Council of Kings te-79

by Don Pendleton

  The doors at the loading bay were still open.

  Bolan walked in as if he belonged there. He saw only grunts. This was probably a new shift.

  Inside the storage area he felt again the coolness. The song about the Devil would not leave his head. Without hesitation, Bolan climbed into a forklift and motored down the aisles to the spot where Buddy lay. He checked the serial number of the bag's ID tag and lifted the body onto the pallet of the forklift. Then he motored to the side of the room.

  Bolan worked hidden by the forklift. He unzipped the bag, bracing himself against the stench of putrefaction. Buddy stared up at him from a drained face. His skin was a dull grayish green, cold and sagging. Dried mud clung to his scalp. Bolan wondered about the person welcoming Buddy home.

  They would never understand what was about to happen.

  Bolan forced open the jaws and looked inside. It was an ugly purple-black hole that stank. Nothing.

  He took the knife from his pocket and held it to Buddy's neck where the crude stitches began. Buddy's sightless eyes stared at him, his Mohawk stark on his scalp. Bolan closed Buddy's eyes.

  He sank the knife into the dead throat and pulled. Buddy's eyes popped open.

  Quickly Bolan drew the knife downward to the belly and watched the flesh part along the broken stitches. He separated the flesh and stared in shock.

  Bags of white powder sat gleaming among the gray-pink cavity of Buddy's corpse.

  Bolan broke one open and tasted it. Heroin.

  The vulgarity of it made Bolan sick. In a daze he closed the bag, put it back on the shelf and left.

  For once in his life Bolan was too sickened to think.

  * * *

  Bolan sat in a Saigon bar, trying to get Buddy's face to go away, but wherever he looked he saw it. The bar radio called mockingly from home. The songs would never sound the same for him. He hated them, now and forever.

  Rage was twisting his guts into a knot.

  Three GI's sat on beat-up chairs at a table, crushing beer cans. The ceiling fan crisscrossed them with shadows as they talked at one another of their sexual exploits.

  Bolan drowned out their boasting. He had to consider his options: the local police, who were in the pay of the VC or the smugglers or both; the American Military Police, who could just about tie their shoes and swing a bat and not much else; the Division command; or the CIA. Bolan chose the most powerful people in the country: the CIA.

  He went to the telephone just as two Vietnamese girls entered the room.

  Bolan paused momentarily. They were identical twins, both petite and slender and lovely. He heard a whistle from the GI's and watched the girls ignore the whistle. Bolan telephoned.

  He waited through the clicks and buzzes, and eventually got through to someone named Barker, who proceeded to question Bolan in a bored but probing way. Bolan was vague; Barker was feeling him out to see if he was a crazy.

  Bolan went as far as he would go, then demanded an interview. Barker took down the location and said he would send someone over.

  Bolan hung up and turned around, The GI's stood over the girls who stood mutely at the bar. The girls wanted to leave.

  The tallest of the GI's leaned down and beery centered his red-rimmed eyes on one of the twins.

  "You not like me, baby-san? You understand I want a little tail tonight?" The GI drained his beer and said to the other, "I think I'm seein' double, Frank. Two fuckin' identical pieces of tail. Man oh man."

  "Never liked slant-eyed pussy myself," said Frank, burping.

  "Got no complaints about it myself," said the tall one. "So long as I'm sure it ain't dead." The girls tried to leave, but he grabbed them by their wrists. "Oh, hey, the party's just starting."

  Bolan felt his hands twitch. He'd seen enough. "Let them go," he said, wearily.

  The GI's turned to stare at the big bastard in the sergeant's uniform. Did he want these two women for himself? Conversation stopped; only the radio continued its mocking, something about someone was going to the chapel.

  "Come on, Sarge," said one of the GI's, pulling out cash from his pocket. "They're only slopes."

  Rage ran through Bolan like electricity. His hands snaked apart, one clutching the GI's uniform at the neck, the other drawing back and then lashing him cruelly in the face. The GI dropped his money, his face running with blood, and sank to his knees. His friend held him, tottering and bleeding, and looked up hotly at the big bastard standing over them. "What are you, a Commie or something?"

