Читать книгу: «Blood Tide»

1

Malay Archipelago

The killers were coming. Their outrigger canoes slid through the water beneath the starless, storm-warning-black South Pacific sky, knifing through whitecaps toward the yacht.

Mack Bolan touched his throat mike. “Contact.”

“Striker!” Barbara Price’s voice was urgent in Bolan’s earpiece. The mission controller back in Virginia was clearly unhappy. “Twenty-two minutes until satellite window! We do not have visual! Repeat! We do not have you!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bolan said.

The enemy showed up clearly in tones of green and gray in the Executioner’s night-vision goggles. They were half naked, wearing turbans and sarongs and festooned with weapons.

“They have us.”

“Striker, be advised strategic withdrawal recommended.”

The premonsoon winds moaned through the rigging of Bolan’s yacht. The craft lay anchored thirty yards from the beach. The tiny atoll was little more than a crescent of palm trees jutting a few feet above sea level. The canoes aimed for the mouth of the lagoon to cut off the yacht from the open ocean. The paddlers did not need night-vision equipment to acquire their target. The yacht’s dim deck lights marked it as a pool of radiance in the velvet dark of the shallow harbor.

Bolan checked the loads in his weapon system as the jaws of the trap closed. He was a sitting duck.

And that was just the way the Executioner wanted it.

“Noted, Control. Standby,” he whispered.

The killers would be in boarding range in less than a minute.

Across the galley Bolan’s wife checked her weapon.

Marcie “The Mouse” Mei was barely five feet tall, and the mass of highly modified, blackened steel and plastic she was toting appeared impossibly large in her tiny hands. She manipulated the weapon’s controls with practiced ease. If an Olympic gymnast and a pixie had spawned a warchild in the Philippines, Marcie Mei would be it. Only her snub nose and generous mouth showed beneath her night-vision goggles.

The CIA field agent’s big smile flashed at Bolan in the dark of the hold. “Platoon strength,” she said as she flicked off the safeties on her weapon system. “Closing fast.”

“Roger that.” Bolan spoke low. “Scott?”

Escotto Clellande nodded from the other side of the cabin. In comparison, the M-4 carbine looked like a toy in the hulking ex-Philippine special operation commando’s hands. “Yeah, I make it about forty hostiles. Heavily armed.” Scott grunted to himself with relief. “No support weapons visible.”

Bolan was silently relieved, as well. The yacht was not a normal pleasure craft by any stretch of the imagination, but RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers were the ocean-borne artillery of choice in the South Pacific. A few broadsides of antiarmor rockets with shaped-charge warheads would burn the old girl down to the waterline.

Scott grimaced as the killers closed in. “Whole lotta cutlery, though.”

Bolan nodded. Pirates the world over had an anachronistic love of edged weapons.

Piracy in the South Pacific had recently taken a very ugly turn. Boats had been found adrift from the Sulu to the Andaman Sea. Everything from private yachts to cargo vessels had been taken. The ships were stripped of their cargo and any valuables, and the passengers, whether professional seamen or sport fisherman out for a trophy, were ritually butchered to the last man, woman and child. The stripped hulks were left to drift like floating slaughter yards.

Mack Bolan was sailing the South Pacific in a million-dollar yacht off the Philippines. To all appearances he was a rich westerner with a native wife, asking in every port of call for private coves and beautiful, secluded spots off the beaten path.

The atoll where they lay anchored had no name. It was picture-postcard beautiful, well off the beaten path, very secluded, and Bolan, Mei and the yacht made for a very tempting target.

Someone had just taken the bait.

Clellande was posing as their hired crewman and cook. He was an able sailor, and Bolan would have wanted him along for his culinary skills alone, not withstanding his skills as a Special Forces operator.

The pair was on loan from the CIA station in Manila. Clellande peered at the incoming enemy. “They’re slowing down.”

“Jesus…” Mei’s ever-present smile went down in wattage. “They’re slinging their rifles.”

