“You are mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
The coaxial gun opened up and began raking the side of the infirmary. A man jumped up out of the top hatch and grabbed the grips of the anti-aircraft gun and began hammering the siding. Gunmen deployed on either side and discharged assault rifles. Bolan’s team dropped as bullets streaked through the thin aluminum walls.
Koa took up a sweating stick of dynamite.
“Now!” Bolan shouted.
Belle appeared at Koa’s elbow and chinked open her lighter.
Koa shook his head as he regarded the unstable explosive.
“Now or not at all!” Bolan roared.
Koa gave himself to fate and held out the stick. Belle lit it. The Hawaiian hurled the dynamite out into the night. “And the chances of the blast wave detonating the rest of them are—”
The dynamite went off like a Hollywood special effect. The walls shuddered. Bolan took up two sticks and felt the glycerin-slick explosives squirm greasily in his fingers. “Again!”
Koa held out the TNT and Belle lit it. Acrid smoke filled the street. Koa sent the dynamite revolving out into the street. The gunmen crouched behind the armored car and the blast wave shook the avenue. Black smoke roiled. Bolan pulled his lighter, leaped out of the window and charged through the fog of war.
The armored car’s machine guns shrieked bullets through the smoke. Bolan’s team cut loose with covering shots. The Saladin’s cannon belched fire in response and blew a huge hole through the wall of the infirmary. Bolan had no time for it. He breathed brimstone and smoke and lit a stick of TNT. The soldier tossed it over the armored car and into the milling mass of men taking cover behind. Gunmen screamed as they saw the spitting and sparking explosive among them. Bolan lit his second stick and skimmed it beneath the armored vehicle. The only safe place was up top. Bolan charged forward and ran up the sloped prow of the vehicle. The top gunner perceived Bolan through the smoke and yanked his machine gun around on its pintle mount.
Bolan swung his machine gun on its sling and put a burst through the enemy gunner’s chest. The soldier dropped on top of the steel glacis.
The first stick of dynamite detonated behind the armored car.
The gunmen’s screams were lost as the second stick of dynamite beneath the Saladin went off and the armored car rose like a fire-fueled elevator beneath Bolan. He clung to the external cargo cleats as the vehicle dropped and failed to bounce on its shattered axles. Bolan jumped up and emptied his light machine gun into the smoke behind the Saladin. He dropped the gold-plated weapon and yanked the ventilated top gunner out of the hatch. The top half of the dead man came up, his lower half stayed in the car. The riven corpse tumbled down the sloped armor as Bolan dropped down the hatch.
Smoke filled the cramped interior. The dynamite had cracked the thin underarmor of the Saladin like an egg and the driver and gunner were mostly spread around the interior like farmer-style lasagna. Bolan pushed a very loosely held together sack of humanity out of the gunner’s seat and climbed behind the controls. He was pleased that despite the damage, the turret traversed as he worked the joystick.
Bolan leaned into the aged rubber mask of the optical sight and took note of men running for three black Daihatsu panel vans that hadn’t been on the street five minutes earlier. The chamber indicator on the 76 mm L-5A1 gun indicated the gunner had kindly reloaded before Bolan had flung his dynamite. Bolan lined up his sighting gradient with the van in the middle. The soldier fired. The Saladin rocked on its shattered axles with the recoil and nearly tipped over before it crunched back semi-upright like a beached boat. Bolan scanned through his sight. The middle van had blown sky-high and its two flanking Daihatsu brethren were burning out of control. The street was empty save for fiery vehicles and blasted bodies. Bolan hit the traverse, but the turret motor whined and died. He sat for a moment in smoke-blackened, wall-to-wall, blood-spattered safety before getting out and taking a closer look at the smoking hole the cannon had torn through the infirmary. “Koa, how we doing?”
“Marwin may have a second concussion. Other than that, the team is tip-top. I’m sorry to report that the 76 mm they fired did the Handyman no favors. I mean none whatsoever. You wouldn’t believe what’s left of him.”
“I think I was sitting in something similar.”
“I bet you were.”
“How’s Dewa?”