  The bartender had called the MP's. Now he stood wiping nervously at the bar, half watching. The two GI's were busy trying to lift their friend from the dirty floor before the arrival of the pricks with the hats and bats.

  A Jeep lurched to a stop outside the bar.

  Bolan turned; not the MP's, but a man in sunglasses with a whore. This would be the CIA contact, he guessed.

  They were the only people around here who wore sunglasses at night.

  "You Bolan?" the man called out as he sat lazily in the Jeep. Neon flashed on him in red and blue. "I'm Naiman."

  "Who the hell is she?" asked Bolan, climbing into the back of the Jeep.

  "Don't worry, I'm just dropping her off."

  Bolan looked at Naiman's whore. False eyelashes sat incongruously on her eyelids. She sucked a long cigarette. She probably spoke French. Yeah, she'd lain under a regiment of sweating officers and bureaucrats, first from France, then from America.

  The whore ran her fingers down Naiman's neck as he drove through the streets. He shrugged to shake her off. She was whispering to him, increasing the force of her nails, digging them into his flesh. She wanted him to pick her up the next night. Naiman shook his head, motioning with his eyes to indicate the passenger in the back seat. She left off, insulted, and then said, "You not really a strong man like I said, Jim. You a mama's boy."

  "Sure, sure," said Naiman, pulling the Jeep to a stop in front of a hovel. She got out, holding her snakeskin purse. Bolan could see through the fabric of her shirt that she wore a snakeskin bra to match. "Talk to you soon, Barbra-Ann."

  Bolan climbed into the front seat. "Drive," he said.

  They wheeled through the cool darkness. The time before dawn was the only time offering respite from the dreadful heat and humidity. In the stillness drifted the booming of far-off artillery.

  Saigon slipped past them, a dirty, hunched, downtrodden city.

  Gradually the density of dwellings thinned, and Bolan smelled the dew and the river.

  Naiman pulled the Jeep into a gravel field between the railroad tracks and the river.

  "Who was the guy I spoke to first?" asked Mack.

  "I don't know. I got a call from the secretary. Why?"

  "I don't like it. The fewer people who know about this thing the better."

  "This thing being."

  Bolan told him about the trouble with the coroner, Morgan, and then of cutting open Buddy and finding the bags of raw heroin. A transport plane roared overhead as they talked, wing lights streaking in the darkness.

  Another load of dead would be vibrating in its belly.

  Naiman sighed, considering. He saw ramifications.

  "You're right, Sergeant," he said, turning to look at Bolan. "The CIA has a duty to stop this. I don't know if I, personally, will handle the case..." A crack split the air. Naiman's head blew apart, his forehead exploding in a wet spray that lashed Bolan's face.

  Bolan rolled to the ground, gripping his Colt M16.

  Slugs ripped into the Jeep with a scream of metal.

  Under the Jeep, Bolan watched the tires of the cars as they swung across the gravel toward him, spraying dirt and stones. Someone in the car was raking the Jeep with slugs, but the car's headlights were still not turned on.

  Bolan rolled to the right, coming up with his submachine gun pointing to the car. From his right flank Bolan saw another car, and then they both jerked on their fights.

  Bolan was caught like an animal in the blinding glare.
He rolled again, dodging the killer slugs, and then with a steady stance blew the lights from the car ahead.

  Slugs from the second car chewed the dirt, zipping up toward him. He aimed and took out the driver of the second car. The lights went crazy as the driver jerked the pedal to the floor and smashed into a post.

  Engines roared like hellions in the lonely yard.

  The first car was dark but still spitting slugs.

  Bolan was in darkness now. He ran at the second car, its engine screaming futilely. Bolan veered when the door opened, and a gunman climbed out.

  In the darkness Bolan just made out the chain-link fence before he hit it. He vaulted in time, grunting, clawing for the top.

  Halfway over, fingers clawing through the wires, Bolan felt the fence shaking under the impact of the slugs. The vibrations stung his hands as the gunmen pasted the fence with fire.

  Bolan dropped over and fell behind a stack of steel drums. Slugs cut through the metal.