“And out comes the cutlery.” Bolan watched as a platoon of pirates drew razor-sharp kris daggers, parangs, and bolo knives. Elaborate curved, razor-sharp steel of every description flashed and glittered in the Executioner’s night vision.

The men in the canoes were bent on slaughter.

Bolan clicked the seven-inch, saw-toothed blade of his bayonet onto the muzzle of his carbine. “Control, high-level of probability that targets are prime.”

“Affirmative, Striker. Choppers are in the air. ETA twenty minutes.”

Bolan signaled his team. “I think these are some of the boys we’re looking for. Be ready.”

Mei and Clelland fixed bayonets.

Bolan’s strategy was simple. He had lifted it from British WWII naval tactics. In the battle for the Atlantic, German submarines had initially ruled the waves. The U-boats sank allied shipping with impunity, but U-boats were small and could carry only two dozen torpedoes, and those were reserved for enemy warships and large transports. To engage smaller merchant vessels, the German submarines would surface and use their deck guns. The British had invented the Q-boat in response. They had adapted merchant ships, mounting them with powerful six-inch cannons hidden amidships. When German submarines surfaced, the British sailors had flung open the Q-boat’s trapdoors and blown the exposed U-boats to hell in a floating ambush.

Disguise equaled surprise, and surprise was the most precious weapon in any operator’s arsenal. The yacht didn’t have a pair of six-inch British naval guns hidden beneath the mast, but she did have some very nasty surprises, courtesy of Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz.

Bolan reached down and punched a few keys on the portable computer perched on the galley counter. “Arming countermeasures.” Tiny green LED lights on the black box next to the laptop turned red. Wires snaked from the box throughout the yacht.

The pirates closed to within ten yards.

Bolan lifted his nose and sniffed the air. Mei cocked her head. “You smell that?” she asked.

Bolan did. It was the sweet stench of hashish, and it didn’t bode anything good. He pressed a key on the laptop and hit Enter. “Here we go.”

The hull shook as the two dozen hidden smoke dischargers fired simultaneously in a 360-degree arc around the yacht. They were the same kind of smoke dischargers that tanks and armored vehicles used to screen themselves from enemy fire. Only those on the yacht weren’t loaded with canisters of smoke-emitting hydrogen carbon powder.

They were loaded with military strength CS tear gas.

Bolan and the agents clicked their respirators into place beneath their night-vision goggles as they were instantly shrouded in blossoming clouds of CS.

The pirates shouted in a ragged chorus of surprise and anger. Wooden canoes thudded against the hull of the yacht. A war cry sounded a few feet away from Bolan’s porthole. “Allah Akhbar!”

The killers hurled their voices to the heavens in response to the call.

Bolan hit another key and closed his eyes.

The second ring of dischargers fired.

Twenty-four Magnum ultra-flash stun grenades detonated like a ring of exploding suns around the ship. Each grenade lit off in a two million candlepower flash into the tear-gas streaming eyes of the pirates. At the same instant each grenade blasted out an eardrum-shattering 185 decibels of sound.

“Back to back, stay close,” Bolan ordered Bolan. “I want one or two alive, but don’t risk yourself to do it.”

The Executioner raced up the tiny stairwell and threw open the hatch. Mei followed as Clellande exploded up from the forward hatch.

A dozen pirates blinked, wept and groped their way across the deck of the yacht. Others struggled to clamber aboard in their temporarily deafened and half-blind condition. Thousands of sparks drifted through the thick fog of tear gas, blinking and whirling like drunken fireflies in the stun grenade’s disorienting secondary pyrotechnic effect.

A bare-chested, tattooed pirate stumbled toward Bolan with a bolo knife in each hand. The Executioner squeezed the trigger of his carbine and sent a burst into the killer’s chest. The pirate staggered back a step and let out a blood-curdling scream of rage. He lunged forward blindly, his blades crisscrossing before him in a frantic attempt to fillet his unseen opponent.

