“When did you make up your mind?”
“Just now.” The killer picked up the brothers’ fallen, silenced Beretta Tomcats pistols. They were pocket pistols, made bulky by their suppressor tubes. With only seven rounds of woefully underpowered .32 ammo, they weren’t exactly Bolan’s first choice of what to bring to a gunfight. Shushan added to the woe. “Daei and his men are wearing armor. I don’t believe V. is a factor.”
Shushan took the keys and unshackled Bolan. He rubbed his wrists and dropped to one knee beside the prostrate ninja. “Kengo-san.”
Kengo moaned and shuddered in the fetal position on the deck plate. He was experiencing the mother of all bad trips.
Bolan pulled the ninja to his knees and slapped him back down. He picked him up and gave it to him forehand and back. Bolan grabbed Kengo’s face in both hands and stared deeply into his eyes. “Kengo-san?”
Kengo’s eyes rolled, but he muttered and gasped something in Japanese.
“Brother—” Bolan mentally tried to beam every last ounce of his personality into the chemically compromised ninja “—are you in there?”
Kengo’s eyes synchronized, albeit badly, and the ninja regarded Bolan with binocular vision, and something like recognition. “It’s…bad…”
“I know.” Bolan pulled Kengo back to his knees and steadied him. “Can you focus?”
Kengo slammed his hands together in front of him. His fingers began writhing in various intricate configurations as if he was playing cat’s cradle with himself. The ninja grunted with strain and tried to breathe rhythmically.
Shushan sighed. “What is he doing?”
“Hand seals. They help focus internal power.”
Shushan rolled her eye. “Oh…”
Bolan reached into the locker and pulled out the swords. He drew a blade and shoved it between the ninja’s twining hands. “Here, focus on this.” The blade shook in the ninja’s grip. Kengo stared so hard at the steel his eyes crossed. Bolan took up the other sword and rose. “How’s that working for you, brother?”
Kengo hissed through clenched teeth. “Brother, there are spiders…crawling all over my eyes…”
Shushan wrinkled her nose. “Eew.”
The ninja shuddered. His knuckles went white on his sword hilt. “But…I can see past them.”
Bolan pulled Kengo to his feet. “Take one head and we’ll call it good.”
“I will take one head…”
Shushan stared up the hatchway. “There are four of them, five if you count V. They have rifles. We have only two pistols. How do you wish to play it?”
Kengo shook like a leaf in the wind, but his voice was suddenly clear. “You will require a diversion. Go on my signal.” Kengo climbed up into the sail. There was barely room for him and Bolan to crouch out of sight. Kengo slithered over the back of the sail and slid down the slope of the hull. Shushan came up beside Bolan. “What is he—”
Kengo’s voice tore the morning quiet. “Banzai!”
Bolan and Shushan rose, guns leveled. The sub rested on another little island in the Hooghly. Daei, V. and the two Assassins whirled away from a conical, olive-drab casing they had unbolted from cleats on the sub’s outer hull. Karrar was closest. Kengo charged as Karrar snapped up his Russian carbine. Whether it was the honor of the clans, his internal power or the fact he was hopped up out of his mind, Kengo managed to absorb half of Karrar’s magazine on full-auto. Kengo’s sword was a quicksilver flash in the morning sunlight. Karrar’s head flew from his shoulders. The corpse collapsed, and Kengo fell on top of him.
Kengo-san had gotten his head.
Bolan shot the closer Assassin three times in the face and brought the little pistol around on Daei. Shushan carefully walked her shots up the second Assassin’s chest, and her sixth and seventh shots smashed past screaming teeth. Daei got his rifle unslung and shoved it up in front of his face. Sparks flew off the carbine’s magazine and action as the Executioner fired his last four rounds. He leaped the sail as Daei staggered backward with blood all over his face. Bolan tossed the spent pistol and baseball slid down the prow of the sub, whipping his sword overhead as his boots hit mud.
Daei roared and threw his damaged carbine end over end at Bolan like a six-pound tomahawk. The soldier brought his blade into a guard as the revolving rifle hit with all the power of the three-hundred-pound giant behind it. The ninja blade snapped and part of the rifle slammed into Bolan’s numb face in passing. He shook his head to clear it and lunged with the six-inch shard still protruding from his hilt as Daei charged.
