Bolan knew where this talk was headed and decided he'd better throw some ice over the emotional sparks right away.
"If Tremain's been here that long, I think you soldiers better take another look at him. And at yourselves. Now, what's it going to be?"
Again, the soldiers and the CIA op hesitated, looked at one another as if each was waiting for another guy to speak up. Bruno Polanski stood first, moved to the center of the hut, crouched on his knees. The others stood, moved in behind Polanski.
For a moment Bolan looked at the eight men in the dim, wavering torchlight. The years of suffering and hardship that had worn them down to skeletons had left few distinctive physical features to separate one man from the others. They all had scars from the whip on their bare backs, arms and chests. Several of them had patches of dead purple skin where they had either been burned deliberately, or shot. Their mistreatment had been the same for all. And they had all better start believing, Bolan thought, that their destiny was the same, too. The bellyaching, the individual crap, had to go. Fast.
In every pair of their eyes Bolan saw something that he was very familiar with. Death. Death's haunting shadow seemed set deep in their gazes, a black pool of terrible memories.
"Don't leave me out of the powwow, Striker," Grimaldi said, bracing an arm against the wall as he tried to stand. Bolan helped him to his feet.
The ten men now formed a ring. And this time when they spoke, they lowered their voices so as not to be overheard.
"Okay," Bolan began. "Give it to me. Everything you can tell me about the march: formations, guard duty, vehicles, weapons, terrain."
"They march us in a close column," Tremain answered. "There's usually a hundred to a hundred and fifty prisoners. Most are Caucasians, but there's a lot of Asians, too, stolen out of Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Vietnam. They chain us together for the duration of the march. Hand and foot."
"Problem number one, Sergeant," Carver announced. "You can't run too far in chains."
"Keys," Bolan shot back. "Who has them?"
"Genghis," Tremain said. "Khang keeps a set for himself and distributes a set to each of six guards. Always six."
"Those guards will be the principal marks," Bolan informed. "Pick them out right away, because they'll be some of the first ones hit. Is the column single or double file?"
"Triple file," Polanski replied.
"Makes sense," Grimaldi chipped in. "Shortens the column. Brings it in tight so that the guards can watch everyone better."
"This year was a good harvest for the big boys," Tremain informed, one side of his mouth twisted in sarcasm. "We're looking at anywhere from fifteen to twenty tons."
"So there're vehicles to carry the bulk of the heroin?" Bolan asked.
"Yeah, and horses and oxen," Jones said. "There's one armoured personnel carrier at the front of the column, the fuckin' spearhead, and one more at the rear. Both rigs have fifty-calibers mounted on the turret. There'll be three, maybe four other transport-type trucks loaded down with scag. And, of course, don't forget the fat cats of the Horn."
"You mean all the members of the Horn will be riding along?" Bolan asked, and he received a hard nod from Ribitowitz. That might work to the prisoners' advantage, Bolan thought. A nice, tight package, all wrapped up in one. Maybe a hostage or two could be seized to help them get clear.
"Most of the fat cats will come along on the big trip," Jones went on. "Mister Clean, too. S'ppose you've already met the big man in the white suit?"
"Torquemandan. Yeah, we've met."
"Right," Jones said. "Well, aside from the transport trucks, there'll also be a jeep with a fifty-caliber mutha' that'll ride along about the middle of the column."
"Okay. We'll have to take the armed vehicles right away to man the guns." Bolan directed his next question to Tremain. "How about guards? How many?"
Tremain shrugged. "Roughly fifty, sixty. They're staggered along the flanks. Most of them, though, will be packed in the rear with Genghis. They'll all carry AK-47s."
"And the routine? How many hours a day do you march? Any meal breaks?"
"You march from just before dawn to maybe three, four hours past sundown," Sellers answered. "One meal a day, if you can call it that. A handful of rice and a cup of water, at night. That's it."
"The terrain?"
"The peninsula's almost all mountains and jungle," Karn said. "No rivers that we've seen. But the monsoon season has just ended, so there'll be water holes, some swampy marshes, a stream running down from the mountains."