“Freaking out.”
“Bag the Handyman. Load up the team. We are out of here.”
Chapter 10
CIA safehouse, Jakarta
“I found it…” Dr. Dewa was drenched in gore up to his elbows. Koa had unbagged what was left of the Handyman into the safehouse claw-foot bathtub and Bolan had directed the good doctor to go on a treasure hunt for foreign objects. Dewa raised his forceps, which held a bloody little piece of something. Bolan recognized a Radio Frequency Identification Device. He had suspected as much and had told Dewa the usual places these chips were imbedded in human subjects. The doctor had sweated through his shirt from exhaustion, fear and the heat. Bolan sighed. “De Jong?”
“Yup!”
Bolan wrapped the RFID in a tea towel from the kitchen and handed it over along with the car keys. “This is a tracking device. Take it for a ride. A fun one. I want it followed but not to here. If you get into trouble, dump it down a sewer. I’ll call you when we’re ready to bolt.”
De Jong was giddy. “I love this James Bond stuff! Marwin! Ándele!”
Marwin raised his mighty concussed bulk with a grunt.
Bolan went back to the main room and sank into a sofa that was still covered with a sheet. The safehouse was a Dutch Colonial. It hadn’t been used in a while and smelled of tropical mildew and stale air. In its favor, the safehouse was squat and Dutch built and included an outer curtain wall and an iron gate. Sirens wailed in the distance. Jakarta was a violent town by anyone’s standards but they were not used to gun battles involving dynamite and armored vehicles twice in the same night. Roadblocks were everywhere. The good news was the authorities knew well of the Handyman and Dr. Dewa’s activities. For them it was a “round up the usual suspects” situation and raids against known crime lords and gangs were taking place all over the city. Bolan and his team were still completely off the radar.
Nevertheless getting out of town was going to be interesting.
The electric mixer ground into life in the kitchen as Belle worked with the groceries she had bought down the street. Rind was hacking away at his laptop and his grin might well have to be surgically removed.
“How we doing, Agent?”
“I got machine pistols. I’m in Jakarta. I got in a fight with a tank. This is epic. This is going to be a movie. Your buddy the Bear is nothing short of genius.”
Bolan nodded knowingly.
Belle came in and offered Bolan a pint glass of what appeared to be agricultural runoff on the rocks. Bolan peered at it. “And?”
“It’s a jackfruit, young coconut, ginseng, cardamom and ishin nha crushed-ice smoothie. Best I could do with what the market down the street had on hand.”
Bolan rummaged through his mental index of the intriguing and unlikely things he’d ingested during his travels. “What’s ishin nha?”
“You don’t want to know, but it invigorates the testicles and makes your sperm powerful.”
Bolan took the glass. “I’ll take every advantage I can get.”
Belle watched approvingly as Bolan poured half the concoction down his throat. It was slightly spicy, sweet and smooth, save for a few suspicious lumps. Koa flopped onto the opposite couch. “Man, I want one!”
“Coming right up, sex machine.” Belle put a wiggle in her walk and headed back into the kitchen.
“She called me sex machine.”
Bolan sipped his smoothie. “I won’t tell Peg.”
/> “So what’s the plan?”
Bolan looked at Rind. “And?”
Rind grinned. “Recently the Handyman has been quiet. Too quiet. Operations of his that Interpol, the DEA and Indonesian law enforcement have been monitoring have literally dried up. He’s been flying under the radar, having himself implanted with radio tracking devices and God only knows what else.”
Koa stretched and sighed. “We were talking religion and syncretism. You got anything along that line?”
“A few newspaper articles, but they’re mostly hearsay. Last year there was an imam in town who stirred up some controversy.”
Bolan’s instincts spoke to him. “Controversy how?”
“Oh, he was calling down the usual fire and brimstone, but he pissed off the local imams.”
“He wasn’t local?” Bolan asked.
“No, they denounced him for being an upstart American who had never been to Mecca.”
“But he said that he wasn’t an American.”
“He said he was Hawaiian,” Koa concluded. “And that was different.”