Bolan punched a second burst through the killer’s turban and dropped him half headless to the deck. Mei’s and Clellande’s weapons snarled on full-auto on Bolan’s flanks. The range was point-blank, and they wielded their weapons like buzz saws. The pirates stumbled and tottered but did not go down.

More pirates climbed aboard. They lurched through the gas and the dark, guided to their opponents only by the strobing muzzle-flash of Bolan’s and his team’s weapons. Bolan put ten rounds into one of the killers, and only the eleventh shot that transversed the assassin’s spinal cord finally put him down.

“These guys are hopped up out of their minds!” Bolan shouted into his respirator’s microphone. “Go for a head shot!”

A screaming pirate to Bolan’s left dropped his knife and unslung his AK-47. Mei’s M-4 spit fire and hammered the pirate’s head into ruin.

A streamer of fire streaked into the air.

“Flare!” Bolan roared. The team snarled and squinted as a unit. Their light amplifying night vision went whiteout as the incandescent illumination round turned night into day. Bolan ripped away his night-vision goggles, and the respirator came with it. He swung his carbine aft. A second flare trailed up into the night from a canoe full of killers. Bolan aimed the M-203 grenade launcher beneath his carbine and squeezed the trigger. The personal defense round sent a thirty-six pellet swarm of buckshot like a wall of lead sweeping through the canoe.

The damage was done. Bolan and his team had lost the cover of darkness. The Executioner felt the sting in his eyes and the burn of the gas streak down his throat. He had been exposed to CS and worse before and fought on, but now the playing field had been leveled.

It would come down to a question of will.

Bolan inflicted his will. The carbine went hot in his hands as he swept it from target to target. He staggered as a bullet struck the ceramic trauma plate of his armor. Bolan spun and put a 3-round burst through the shooter’s eye socket. The Executioner’s own eyes streamed, and he struggled to breathe as the gas entered his lungs.

Bolan’s carbine slammed open on an empty chamber.

A pirate who couldn’t have been more than sixteen screamed and charged waving an escrima stick. Bolan squinted against the chemical burn engulfing his eyes and decided the young man was POW material. He aimed his empty carbine and thumbed the pressure switch on the forestock. The X26 Taser mounted on his weapon chuffed twice, and the two barbed probes streaked into the young pirate’s chest trailing their conductive wires.

Bolan pressed the switch a second time and held it down. The stun gun crackled as Bolan pumped the five watt shaped pulse into his target at eighteen pulses per second. The force should have dropped the young fighter into the fetal position on the deck.

It did not.

The pirate let out a scream and ripped the bloody, sparking probes from his chest. He gasped and fell shuddering to his knees as he inhaled CS.

Bolan realized he would have to take his prisoner old school style. He rammed the aluminum buttplate of his carbine between the young man’s eyes and dropped him limp to the deck.

Marcie Mei gasped raggedly behind Bolan. “Striker!”

Bolan ducked as a pirate flew past him. The killer’s heavy parang passed inches from Bolan’s temple and sliced splinters from the boom of the mainsail. The blade rang off Bolan’s bayonet as he parried the second blow. The Executioner rammed his shoulder into the pirate’s chest, pinning the killer’s sword arm and shoulder-blocking him against the mast. Bolan shoved his bayonet beneath the pirate’s chin, ramming the razor-sharp steel up. The pirate slid to a sitting position against the mast.

Bolan let his spent carbine fall and slapped leather for the pistols strapped to his thighs.

A pirate came at Bolan wielding a machete overhead like a samurai sword. The Desert Eagle rolled like thunder in Bolan’s hand. The pirate folded as the .50-caliber bullet smashed him down the hatchway.

Clellande’s grenade launcher belched yellow flame as he blasted a 40 mm buckshot round into a canoe off the bow. He moved along the grab rail, his carbine spraying the canoes astern.