"Over the years," Tremain added, "they've made us hack out a trail for the march."
"For every hundred feet of jungle that's been hacked out," Ribitowitz said, "one of us has died doing it."
"And that ain't no bull, Sarge," Jones said, meanfaced, grim.
"Any villages along the way where a rest stop might be ordered?"
"Yeah, there's three," Tremain said. "Small ones. One at the fifty-mile point, another just over the hundred-mile mark, and the last one about thirty miles south of Bangkok. Genghis always orders a stop at all three. He and his hordes are always greeted with open arms by the villagers. They seize whatever food and water is available. I've only seen villagers resist once, and there was another time when a village didn't have anything for Genghis. I say once, because those people who resisted never got the chance to disappoint Genghis again."
'There ain't nothin' left for those folks once we pull out," Jones added bitterly. "Genghis and his punks clean them out like a swarm of locusts."
"And the Mongol usually takes a sampling of the women," Karn said. "When that happens, it means a few hours holdup, you can bank on it."
Bolan's mind was racing. Possibilities were beginning to reveal themselves. Suddenly an escape attempt didn't look as hopeless as these men had thought. There was a good chance at least of making the attempt. Damn right. Bolan vowed to himself right then that there would be a breakout.
"Okay. Now, one very important item," Bolan said. "Somehow we have to get word to the other prisoners. If the ten of us attempt a breakout on our own, there will be confusion and the guards will just start slaughtering everybody."
"I follow ya, man," Jones said. "I tell ya what. For the next few nights before the march, one of us could fall in with the mates at another hut."
"Yeah, right after we break at night," Polanski said, his eyes lighting up. "We could spread the word that way. Then a guy from another hut could move into another bunch the next night. Pass the word on. Or we could all just take turns, maybe two guys a night, each man to a hut."
"It could work," Grimaldi said, his gaze narrowing with determination.
"It's a good plan," Bolan assured. "It'll have to work. Do we have to get a man from the other hut to take the place of whoever leaves here? Do the guards take a head count at night?"
Tremain shook his head. "No. Just a quick look to make sure we're all there, then they separate us into our groups."
"We may have to chance the replacement the first night," Bolan said, "until we can get word to the next group. I think our best bet is to let the breakout rip at one of those villages, probably the second one at the hundred-mile point. The guards will be tired by then, and from the sound of things, hungry for a little R and R. That'll be our chance. Let's think it over. Let me know if you can think of anything else you've forgotten to tell me. Any more breaks in the routine, anything like that. Sleep on it for a couple of hours. We'll work out the finer details in the morning before the guards come and round us up."
"You know, I like it," Bruno Polanski said, his eyes hard with sudden conviction. "I think we can do it."
"You're damn right we can do it," Bolan acknowledged. "We're going to do it. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Agreed?"
Bolan met each man's gaze. He found steel in every pair of eyes that stared back at him. Carver and Tremain nodded. Only Struber looked doubtful to Bolan. The Executioner made a mental note to watch that guy. It would only take one man to screw everything up.
"We're with ya, man," Jones said, "we can..."
Jones broke off abruptly when a sudden scream ripped through the night beyond the hut. Bolan and the circle of men snapped their startled attention toward the doorway.
"No-o-o-o! No-o-o-o! Don't!"
Bolan recognized that voice, even as the words shattered the night, twisting into the scream of a man in terrible agony. A scream of pure terror and pain.
Grimaldi knew the voice, too. "Brennan," he murmured.
"Jesus!" Tremain breathed into the taut silence. "The black room... the poor bastard..."
Again, the bone-chilling shriek for mercy split the night. The cry seemed to linger in the air, envelop the hut as if that doomed soul was hanging just above the roof.
Carver looked pointedly at Grimaldi. "Brennan? Is that the other one that came in with you?"
"Yeah," Bolan answered, tight-lipped, his cold stare riveted on the doorway. "Brennan."
"Who is he?" Sellers wanted to know.
