Bolan nearly smiled at the compliment. “I’ve had a week.”
Yaqoob blinked.
“But my sifu was Ming Jinrong, master of the Lost Track style.”
Yaqoob’s eyes narrowed to slits. The fallen Red League smuggler of Macao was clearly well-known to Chinese intelligence. The agent raised his weapon high over head and dropped into a low stance. “Then show me what the sodomite has taught you.”
Bolan turned and ran.
Yaqoob shouted in outraged Mandarin. Bolan scooped his sling from the sand without breaking stride. He knew he couldn’t go hand-to-hand against ten years of Shaolin Monk’s Spade tutelage. Bolan needed distance.
And a rock.
The Executioner opened his stride. Three days in the hold hadn’t done him any favors, but for decades every day that he had not been on a mission he had run a 10 k, and run it for top speed. For a man who operated alone, outmarching and outrunning the enemy was a key skill. Bolan forgot his wound and his exhaustion and ran all out. He needed distance and a few free moments to stack the deck in his favor.
Bolan checked and saw Yaqoob following him through the trees at an easy jog. He judged that a mistake. The Chinese agent should have made every effort to run down his opponent and kill him blade to blade. Then, again, Yaqoob had blocked a sling stone in midflight. His confidence was based on ability.
Bolan burst out of the trees and found himself on the other end of the island. The golden strip of beach sloped down toward the achingly blue water. It was postcard perfect and unblemished by anything even remotely resembling a rock. Bolan jogged down the beach scanning for a projectile. A handful of pebbles would suffice as a distraction, but all Bolan saw was a black patch a hundred yards ahead.
Someone had made a fire.
The small black hole was filled with dead embers, and the bones of a decent-sized fish with the blackened stick it had been spitted on still thrust through it. Bolan dropped to his heels and considered his find. Four empty, green Bintang pilsner beer bottles lay in the sand, their labels faded with age and peeling in the sun. Bolan picked up a bottle and considered the ballistics of the equation.
Modifications would have to be made.
He drew his sword and wedged the hilt firmly between his feet as he squatted over the blade. Bolan took the bottle by the neck and carefully cracked it across the edge. He grimaced as the bottle broke and collapsed into shards. He took up a second bottle and tried again, but the bottle broke apart leaving him nothing but the neck between his fingers.
“Hey!” Yaqoob called jovially from down the beach.
Bolan took aim and snapped the third bottle against his sword blade. He tossed away the neck and picked up the fallen piece. He held a jagged glass cup about two and half inches tall and two inches in diameter.
Yaqoob strode down the beach with his Spade resting jauntily across his shoulders. He was sixty yards and closing. “What are you doing?”
Bolan ignored the approach of his assassin and filled the broken bottle with sand. With such an ungainly projectile, he figured the release was going to be problematic. He would have to get to point-blank. The filling was another problem. He was bound to get spin and the force would fling the sand out.
“What do you have there?” Yaqoob called out. He took his Spade in both hands at fifty yards.
Bolan hunched to hide what he was doing. He took his canteen out of his bag and began pouring his water slowly into the broken bottle. The hot sand drank up the liquid quickly, but he stopped before the sand turned to slop. Bolan gulped the remaining water and tossed away the canteen.
“Did you find a rock?” Yaqoob was thirty yards away.
Bolan tamped down the damp sand with his thumb.
Yaqoob closed to twenty yards. “What is it you think you are doing?”
Bolan took his sword from between his feet and stabbed it point-first into the sand. He placed the broken bottle in the pouch of his sling and wrapped his left hand around it. The Executioner rose and began walking toward his assailant.
At fifteen yards, Yaqoob brought up his Spade at midguard like a bayonet fighter. Bolan drew the cords of his sling tight at ten yards. Yaqoob’s hooded eyes regarded Bolan frostily over the edge of his blade.
“You should have taken the deal.”
Bolan raised his sling for the cast at five.