“On the nose,” Rind confirmed. He shook his head at the hacked Indonesian police report Kurtzman had translated and provided. “And two of the imams who denounced him were found dead in an indescribable condition.”
Bolan and Koa spoke in unison. “Bundled.”
“Yeah. The report I’m reading doesn’t actually describe it, but you can tell they were appalled—and this is the Jakarta authorities. It takes a lot to appall them.”
“Do we have a name on the Hawaiian imam?”
“The handle we have is Musa Jalaluddin.”
Bolan wasn’t surprised. It was almost certainly a name the man had chosen for himself upon conversion or it was given to him by his religious instructor. Musa was Arabic for “Moses” and Moses had delivered his children from the pharaoh.
It stank real hard of a hardcore liberation theology.
“We have a picture of this guy?”
Rind handed over his tablet.
The photo wasn’t good. It was a grainy black-and-white taken from a local Indonesian newspaper, but it was enough to put a frown on Bolan’s face.
Musa Jalaluddin looked to be in his mid-fifties. He wore a traditional Muslim tunic with a shawl. His mighty frame stretched the fabric in ring-ready, or more likely, bundling-ready hypertrophy. He had a Ten Commandments’ worthy beard that curled down past his clavicles and hair that rioted down across his shoulders in unruly locks. Jalaluddin glared into the camera and pointed his finger in condemnation. His eyes radiated God’s fury at the unbeliever, or more than likely, his own rage that he adorned with God’s name.
Musa Jalaluddin looked as though he could walk into Melika’s bar and take out Uncle Aikane, Nui and the Lua master with his bare hands and then work Tino like an after-dinner mint. When it came to disassembling people with his bare hands, Bolan had a very intriguing candy store of useful flavors, but he was not a martial artist; and he had a very bad feeling that if they fought hand-to-hand, Musa the radicalized Hawaiian prophet wasn’t going to fall for any of them. “Have we got a given Hawaiian name and a social security number on this guy?”
Rind rolled his eyes. “We got nothing. He’s a mystery. My best guess is he was born up in the hills or back streets of the Hawaiian Islands and took some real dark turns a long time ago.”
Bolan sent the files to his phone. “We have the Handyman’s tracking device, and I suspect he’s a major part of whatever is going on. We need to get back to Hawaii and take care of our people.”
Belle came out of the kitchen with smoothies for Rind and Koa. The Hawaiian warrior took a healthy slug. “And the bad guys looming on every Pacific Island from Catalina to Kamchatka?”
“They don’t know Handi is dead. We take the RFID with us and see who comes calling.”
“You don’t think that could screw up what we have going on undercover in Oahu?”
“It could screw it up huge. You got a better idea?”
Koa poured back his smoothie. “No, unfortunately I don’t.”
“Rind?”
“This is epic!”
“Rind is with us,” Bolan concluded. “Belle?”
Belle gave Bolan a smoky-eyed look. “I am in this for the duration.”
“That’s my girl.”
Belle smirked.
Koa shook his head. “I can’t wait to see you explain your new girl to Melika.”
Honolulu safehouse
“What in the blue hell, Makaha!” Melika looked ready to beat the tar out of just about everybody. “You brought some Norwegian porn star back from your sex tour in Subic Bay?”
Belle lit herself a Kretek cigarette and regarded the Hawaiian spitfire coolly. “Swedish.”
“Whatever!” Melika suddenly stabbed out her finger. “And no smoking!”
Belle erotically blew a smoke ring, a second and a third, and then blew a perfect stream of blue smoke through the concentric circles. Melika cracked her knuckles. “And what about this gangsta trash you dragged in with her?”
De Jong looked hurt. Marwin sighed the sigh of big men in female situations where size didn’t matter.
Bolan spoke quietly. “Melika, we’re very tired. It’s been a long seventy-two hours. We’ve been fighting and flying nonstop. Some of us are messed up. Please, help my friends.”
Melika’s eyes narrowed but she automatically went into Hawaiian hostess mode. “We’ll discuss what you owe me later. I’ll go cook.”
“Thank you.”