  Bolan waited for his pursuers to get closer.

  With deep slow breaths he cut the pounding of his blood to a roar, and took aim. He saw that the gunmen wore suits. He selected a face and blew it apart. The second gunman dropped to the ground, bringing up an AR.

  But Bolan had gone.

  Splashes in the river were all that could be heard. The sounds retreated downriver.

  * * *

  Bolan heard voices in the brightness. He woke and jumped up simultaneously, grabbing for his gun even before he knew where he was. The Colt was in his grasp as he blinked, trying to see who to kill. It was only children playing on the riverbank. God, one day a Nam vet was going to jump out of his sleep and kill his own kid before he realized he was no longer in Nam.

  The sun was well above the horizon, the day already hot and oppressive.

  Bolan was coated in sweat as he crouched under a railway bridge. Twenty yards down the riverbank, a cluster of Vietnamese children were throwing rocks into the river. Bolan wiped sweat from his face and thought of the countless stones he had skipped into rivers as a child.

  Some things were universal for children, even in war.

  Pleasure came unexpectedly in this place.

  The children were excitedly picking up stones from the bank, competing for some target that floated just at the surface of the water. Bolan watched as it drifted closer. The stones splashed into the water around it. The children were following it down with the current toward Bolan.

  When it was fifteen yards away, Bolan saw what it was. The corpse floated feet first, puffy and discolored, stripped naked.

  The face was gone, blown away by a slug, but Bolan could tell the body was a Westerner's and not a Vietnamese's. A rock from one of the kids hit the chest with a hollow thump and bounced into the water. The child laughed; another threw up his arms in triumph. The rest went back upriver, throwing at a second body.

  Bolan grabbed the kid by the arm. The kid practically jumped from his skin at the big guy's touch. He looked up in fear. Bolan addressed him in Vietnamese, asked him if he wanted to make some money for his family.

  The kid agreed cautiously. Bolan wrote out a Vietnamese name and an address in Saigon and handed the paper to him, along with some money. The young boy handed back the paper. He was illiterate. Bolan told him the name and address and had him repeat it to him. If he brought the man back with him there would be more money, but he must hurry and he must tell no one.

  The child raced off. His friends were excited more corpses were coming down. Bolan heard another thump.

  The first corpse came closer to shore as it drifted under the bridge.

  Bolan waded in. The corpse passed from sunlight to shadow and its color emerged better: greenish-gray skin, purple on the underside where the blood had settled. Red hair — that would be important. Bolan pulled it into an eddy under the bridge. The face was unrecognizable.

  The second corpse drifted headfirst. Bolan had to chase a buzzard off the face before it would give up its meal. Another head shot. Chestnut hair.

  The third corpse was Vietnamese — shot in the chest, but the face had been hit and was swollen and distorted.

  Naiman didn't come down the river. Bolan waited as the day grew hotter.

  The corpses swirled in the slow eddy, around and around like a kindergarten game. The sun was advancing across the eddy, and they would be well on their way to rotting in a few more hours. Bolan watched them go around and around, bobbing in the heat.

  An hour later the boy returned with a Vietnamese man dressed in a white suit. Bolan gave the boy his money and sent him off.

  "Vu Quoc Thanh. Thanks for coming."

  "What do you want from me, Sergeant Bolan? I cannot help you in your position."

  "What position is that?"

  "You murdered Jim Naiman last night. They know you work for the VC. Every police force and intelligence force is looking for you."

  "Do you really believe that I killed him, Thanh, after the work we have done together?"

  "In this war I can believe anything."

  Bolan motioned to the corpses turning in the eddy.

  "Do you know any of them?"

  The Vietnamese walked over and watched them go around.

  "The Vietnamese I don't know. I think he is a tribesman. Meo, or Laotian."

  "And the others?"

  "We have seen them before. They are the foreigners." Thanh looked back at Bolan, his sunglasses reflecting the river and the sampans. It was a long look. Someone was going to have to kill Thanh very soon.

  Bolan was pushing the bodies out into the current, when he heard Thanh's voice come from the bridge above.