"A pusher. A smart guy who wasn't as smart as he thought he was," Bolan said.
Ribitowitz snorted, seemed to find something amusing in what he heard. "A pusher, huh," he said, acid in his voice. "I hope he gets it good. It'll be just what he deserves."
"When Genghis told you, 'welcome to hell,' friends," Tremain said, "he wasn't just talking to hear himself."
Bolan didn't have to be told that, as he listened to another bloodcurdling scream. He had a gut feeling that the harrowing cries were going to go on all night long. And he had to wonder if a man deserved the fate Ronny Brennan was suffering.
But he knew the answer before he even formed the question.
16
Bolan spotted the pigeons the next morning out in the Held. It didn't take much imagination on his part to size up the camp stoolies, to determine what they'd gained by their betrayal of their fellow inmates. Yeah, Bolan had seen their rotten ilk many times before. They were the kind of human virus that lived, indeed thrived on the host body of others' suffering. Here, though, these rats openly flaunted the privileges they had acquired through their guile and treachery. The physical appearance of the scum was as starkly different from that of the other prisoners as night is from day. They were like a roadside billboard advertising beer on an empty desert highway.
Jones, scraping poppy bulbs beside Bolan, glanced at the Executioner with contempt in his eyes, then jerked a nod at the three rats, who were several rows of plants beyond them. Then, Jones shook his head. Bolan read the gesture as an expression of Jones's personal frustration at not being able to kick the hell out of those bastards.
Their clothing was the first thing Bolan noted that set them apart from the others; they were dressed in light gray silk shirts and slacks. But what really made them different, on a closer appraisal, was the fullness of their well-nourished faces and figures, the scrubbed, damn-near-pink freshness of their skin. Indeed, their bodies were padded with fat from excessive eating. Every thirty minutes, the three snitches took a cigarette break, talked and laughed with the guards. The only work they did was to carry the wooden buckets of raw opium to the edge of the field, where they dumped the sap into black drums. The vermin even had the gall to demand angrily that the other prisoners work faster.
Bolan had learned that the pigeons were protected by Kam Chek and his cannibals. If any of the three rats was harmed by another prisoner, the offender was immediately hauled away to the black room. His screams of agony would be the last thing anyone in the inmate population would ever hear from that man again. Bolan knew he would have to work his plan past them, somehow avoid the ever-present threat that the plan would be discovered by the spies. But he already had that angle covered. The three rats had their own hut, powered by a generator. The rats had light, even a refrigerator, and were allowed magazines and books of their choosing. It was even rumored that they received a salary, supplemented by a commission for every inmate they sent to the black room. Eavesdropping, Bolan's circle of captives had informed him, was the rats' most effective method of picking up information damaging to the prisoners. A second method was to buy out inmates within other circles.
Bolan was grimly aware that his proposed breakout plan was full of risks, with holes that could be punched gaping wide by an unforeseen twist of fate. He was going to have to mix chance with daring.
Bolan caught the eye of a pigeon. The rage that burned inside Bolan hardened his stare, so that his eyes were like two glittering diamonds behind narrowed slits.
For a moment the rat seemed frozen by Bolan's graveyard expression. Bolan read the fear in the guy's eyes; all of a sudden the punk looked as if he wanted to crawl into the nearest hole. To Mack Bolan there were few savages worse than a traitor in the ranks. He believed this kind of cannibal deserved nothing but sudden death.
Just then Kam Chek, who had been making the rounds of the work party with his threats and insults, approached the area where Bolan was working.
"Back to work, ferang!" Kam Chek screamed. "You are daydreaming. You are feeling sorry for yourself. I tolerate no loafing! I have a deadline to meet. I have a timetable!"
Kam Chek shrieked insults at Bolan for several moments, finally moved on to the next group of prisoners. From the corner of his eye, Bolan saw the pigeon smile at him. The smile was a sneer, a look of such arrogance that Bolan wanted to carve it off the rat's face with the edge of a very dull knife.