The team took seats around the dining table. Peg had been quiet, and she waited as Melika left the room. “It’s getting spooky around here. We have strangers in the neighborhood.”
“What kinds of strangers?” Bolan asked.
“Dunno, big guys. Showing up at the bar, buying drinks. Going into stores. Holding down tables in the local restaurants.”
“They asking questions?”
“No, that’s the creepy thing. They just show up, observe and disappear. Of course Melika and I are supposed to be off on a romantic weekend with you and Koa, so we were lying low and couldn’t do any serious digging for intel, but the locals are nervous, uptight and scared.”
Koa echoed Bolan’s thoughts. “Whatever is going down is going down soon.”
“No one has any clue who I am,” Rind ventured. “I could go out and—”
“You would be bundled in seconds,” Koa suggested.
“I could,” Marwin announced. The entire team looked at the massive Filipino. He’d changed into a blue 3XL Primo beer tank top, a pair of cargo shorts that could have doubled as khaki theater curtains and sandals. Marwin threw a Hawaiian-worthy shrug. “I could just be a big fat guy looking for my cousins who called me.” He looked at Bolan and Koa. “I could be looking for you, because you called me, and then they bring me in. That would give us a lot of the lower-level players if we pull our stakeout right.”
De Jong pumped his fists. “My man Marwin!”
Marwin did genuinely look as though he belonged in Happy Valley. Bolan turned to Koa. “Koa?”
The Hawaiian soldier shrugged. “It’s not bad. It could work. The bigger and fatter you are around here the more respect you get.”
Marwin looked hurt. “I have a glandular condition.”
Bolan decided. “We’re going to insert you as if you just got off a plane. Go to Melika’s bar and start asking around.”
Marwin smiled for the first time since Bolan had known him. “I’m in.”
De Jong took the RFID out of his pocket. “What about the tracking device?”
Bolan nodded at it. “When I checked it on the plane it was still active.” The soldier pointed his phone at the blood-caked device and hit an app. “And it still is.”
“So they know we’re here.”
“They know the device and possibly the Handyman are at this location. As for ‘we,’ they have no clue.”
Rind grinned. “So we are going to see who comes calling. We going to track the trackers or lay an ambush?”
“Maybe a little of both. The problem is Koa and our dates have to get back to Happy Valley stat. I’m surprised the phone hasn’t rung already. So I think the first thing to do is to establish whether we’re being tracked in Hawaii and then run the trackers around for a little while. You think you can manage that, Special Agent?”
“I’ve been on both ends of a wild-goose chase, Cooper.”
“Good, take De Jong with you for backup.”
De Jong clapped his hands happily. “Cool! I can’t— Wait a minute!” The gangster suddenly got suspicious. “What about Belle?”
“Yes.” Belle stubbed out her cigarette. “What about me?”
“Well, it’s like you say, no one ever expects you. We’re bringing you in but just short of Happy Valley.”
“So I’m your secret weapon?”
“I prefer to say unexpected bombshell.”
“You say the sweetest things…”
Happy Valley
Bolan rolled the Land Cruiser to a stop outside Melika’s Place and his undercover team unloaded. It was late, and the soldier didn’t have to feign exhaustion from an exciting weekend but he did put a smile on his face and fired off a belly laugh as he jumped out of the 4 x 4. Melika spooned against him as though she had been doing it all her life. Koa and Hu went into happy couple mode. Bolan slung his duffel bag and the team entered the bar.
Court was in session.
Uncle Aikane and Uncle Nui sat in state one booth forward from the corner. Bolan made it a baker’s dozen of Hawaiian hardcases at the bar and at tables. Tino stood behind the bar.
The corner booth caught Bolan’s attention. Melika’s Place wasn’t exactly well lit, but the light over the corner booth was out. It formed a pool of blackness in the back of the bar. Enfolded in that darkness, Bolan could barely make out the shape of a very large man. The thin man stood in a pool of light beside him like an adjutant. Uncle Aikane spoke quietly. “Koa, Makaha, Melika.” He gave Hu a nod. “Little One.” He turned his attention back to his fellow Hawaiian. “How was your weekend, Koa?”
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