Yaqoob spit. “You only have one sh—”
Bolan slung at three yards. He did not engage in a windup. The pouched sling blurred behind him and back up in a ripping, uppercut of a cast at Yaqoob’s head. Green glass flashed in the sun. The unbalanced projectile took spin and flew slightly off course as Bolan had thought it might. Yaqoob finished Bolan’s job as he’d hoped. Instead of dodging, the agent instinctively whipped his weapon up to block Bolan’s shot. He caught it on edge, and half of the projectile splattered against the blade of his Spade. The other half exploded into a cloud of wet sand and shattered glass that expanded into the left side of Yaqoob’s face at 100 miles per hour.
Bolan leaped back as Yaqoob screamed and whipped his Spade in a defensive figure-eight pattern. The Executioner ran back and picked up his sword. Yaqoob had ceased his swinging. Bolan surveyed the damage as he came forward. Yaqoob’s left eye was gone. The left side of his face was a hideous, wet mosaic of broken glass and blood set in sand. His right eye squinted and blinked as it teared over.
Bolan began circling to Yaqoob’s left.
The Executioner had to jump as the crescent blade scythed around to hamstring him. He landed and jumped a few feet away.
Yaqoob was far from done.
“You are going to be a long time dying…” the agent snarled. “You will—”
Bolan attacked without warning. The sword-and-Spade clash rang across the beach. The Executioner aimed his blows toward Yaqoob’s blind side, but the Chinese agent parried them with ease. “I am going to gouge out both your eyes,” Yaqoob announced as they crossed blades. “And fill the sockets with—”
Bolan snapped the hilt of his sword as Ming had taught him. Under Ming’s watchful eye, he had practiced snapping out the red silk ribbon five hundred times each morning of training. Bolan could reliably crack a dozen eggs with a dozen snaps.
The weighted tips of the ribbons snapped directly into Yaqoob’s remaining eye.
Yaqoob let out a high thin scream. The agent was a man who could fight by feel, and even blind he was still dangerous. Bolan slammed his sword against Yaqoob’s Spade and then ripped his blade down the wooden shaft.
Wood shaved away, and the fingers of Yaqoob’s right hand were sliced to the bone.
The agent struggled to control his weapon one-handed.
Bolan stepped in and pushed the iron ring pommel of his sword under Yaqoob’s jaw. Yaqoob went up on his toes with the force of the blow. Bolan swung the sword back down with all his might, and the dadao cleaved Yaqoob’s collarbone and grated to a halt.
Bolan let go of his sword and yanked the Monk’s Spade from Yaqoob’s hand as the man fell back in a heap. His mouth worked, and the pulverized orbs in his eye sockets gaped up blindly.
“You have any information for me?” Bolan asked.
“Or…what?” Yaqoob gasped.
“Or nothing,” Bolan answered, “but I’ll put you down easy if you want.”
Blood spilled over Yaqoob’s lips. “We have…a second agent.”
Bolan dropped to one knee. “Who is he?”
“The…lepers.”
“Lepers?” Bolan frowned. “Your fellow agent?”
Yaqoob’s head fell to one side as his body relaxed into the sand.
Bolan frowned. A second Chinese infiltrator and lepers. Or a leper agent. That was interesting. Bolan pulled his sword from the dead man’s corpse and retrieved his sling. He walked back across the island, stopping by the bodies of Al’alim and Guadaloupe and to gather their weapons. Bolan retraced his steps to the opposite shore. The shrimper still lay at anchor.
Fass, Hoja and six of the pirat
es stood on the beach with rifles in their hands.
Bolan threw his captured steel in a pile at the woman’s feet.
He retained his sword.
Fass smiled at Bolan. The curve of her lips was predatory.
11
It was quite a party. Although they prohibited the imbibing of alcohol, this sect in the South Seas had no issue with smoking hemp. Water pipes gurgled while happily hopped up pirates inhaled huge quantities of spit-roasted goat. A second boat had come to meet them on the island, and they had brought portable stereos and prostitutes.
The faithful were being rewarded.
Stereos blasted Indonesian pop music and extended-disco versions of Pakistani music and the men danced with abandon. The prostitutes were wide-eyed with fear as they danced with the pirates, flinching as men fired their automatic rifles into the air in celebration.
