"Yeah. Like what?"
Jones, Grimaldi, and the other prisoners in Bolan's group suddenly stopped working to watch the exchange.
Kam Chek glared at the prisoners behind Bolan. "Work!" he barked. "Back to work, you filthy ferangs!"
Kam Chek summoned some guards who ran up behind the prisoners. Whips cracked through the air like lightning, lashed flesh with several strokes.
The beaten prisoners grunted and moaned. Bolan pinned Kam Chek with an icy stare. You're going to be the first, pal. I swear... Kam Chek could beat him. Kam Chek could thrash him to within a breath away from death. But Kam Chek, Bolan knew, would never break his will. Never.
"As I was saying, Bo-leen. A certain look has been noted on your face. A most suspicious look, I may add. It is a look we have seen before. Many, many times, out. It is the look of a man who still has plenty of fight left in him. It is the look of a man who will defy his superiors at all cost.
"Bo-leen, listen to me, s'il vous plaît" Kam Chek said in an almost imploring voice. Then came a shrug and a mocking grin. "Have you no respect for us? Have you no wish to cooperate and accept your lot of suffering, deprivation and pain? Bo-leen, you must cheer up, you must. You are becoming a morale problem, ouil Perhaps this morale problem will become infectious. Perhaps, Bo-leen, this morale problem will turn itself into an escape attempt? Eh?"
Bolan cursed silently, but his eyes did not show Kam Chek the first flicker of surprise he felt. If the SOB had any positive proof about the breakout plan, Bolan suspected, he would have been whisked off to the black room by now.
Or would he have been taken at all? he asked himself. Maybe Kam Chek knew the whole plan. Maybe Davis or one of the other rats had been eavesdropping around the hut. Maybe Kam Chek would take no action yet, would let Bolan make the first move in the planned escape, then slaughter any prisoner who dared to join in the attempt. A lot of maybes, Bolan thought. The attempt, when it came — and Bolan determined right then to go ahead with the plan — would be touch and go. If Kam Chek knew about the plan, Bolan was willing to gamble that the whipmaster would announce this to the prisoners before the march set out, just to show the inmate populace how smart and cunning he was, to show them that escape would be a dismal exercise in utter futility, ending in bloody disaster, to prove that freedom away from the stinging bite of his whip was impossible.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Bolan grunted.
Kam Chek chuckled. "Nothing, I hope. Perhaps, nothing at all, Bo-leen. For your sake, let us hope it is nothing, eh?" His eyes were nearly hidden behind hooded lids. "Out?"
Kam Chek started to turn away from Bolan, then he stopped suddenly and turned to face the Executioner. Kam Chek smiled. "We were talking about you this morning, Bo-leen. Would you like to know what I heard about you?"
Bolan's spine stiffened. At that moment there was something particularly ugly about the laughter in Kam Chek's dark eyes. What was the savage going to come up with now? Bolan wondered uneasily.
Kam Chek draped his hand over the hilt of his samurai sword. "I see you are pretending to have no curiosity about what it was I heard about you. Never mind, I will tell you the story anyway. I understand your family was killed in a most tragic incident... in a city called Pittsfield, I believe the ferangs of the Horn said."
Grimaldi stopped working, looked up at Kam Chek, his gaze cold.
Rage twisted Bolan's guts. He knew where Kam Chek's "story" was leading. Stay hard, he told himself. This bastard's day is coming.
"I believe your father went berserk, as I heard it, oui," Kam Chek went on. "He shot your sister, your mother and your brother, a Donny or Johnny, I believe. And all because your sister was selling her body? A most regrettable reaction on your father's part. To me, such an act of barbarism shows a decided lack of willpower. A decided lack of character, ow/? Perhaps this deficiency in strength is inherent in your blood. Perhaps you suffer from it yourself." Kam Chek looked at Bolan with a level stare, then he laughed scornfully.
Grief tore through Bolan. The horror of the past... the moment he had learned the nightmarish truth... a truth that had changed the course of his destiny. His throat went dry, tightened up, was suddenly raw and burning. Kam Chek's derisive laughter fired the murderous wrath that was searing through every muscle in Bolan's body. No! he silently cried. Kam Chek was wrong about his father. Dead wrong, goddammit. Bolan's father, he knew, had been driven over the edge by the savage cunning of bloodsuckers, driven beyond the point that any man could be asked to endure. What would he have done if he had been in his father's shoes? he asked himself. He knew exactly what he would have done. He would have crushed the bloodsuckers beneath the heel of his shoe. Squashed the life out of their twisted souls.
With a determined effort, Bolan steadied the trembling of his hands, and went back to work. But he could still hear Kam Chek's laughter ringing in his ears.
The sweat rolled down Bolan's back, burned into the raw slashes. Fire. Agony. Hate.
The edge. Yeah, Bolan thought. The final, cutting edge.
Someone was going to pay. Pay hard. Pay in pain, then death.
And this time the judgment was going to be meted out differently.
With a Sadeian twist. With the very righteous, steely edge of the blade.
* * *
The infiltration of another circle of prisoners by Carver seemed to go off without a hitch. But Bolan wasn't about to become overconfident at this early sign of success. The whole enterprise was a crapshoot. The dice were rolling.
Bolan had selected Carver to move into another hut and spread the word about the escape attempt because the man was fluent in Thai, Burmese and Hmong. There were some twenty-plus Southeast-Asian men among the captives who spoke these languages. Of course, some of the Asians spoke English, but Bolan wanted them to know exactly what was going to happen, which made it desirable to brief them in their native tongue.