The giant accepted a brutal cut along his arm as he vised one hand around Bolan’s throat and slammed the other into his crotch. The soldier’s vision went white. Daei pressed his adversary overhead and gorilla-slammed him into the ground.
Bolan lay in the mud gasping and staring up into the sky like a landed fish.
He still had hold of the shattered sword.
Bolan sat up.
“Now, Mighty One,” Daei said, sneering. “Let us—”
Shushan’s spent pistol clouted Daei in the teeth. He turned as Shushan leaped from the prow of the sub with her legs scissoring in an admirable flying butterfly kick. The giant smashed her lashing feet aside with one huge forearm and sent the woman spinning into the reeds.
Bolan rose. The remaining shard of steel slid out of the broken hilt with a metallic ring and fell into the mud. He held an empty sword hilt in his hand.
Daei exposed his bloody teeth. “Pathetic.”
Bolan gestured the giant in. Daei took a step forward and nearly stumbled.
Kengo’s hand grasped Daei’s ankle. The giant shook his leg and nearly slid in the mud. Bolan lunged in. He drove the butt of the sword hilt into Daei’s temple. The giant groaned and dropped to one knee. Bolan whipped the hilt over his opponent’s head and heaved the handle back against the giant’s throat. Daei tore at the soldier’s arms and wrists, but his sausage-like fingers slid on muck and sweat. Bolan heaved back with all of his might. Wood, silk and skin crackled in his hands. Daei’s cartilage crackled beneath the pressure. Bolan roared and gave the sword hilt a final heave.
Gholam Daei’s trachea popped and broke.
The Executioner released the giant as he fell forward, gargling chunks of his larynx. Daei kicked and clutched at his throat as his face purpled. Kengo’s hand still held the giant’s leg in a death grip.
A rumal snaked around Bolan’s throat. The soldier felt himself yanked backward, and his vision went white as a knee viciously blasted into his right kidney. The soldier tried to spin, but his opponent moved behind him like a perfectly synchronized dance partner. A second kidney blow stopped the strangulation spiral and dropped Bolan to his knees. He saw Shushan lying face up, staring sightlessly into the sky. The livid mark of the rumal encircled her throat. She had been silently strangled while Bolan and Kengo had brought down the giant. The rumal cinched tight for the kill. V. was no longer wearing a sling and he had somehow regained the use of his missing hand.
“My name is Sreenath Tendulkar,” Bolan’s strangler announced. “You killed my brother Harbajan.” Bolan tasted copper behind teeth as Sreenath gave him another brutal knee. “You cut off my brother V.’s hand at the wrist. Surely you noticed they were twins. But it seems you were not aware we were triplets.”
The Thuggee put his knee between Bolan’s shoulder blades to pin him in place. “You are a fool, and you have failed in the mission. Kolkata, Kali’s city, shall be Kali’s burning ground. But I want you to die knowing that you are blessed, because you are truly a fit sacrifice for Kali. You will know the bliss of—” Sreenath ceased his monologue as he sensed something was wrong. He drew back to give Bolan another knee. Despite the agony trying to lock his body like tetanus, Bolan managed to twist aside from the blow and rise from his knees.
The Executioner had fought Thuggees before.
The Farm and the Future Warrior Project had come up with direct countermeasures for them. The most important thing in fig
hting Thuggees was the fact that they liked to strangle people. Bolan wore what looked like a common, turtle-necked raid suit, except that the collar wasn’t made of cotton or wool. Carbon was a very interesting fiber. You could make it do all sorts of things. Two of the more relevant things you could make it do were to expand or contract on command. Bolan’s collar was a very primitive example of a carbon fiber matrix. It didn’t require electrical or chemical stimulation to function. It was stunningly simple. In effect the collar was a reverse Chinese finger trap. The harder you squeezed the collar, the more the carbon fiber material expanded and bulged back.
Bolan could still breathe with effort and blood was still more or less flowing to his brain. He twisted in the grip of the rumal as cotton strangling cord fought carbon fiber matrix and failed.