  "You want a reason, Sergeant? History repeats itself. The Council of Kings."

  * * *

  Bolan looked at tiny room through the slatted vent of the locker. The coroners worked at an enamel table in the center of the white-tiled room. He breathed slowly, calmly, so that he remained perfectly still and could not be heard. The place was cool, even in his hiding place. Indeed, it was chilling.

  They unzipped the bag and turned their heads away as the odor escaped.

  Bolan saw a young man's face. The kid was maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, the tendons tightened into a grimace. They pulled the bag off him and began stripping away his tattered fatigues.

  "Jesus Christ," said one of the coroners. "Here I was looking for a bullet wound and he doesn't have any."

  "Bled to death," said Morgan.

  They stripped him naked and dead.

  "I've seen this before," Morgan told the other coroner. "Every time they do one of these pacification programs we get the weirdest sights. This guy was reckoning on slipping it to a slope, okay? But she's the enemy. She gets a tube, or a toilet roll or whatever, and lines it with razor blades. Bob from Nebraska here gives her one in the hut and bang. The way blood pumps into erectile tissue, I'd say he was dead in fifteen seconds."

  The other man was slitting the body open down the belly and letting the guts drop through the well in the table into a sealed bin below. Bolan heard the slick plop as the intestinal matter hit bottom.

  "What are they going to tell this kid's mother?"

  "Maybe they'll give him the Purple Heart."

  They worked, cleaning the cavity and stuffing it with the cotton and formaldehyde. The man across from Morgan broke the silence.

  "Shouldn't we lay low for a while?" he said softly.

  "No problem," Morgan replied. "They're going to put that crazy young sergeant in the slammer for good."

  The odor from the corpse drifted over to Bolan.

  It invaded the locker, filling his nostrils with the stench of putrefaction.

  The coroner brought over a cardboard box and began placing bags of white powder among the cotton in the GI's gut space. Dr. Morgan walked over to his desk and unlocked a drawer. He took out some papers and a pencil.

  "What's the serial number on this one?"

  The other man read the number and Morgan copied it down
.

  "What does Putnam say about all this?" asked Morgan's partner.

  "Don't mention his name again. Especially to any of the others. We're all better off if Putnam's name is kept out of it."

  "I see he's really keeping his nose clean."

  "You could say that. You going to sew that one up"

  "Soon as I finish packing him. Jesus, this guy has enough dope in him to supply New York for a month."

  Morgan finished writing and put the papers back in the drawer and locked it. Then he took off his coat and walked toward the locker. Bolan watched as his face grew nearer.

  "That's not my concern, Mike, my boy," said Morgan, his voice suddenly very near, filling the locker. "Not my concern."

  Bolan's adrenaline started its pounding effect.

  The gun felt good in his hands. Morgan pulled open the locker door and then dropped his coat in horror. The big bastard stepped from the locker, unwrapping his big frame even as he pressed the Colt M16 into Morgan's genital area. Morgan stopped breathing. He stared up into a pair of crazy blue eyes.

  Mike was stitching, unaware of Bolan's presence.

  "You got a lot of balls, running an operation like this, Morgan," Mike said. He pulled a long stitch through the kid's corpse.

  Bolan cut the air with the voice of the guillotine. "Not much longer he hasn't. Drop the knife and get against the wall."

  Mike turned, still holding the thread. Seeing Bolan, he obeyed. Morgan was wide-eyed, sweating and trembling. He tried to edge his genitals away from the gun barrel, but Bolan kept it jammed tight.

  "Who is Putnam?"

  Neither spoke.

  Bolan pulled the hammer back with a resounding click.

  "Tell me who Putnam is."

  Morgan's voice shook. "Putnam is a guy, just a guy who tells me what to do. I don't know who he is."

  "You lie to me again and I fire this thing."

  Morgan stole a glance at Mike, then looked back at the big bastard holding the gun. His lips trembled.

  A knock on the door. Bolan told Morgan to answer.

  "It's me, Jones," said a voice through the door. "You finished yet?" The door swung open. A guard walked in, rifle slung over his shoulder.