Bolan went back to work, all right. Quickly but carefully he continued cutting incisions into the poppy bulbs with his knife, then scraping away the bleeding brown-black sap. At this point, it was important that he not draw unnecessary attention to himself. As it was, Kam Chek and the other guards were watching his every move with the predatory wariness of hawks. He could feel their eyes boring into the back of his head at all times.
As the sun climbed across the burning blue sky, it seemed to suck the air away from the field, straight up into the vortex of a furnace. That time of the year in Southeast Asia, Bolan knew, was always hot, but he suspected that day was unusually hot. But the heat had only begun to stoke his fury. The more he suffered now, the better, he reasoned. Perhaps pain would give him all the edge he needed.
Just before dawn that morning, Bolan, Grimaldi and their eight accomplices had gone over the plan again, smoothed out the rough edges. They decided that the attempt would take place at the village that marked the halfway point of the march. Before setting out, Bolan, Grimaldi and the eight prisoners of their circle would stumble into the column, assume strategic positions in the front, rear and middle of the marching prisoners. The veterans of the march didn't think this would be a problem, for the assembly and file of the prisoners at the outset was always a mass of crowded flesh and huddled misery. Kam Chek's screaming for the men to fall into place and pick up their sacks of heroin always added to the confusion, panic and terror.
Once the march got under way, Bolan intended to keep as low a profile as possible, though gut feeling told him he would be the center of Kam Chek's cruel attention.
At the midway rest point Bolan would give the signal, a look and a shallow nod that would be passed on down the line. Because of the possibility of spies in the ranks, none of the other prisoners beyond his circle would know the exact moment that the breakout attempt would be staged. It would take daring, grim resolve and speedy maneuvering to pull it off, he knew. He had stressed this to Tremain and the seven soldiers. Together, the ten of them would have to carry off the brutal force of a shocking initiative, and take the brunt of the cannibals' resistance.
Bolan had also learned from the veteran marchers that many of Kam Chek's cutthroats got drunk at the halfway rest stop. They did this every year without fail. An orgy, Bolan hoped, would seal the fate of their tormentors. In fact, he saw this as a very fitting end to their savagery and brutality.
In the event that it appeared they were going to be overwhelmed and massacred by Kam Chek and his cutthroats, Bolan had ordered the rebels should instantly bolt into the jungle surroundi
ng the village. He didn't think this would happen, but he had to cover all contingencies. What he wanted, he thought as vengeance pumped hot blood through his heart, and a sudden feverish rage spread a fire through his brain, was for the prisoners to stand their ground and annihilate their captors. Completely. Totally. Without mercy or hesitation. But he knew there was the strong possibility that some prisoners might fail to seize the initiative. And, of course, their weakness from undernourishment, their exhaustion from the punishing march and their lack of firearms put them at a disadvantage. There would be casualties, Bolan was certain of that.
But there was no alternative.
Strike first. Strike hard. Strike with twice the ruthlessness and viciousness that their captors had used on them over the years.
Bolan knew that he didn't have to drive the men of his circle into a state of frenzy; their rage and hatred were fueled by the terrible memories of their enslavement. When the time came, they would act. They would have to. Their lives depended on it.
During the next few hours in the poppy field, Bolan became the object of intense observation by the pigeons. He saw them pointing his way, talking, as if trying to decide some issue that had suddenly arisen. Then one of the pigeons broke away from the others, walked up to one of the guards.
Bolan looked at Jones, and nodded at the pigeon.
"Davis," Jones whispered.
The King Rat, Bolan thought.
Kam Chek walked over to Davis and they conferred for several moments. Davis did most of the talking, while Kam Chek nodded repeatedly. Finally, the whipmaster turned, looked at Bolan.
Bolan ignored Kam Chek, busied himself with his endless task of scraping the poppy bulbs. But a warning bell was sounding in his head. Now what? he wondered.
"Ferang."
Slowly, acting as if he couldn't be bothered by an interruption, Bolan straightened, looked at Kam Chek. The whipmaster stood less than four feet away, legs planted far apart, clenched fists on his hips.
"Something has come to my attention, Bo-leen."
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