“Makeen!” Someone shoved a pipe into Bolan’s hand. The Executioner made a show of accepting the offering but did not need to feign smoking it as the stone man simply clapped Bolan on the shoulder happily and tottered off toward a woman.
Bolan watched the celebrations. His single-handed defeat of four men in trial by combat had been taken as a sign of great good luck. The Executioner sat back and gnawed on perfectly barbecued haunch of goat. The meat had been rubbed with cumin and basted with clarified butter until it was practically falling off the bone.
“Makeen.” A hand draped across Bolan’s shoulder. “You do not smoke deep, nor do you dance. Why?”
Bolan glanced up at Fass. She wore a blue button-down man’s shirt that was four sizes too large. The billowing cotton clung to her curves in the breeze coming off the sea. He swallowed his food. “You know why.”
She raised an eyebrow in challenge. “Oh?”
Bolan tossed away the naked bone and gave her his most roguish smile. “I was waiting for you.”
Her thick lashes drooped at him as the corners of her lips turned upward. “That is a good reason.”
Fass took his hand. She quickly led him away from the light of the fires. They walked silently through the palms to a small grotto. A pair of blankets was laid out near a palm. Fass hesitated and stepped back from Bolan as if she had suddenly become aware of what she was doing. She leaned against the trunk as Bolan came to her.
“Makeen, I do not—”
Bolan kissed her. The tensed muscles in her arms and shoulders melted as her lips opened beneath his. He took the collar of her shirt and pulled her up to him. She gasped as he yanked his hands apart. Cotton tore, and the buttons of her shirt popped in a line. He leaned back slightly, examining her naked body by the starlight as his hands ran over her flesh. He felt the lean flatness of her stomach and the rails of her ribs. Her breasts filled his hands, their startling size, torpedo shape and almost hostile firmness and defiance of gravity revealing them to be a product of science rather than nature. His hands went back to her hips and pulled them against his. Her hands yanked and pulled at the button and fly of his shorts.
Her voice moaned low in his ear as he kissed her throat and lowered her to the blankets.
THE WOMAN’S ARM DRIFTED across Bolan’s chest in sleep. Bolan’s hand closed around the hilt of his sword as his eyes slitted open. He suddenly sensed they were not alone.
“You will not need that,” a strange voice said.
Bolan looked up. Hoja and four of his pirates flanked a six-foot-tall, rail-thin Asian man. He wore a small red turban, and a wispy mustache and beard attempted to fill out a face like a hatchet. Every exposed muscle and tendon in his body stood out in high relief. Bolan thought he looked like a bodybuilder who had spent six months in a death camp. A Tokarev pistol was holstered on his right hip. A double-pointed, curved Indonesian sword hung from his left. A hand ax was thrust through the front of his belt. Bolan had not seen the man at the previous evening’s festivities, and highly doubted he ever engaged in such things.
The man radiated command authority.
“I am Jusuf.” He gazed down at Bolan in open suspicion. “You will come with me.”
Bolan rolled out of the blankets and pulled on his shorts. One of Hoja’s men picked up Bolan’s sword. The captain knelt by Fass’s side, and the two of them began speaking in low voices.
She was being obviously debriefed.
Bolan thought about the night they’d spent together, their pillow talk and the many questions she had asked after their love-making. He had given her most of his cover story. He had been sure that his night with Fass had been the opening round of interrogation. If they were going to play good cop-bad cop, she had been a very good cop.
If his story didn’t stand up, Bolan suspected Jusuf would be a very bad cop.
Bolan followed Jusuf while two pirates with fixed bayonets followed him. Jusuf did not speak. They walked to shore and began walking along the beach. They were doing a lap around the island, and Bolan knew that someone else was getting the briefing.
The Executioner enjoyed the sunrise, knowing that it might be his last. They had circled most of the island when they came to a small camp. A small, blue tent stood near the tree line. Outside of it, a Persian carpet had been laid in the sand. A teapot hung from a tripod over a small fire. Bolan’s sword and sling lay on the carpet.
The Executioner came face to face with the Expected One.