Sreenath screamed at what he saw in Bolan’s eyes and released the rumal. He staggered back and pulled one of the filleting-thin, drug-delivering blades from a sheath behind his back. Bolan bent with effort and picked Kengo’s sword up out of the mud. The Thuggee crossed his arms in front of his face, screaming in terror.
Bolan took a step forward and ran the Thuggee through.
Sreenath gasped as the Executioner twisted the blade. The Thuggee folded like a boned fish and fell as Bolan yanked the sword free. The soldier undraped the rumal from around his neck and wiped Kengo’s blade clean. Gholam Daei had ceased his thrashing. His face was cyanotic blue from choking to death on his own broken throat. Bolan knelt beside the ninja. He had a half dozen holes in his back from where Karrar’s burst had blown through him. “Kengo-san?”
Kengo whispered from his facedown position. “Cooper-san…” The ninja managed to turn his head Bolan’s way. “We won?”
“We won.”
“Good.” Kengo’s face relaxed into the mud.
There was nothing to be done. Kengo was shot to pieces. “How are you feeling?”
Kengo made a noise that might have been amusement. “The drug is very powerful, yet I found being shot in the chest twelve times was very…bracing. It focused my mind wonderfully on the task at hand.”
“You saved my life, brother.”
“Five opponents, and all you asked of me was one head. Brother, it was the least I could do.”
Bolan brought a hand to his brutalized face. “Tell me this ninja battle mask thing is going to wear off on its own.”
“Brother…you have never looked better.”
Bolan held up the sword. “I have your sword. It will return to Japan.” Kengo’s body relaxed into the mud. His eyes glazed over as he joined his ancestors. Bolan lowered the blade. “So will the story of what you did today.” The soldier glanced up at the sound of a pair of supercharged diesel engines. A cigarette boat whipped around the bend in the Hooghly, throwing up twin rooster tails in its wake. Bolan saw Keller’s hair whipping in the wind behind the wheel. Ous leaned out with an M-14 rifle at the ready. Babar stood in the passenger seat with the tube of an antiarmor rocket leaned on the windshield.
Bolan raised Kengo’s sword.
Keller throttled back and brought the boat to a smooth stop against the reeds. Bolan lowered the blade once more and walked over to the weapon in question. The device was very suspiciously shaped like a 130 mm artillery shell, in very common use by both China and Pakistan. The fuse in the nose had been removed and filled in. Someone had bolted a small control pad–interface onto the side of the weapon’s casing. It appeared to be waterproof and consisted of a keypad, a dial and a digital readout.
Keller and Ous leaped from the boat and swept the little island in opposite directions. Babar had abandoned his anti-tank rocket and taken up a rifle. He beelined for the enhanced radiation weapon lying in the muck.
“This device belongs to the Pakistani military and as her highest ranking officer present I am taking possession of it,” he announced.
“Actually I think it’s Chinese, or a prototype your governments were working on together.” Bolan shrugged wearily. “I never got the full story.”
Babar fingered his rifle and stared at Bolan very steadily. “As agreed, I claim this device.”
“All right, you take the device and load it in the boat. Head down the Hooghly about eighty miles or so and turn right at the Bay of Bengal. Just follow the coastline and sooner or later you’ll hit Karachi.” Babar failed to see the humor. Bolan pointed the tip of his sword at the control panel on the side of the nuclear shell.
The timer on the readout was ticking away.
“Hope you can make it in fifteen minutes or less.”
“Hmm…” Babar scratched his beard. “I see.”
Keller and Ous joined the group. The NCIS agent blinked at the bomb. “Shit.”
Ous looked like he missed his pipe. “Can you diffuse it?”
“Not with what I have on hand.”
Keller checked her watch. “The President is going on in ten minutes. Tell me you have a plan.”
Bolan took a look around the tiny scrap of mud and reeds they stood on. “We load the weapon into the sub, along with all the bodies, sail it into the middle of the river and scuttle it.”
Keller blinked. “You mean, we let the bomb go off. Right here where the bad guys wanted it to go off.”
“It’s an enhanced radiation weapon.”
“A what?”
