boots drilled into their asses. Their cries for mercy were ignored by their former captives, indeed their very pleading seemed to further incense those they had enslaved and brutalized for so long. Not all the prisoners, however, joined in the fight for freedom. Some, after working feverishly to unlock their chains and free themselves, charged off into the jungle and vanished. At the end of the opening onslaught, Bolan counted up a fighting force of sixty, not one hundred, men, and only half of
them brandished weapons.
A split second later, Kam Chek's barbarians in the village made the hellzone even hotter. Alerted by the furor, Khang and Kam Chek poked their heads out the doorway of a large hut at the far north end of the village street. From there they shrieked orders to their brigands. Then they and their mercenaries tugged on pants and shirts, and scrambled into position. Some flung themselves into doorways, others dropped into prone position beneath the raised foundations of yakas. The muzzle-flashes of AK-47s stabbed through the twilight gloom.
Puffs of dirt coughed up around the transport trucks. Lead hornets screamed off the armored hulls and drilled into the trail as the prisoners who had chosen to stay and fight scurried for cover behind the line of vehicles.
The pack animals continued to scream, crushed one another with deadweight as slugs raked their bodies and sliced off chunks of bloody hide.
Grimaldi jumped into the back of a truck. He rummaged around for a moment, then, brandishing the MM-1, he called, "Striker!" Bolan caught the multiround projectile launcher that Grimaldi threw to him.
"What's next, Sergeant?" Larry Jones growled. He was crouched beside Bolan. Above their heads, lead-jacketed steel whined off the metal of the truck.
The escape attempt had got off to a good start, but was not going according to plan. Bolan had hoped the initial shock of the prisoner uprising would bring the rest of Kam Chek's cutthroats running from the village. It hadn't worked that way. Instead, the mercenaries were turning the village into a stronghold. Bolan feared the worst.
Moments later, he discovered just how the warlords intended to turn the tables back in their favor.
"Hold your fire! Hold your fire!" Kam Chek shrieked.
All weapons ceased firing. The final chatter of AK-47s rang out in a hollow echo.
Tremain and the surviving prisoners of Bolan's circle gathered around him. They waited, listened. Dust swept over them in a thick, choking brown sheet.
Devil's Horn Page 17