The Mahdi was a sparrow of a man. He sat cross-legged on the rug, his stick-thin legs visible beneath his short white robe. A gray shawl covered his narrow shoulders and the top of his shaven head against the morning chill. His skin was the color of saddle leather but was as unlined as a baby’s. His short snow-white beard and mustache were startling against his face. He could have been forty years old or eighty. He could have passed for Asian, Indian, South American or perhaps a little old Swiss man who had spent long years in the equatorial sun. His black eyes were huge, somewhat sunken and stared up at Bolan from beneath his snowy brows with startling intensity.
Bolan had seen such eyes before.
The dark pools of his eyes were warm, all seeing, all encompassing, all understanding. Bolan was reminded somewhat of Rosario Blancanales. The man from Able Team had eyes that could look inside another human being with empathy. He could make you feel like he was the father you wished you’d had. Bolan reflected that Pol was a man who could take a damaged, invaded individual and push them to the right side of the line. He could speak to the weak and hurt, the scarred and jaded, and make them do the right thing.
The Executioner could see immediately that the Mahdi was a man who could look inside another human being and make them do wrong. He was a man who could take the damaged and disadvantaged, the weak and the marginalized, and give their suffering meaning by having them inflict horror on an enemy of his choosing.
Behind him stood a quartet of armed bodyguards. A black man built like a sumo wrestler knelt behind the Mahdi holding a massive, cross-hilted sword ready for the Expected One to draw. The straight, double-edged blade looked like it belonged in the hands of an armored medieval knight rather than a 110-pound holy man.
The Mahdi smiled to reveal a mouth of blazing white teeth. “Greetings, Makeen.”
Bolan smiled back as the force of the man’s personality hit him like a wave.
The Mahdi was a leader, pure and simple, and he had something that Pol could not call upon.
The Mahdi had God on his side.
The Executioner knelt in all humility before his enemy. “Greetings, Imam.”
The Mahdi smiled and waved a hand dismissively for Bolan to rise. “Will you take tea with me?”
His voice had an accent Bolan did not recognize. One of the Mahdi’s servants poured tiny cups of mint tea thickly sweetened with cane sugar. Bolan sat cross-legged on the carpet and took the tea.
“Makeen Boulus.” The little man seemed to savor the sound of the name.
Bolan nodded.
“You are Bosnian?”
Bolan nodded again.
“I understand you are Bektasi
.”
Bolan gazed out into the dawn, his eyes fixing on the middle distance. The Bektasi were a dervish sect, brought to the Balkans by the Turkish Janissary armies in the fifteenth century. They proclaimed themselves part of Sunni Islam, but their doctrines contained aspects of ancient Turkish paganism, Buddhism and had strong elements of Shia Islam and even Christian influences.
The main difference between the Bektasi sect and Orthodox Sunnis was the Becktasi belief that all religions were valid. Some even preached that Christians and Jews were not really infidels. It made them popular among the conquered Balkan Christians, and the sect attracted many of the conquered Christians who chose to convert.
The Bektasis acted as chaplains to the Turkish armies and would fight beside Turkish troops, wielding enormous iron axes inscribed with Koranic verse.
Bolan started quoting from the scripture he had studied for his cover.
The Mahdi smiled beatifically. He ran his fingertips spider-like across the ancient gold inlay in the blade of Bolan’s sword.
“The sword is an heirloom, Imam. A gift to my forebear,” Bolan said as he bowed again. “Always have the eldest sons of my family practiced with the blade.”
“Ah.” The Expected One touched Bolan’s sword again and then his sling. It was obvious the weapons gave him great pleasure. “With the Sling of David, and a sword fit for Goliath, you slew the Philistines among us.”
“The sling I learned as a boy, herding my father’s sheep. There are still wolves in the Balkans.” Bolan bowed once more in humility. “As for the killing of your men, I was given little choice, Imam.”
“Indeed, but now you have a choice, Makeen.”
“To embark upon jihad.” Bolan let out a bitter sigh. “It is a road I have walked before.”
It was not far from the truth. The Executioner’s War Everlasting had been a very personal Holy War of biblical proportions.
The Mahdi tilted his head understandingly. “The war in Bosnia,” he said.
Bolan nodded.
“The war against the Christians and the ethnic cleansing.”
Blood Tide Page 9