Two pirates levered themselves up from the water, pulling themselves up into the push pit with daggers in their teeth. Bolan extended the Beretta 93-R machine pistol in his left hand in a fencer’s lunge. The Beretta snarled as he touched off two 3-round bursts. The first pirate fell back from the stern with his turban unspooling in ribbons of cloth and brain behind him. The second hung tangled in the rail with his throat blasted open.

Bolan spun, the big .50 and the 9 mm rolling in his hands like a gunslinger. The Desert Eagle hammered a howling pirate into the jib, and the machine pistol painted the white canvas with the arterial spray of his target’s life.

The pirates were not acting like pirates. They weren’t cutting their losses and running. They were coming on like feudal Japanese samurai bent on death before dishonor. In the light of the flare, Bolan could make out the fins of sharks churning the dark waters of the lagoon as they feasted upon the dozens of fallen.

Mei knelt before the hatch, half-gagging from the gas as she rammed a fresh magazine into her carbine with streaming, swollen eyes. She held her trigger on full-auto as she swept the pirates off the port side of the deck. Clellande’s weapon snarled in continuous fire as he put thirty rounds into a canoe full of steel-wielding cutthroats.

A pirate erupted out of the water at the bow and heaved himself up into the forward pulpit. Metal flashed and red fiber fluttered from the end as he threw a piece of glittering steel. Bolan and Clelland swung around, their weapons hammering the pirate in ruptured ruins to the black water below.

Bolan dropped to one knee. He struggled to bark out an order through the gas sizzling in his chest. “Hold your fire!”

Mei and Clellande knelt with their weapons ready.

“Scott! Anything off the bow?”

The man hacked and coughed. “Nothing moving! All targets down!”

“Marcie! Port?”

“No…hostiles all down,” she replied, struggling for air.

Bolan scanned to starboard and astern. Nothing moved. He rose to take in the bigger picture as the second flare drifted low toward the water. The wind was dispersing the gas. The yacht was littered with bodies from stem to stern. Head shots at point-blank range were not pretty business. Neither was buckshot raking canoes out of 40 mm tubes. The canoes drifted dead in the water. None of the occupants moved.

Bolan reloaded his pistols. “Marcie, secure the prisoner and get him below before he chokes to death. Scott, let’s clean up the deck and call for extraction. We keep two bodies for forensics, the rest go over the side.”

“Affirmative, Striker, I…” the big man stumbled slightly.

Bolan moved toward the bow. “Scott?”

“Nothing, just a scratch.” Clellande plucked a tuft of red fiber at the collar of his armored vest. “What the hell?”

Clellande went rigid as blood geysered between his fingers. “Jesus!”

Bolan lunged. “Leave it in!”

Clellande was already going into shock, and his first instinct was to get the intruding metal out of his neck. The shard fell to the deck with a clatter as Clellande fell facefirst onto the roof of the cabin.

“I need immediate medevac!” Bolan roared into his radio. “The big man is down!”

“Affirmative, Striker!” Price came back. “Choppers inbound.”

Boland rolled Clellande over. Blood was pouring out of him like a river that had jumped its banks. The soldier applied pressure to the wound. He grimaced as his fingers sank through the gruesome, multiple channels the blade had dug into him. “Marcie! Field dressing!”

“Scott!” Mei raced to help.

Bolan grimly applied pressure while she ripped open a field dressing. Bolan pressed the dressing into the wound, and it instantly bled through. He pressed down as Mei ripped open another. The dressing bled through again. “Give me another!”

“Scott!” Mei screamed as she ripped open another dressing. “Scott!”

Bolan sat back on his heels. Escotto Clellande was gone.

The Executioner stared at the deadly gleaming weapon on the deck. It was a strangely shaped piece of razor-sharp steel. It resembled a hawthorn leaf save that it was six inches long, slitted and had a tail of red fiber to stabilize it in flight.

It was about the ugliest implement the Executioner had ever seen.

He pressed his thumb into his throat mike. “Control, be advised the big man is KIA. Tell command we have a prisoner.” He shook his head bitterly. “We are ready for extraction.”