“A neutron bomb. Three feet of water will stop the radiation wave. We’re going to submerge it two hundred feet below the surface. I don’t know what the Chinese and Pakistani engineers are packing, but the whole point of a neutron bomb is to have a small explosion. U.S. weapons are five kilotons tops. You figure a five-kiloton blast, two hundred to three hundred feet down? People on the river will report an anomalous tidal surge. If anyone is looking in this direction when it goes off, there may be reports of one hell of a water spout.”
“That’s it? No mushroom cloud? No radioactive fallout?”
Bolan ran what he knew about enhanced radiation weapons with what he knew about the Hooghly. “The surviving metallic bits of the sub will give off potentially lethal secondary radiation. There won’t be much of it. The Hooghly has a significant tidal bore that’ll disperse it. The secondary radiation fizzles out in about twenty-four hours.”
Keller turned to Babar and raised a questioning eyebrow. “It’s your bomb, Subedar.”
Babar looked at the weapon with the sadness of a soldier whose country was still in a nuclear arms race. “Do it.”
“FIRE IN THE HOLE.” Bolan pressed the firing button on the Indian army, Israeli-manufacture rocket launcher. The 82 mm rocket hissed across the rippling waters of the Hooghly and detonated against the prow of the minisub. Bolan lowered the smoking empty rocket tube. “Time.”
Keller looked at her watch. “Three minutes.”
All of the bodies, weapons and evidence lay in a soup of gore in the minisub’s hold. They formed a nest for the bomb in the sub’s belly. The sub tipped as it began to take on water. If it didn’t sink on its own within the next two minutes, Bolan was going to have to climb inside and pilot it to the bottom. He watched the Hooghly push the stricken sub downstream. “Time.”
“Two minutes.”
The sub sank with agonizing slowness. After an eternity, the edge of the sail dipped into the water and the Hooghly began spilling down through the open hatch and filling the sub in earnest. “Time.”
“One minute ten…nine…eight…seven…”
The sub stood on its nose and slid beneath the dark waters of the Hooghly. Bolan rapped the rail with his knuckles. “Go.”
“Thank God.” Keller shoved the cigarette boat’s throttles forward, and the craft lunged forward like a racehorse out of the gate. Bolan, Ous and Babar looked back as the boat streaked southward. They slewed through an S-curve, and the minisub’s death descent was hidden from view.
“A shame,” Ous said. “I liked Kengo. He was a mighty warrior.”
“He was.”
Babar gave Bolan a guilty look. “I am sorry about the weap
on, but my nation—”
“And my nation are allies, though our national interests won’t always be the same.” Bolan stuck out his hand. “I’ve been proud to serve alongside you.”
Babar actually managed to blush through the beard and scar tissue that took up most of his face. “Oh, well…” He shook Bolan’s hand.
Keller throttled back the engines. “Ten…nine…eight…seven…”
Several thousand yards behind them a column of white water rose nearly a hundred feet into the air like a rocket. The spout reached its apex and hung suspended for a heartbeat like some wizard’s magical tower. The swirling white tower disintegrated as gravity pulled it back down and pulled it apart.
“Keller, we want to stay ahead of that,” Bolan advised.
“My people have secured a safehouse for me in Diamond Harbour,” Babar suggested. “I hear it is quite lovely, and just fifty kilometers downstream.”
“Don’t have to ask me twice.” Agent Keller rammed the throttles forward once more. She clearly enjoyed putting the speedboat through its paces. Bolan sat in the cockpit with her.
Keller looked at his grim visage and sighed. “Cheer up, we won.”
“I’ve fought Ismaili Assassins and Thuggees before. Ismailis always have a supreme leader. Thuggees always have a high priest. Daei and V. Tendulkar were field generals. We still have a problem.”
“We still have a President, Kolkata is still lovely this time of year, and in forty minutes or less I guarantee I will have you in Diamond Harbour sitting on a veranda with a cold beer in your hand. We won today, didn’t we? Tell me we won. I’ll even throw in a back rub.”
The way the morning had started, a back rub, a beer and a veranda in Diamond Harbour sounded one hell of a lot like victory. “Yeah.” Bolan closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. “Today we won.”
ISBN: 978-1-4592-8234-6
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Charles Rogers for his contribution to this work.
ASSASSIN’S CODE
Copyright © 2011 by Worldwide Library
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.
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