Bolan particularly wanted the Montagnards on his side. He had worked with Montagnard tribesmen — the Meos — before, in behind-the-lines search-and-destroy operations during the war. They were not only excellent guides and accurate interpreters for seventeen different tongues, but they were also fierce fighters. Better still, he knew, they were loyal, would fight to the last man, to the bitter end, their allegiance to a chosen ally incorruptible. Bolan remembered them with warm feeling, affection, yeah. The Montagnard tribesman had been best friends to the Special Forces, many of them earning the 101st Airborne Division patch, some three dozen of them qualifying to wear U.S. airborne jump wings. And they had been the ferocious, hated enemy of the Vietcong. Yes, Bolan thought, he had great respect for the Montagnards.
After the prisoners received their bowl of rice and a cup of water, they had split up and moved to their huts. Bolan had trailed Grimaldi and the other prisoners of his group into the hut. He was exhausted, still aching and burning from his beating and whipping. The strain of the long hours in the field, the physical punishment of the beatings and lack of food and water were wearing down his strength, dangerously fast. It seemed that every step he took now was made possible only through sheer willpower.
Bolan looked back at the guards, who were watching as the prisoners filed into their huts. Nobody stopped Carver when he entered a different hut than usual. Kam Chek, Bolan noticed, was nowhere to be seen at the moment.
As Bolan walked into the hut and seated himself beside Grimaldi, he looked at the ravaged faces around him. He spotted the telltale shadows of fear in every pair of eyes. And he spotted wonder, too. And hope.
"Mack."
Bolan looked at Grimaldi. His friend's voice was one rasping scratch of pain. There was deep sympathy in Grimaldi's eyes. Bolan looked away. He knew what was on Jack's mind.
"Mack, I... I..."
"Forget it, Jack. It's all part of the sickness here." And Bolan believed what he told Jack, knew he should put Kam Chek's spiteful needling out of his mind. But Bolan still felt the hurt, the rage over Kam Chek's mockery of his fa
mily's tragedy.
There was a sudden scuffling sound beyond the doorway. Bolan, Grimaldi, and the other seven prisoners looked toward the hut's opening. A second later, a man was tossed into the hut.
Not a man, Bolan saw. No, nothing human could possibly look like the lump of blackened, twisted flesh that sprawled on the dirt floor.
Someone muttered an oath. Bolan looked at the guard in the doorway, but Kam Chek's tool of enslavement wheeled away from the opening, seemed to melt back into the night.
Bolan's gaze fell on the lump of flesh on the floor.
On Ronny Brennan.
Slick crimson drool spilled from Brennan's mouth as he lifted his head, looked at the faces around him. He looked as if he wanted to curse them all, then he seemed silently to implore someone to help him.
No one did.
"Jesus!" Mike Tremain murmured.
For just a second, Bolan experienced a stab of pity for Brennan. Since the man wore only a pair of shorts, the scars of his torture left very little to Bolan's imagination. The guy had just come from hell. The drug pusher had been mutilated, disfigured beyond recognition. His face was a mask of raw meat; the skin appeared to have been scraped, or perhaps clawed off. There were black burn marks, purple lumps and long pink streaks on every visible inch of Brennan's body.
But the worst sight was his hands. Several fingers had been chopped off. The other fingers were crooked at impossible angles, broken, crushed by some instrument of torture. His fists appeared to be swollen to twice their normal size and looked more like clubs than hands.
Ronny Brennan looked Bolan in the eye, with a stare of pure hate at first, then depthless misery.
Then a sob broke from Brennan's mouth. He wept, let his head fall to the floor again, face first.
No one moved.
17
On the third day of Bolan and Grimaldi's imprisonment, Kam Chek made a sudden and unexpected announcement. It was midmorning, and the sun burned its fire down on the slave-labor force from a cloudless sky.
"Ferangs, and other workers of the Imperial Revolutionary Army. Listen!"
Bolan, Grimaldi, and the more than one hundred other prisoners straightened from stooping over the poppy plants. Everyone gave Kam Chek his undivided attention as the warlord addressed them from the far eastern edge of the field. Kam Chek shouted, though that wasn't necessary; his voice would have carried easily enough in the oppressive silence that gripped the prisoners in exhaustion and despair.
As he looked at the other prisoners, Bolan wondered how these men kept going. It was hard to believe that many of these same prisoners had lived in this appalling slave-labor camp year after year, and survived. Why, under these conditions, did they even bother to live? He knew why. Damn right he knew why. Because in the back of the mind of each and every prisoner, there was hope. The belief that they would someday be free again. No one was going to take that belief away. A man might seem to give up under these conditions, he knew, might even appear totally defeated. But somewhere in his heart there was still that belief. If there wasn't, only then would that man give in, just lie down and die.
"We are ahead of schedule, workers of the Imperial Revolutionary Army!" Kam Chek announced.
"Cut the crap, Genghis, will ya," Tremain muttered from the bank rank.
"You have done well," Kam Chek continued. "The harvest, it appears, will be completed by the end of this day's work, perhaps as early as this afternoon. I congratulate you. Half of you will then begin to bundle your harvest. You will complete this chore today..."
Kam Chek left the warning unfinished. Bolan suspected what the veterans knew: what would happen to prisoners who did not finish wrapping the raw opium for transport. Most likely those prisoners would be the first ones to die on the march, forced by beating and starvation to drop out.
"Therefore, workers, we will set out in the morning. Early. Prepare yourselves for the journey. Rid your minds this instant of any foolish thoughts of escape."
Bolan would have sworn Kam Chek looked his way. Did he know? And what if he did? he asked himself. Or had Bolan imagined that warning glance?
"Strip yourselves of any weakness, particularly the loathsome baggage of self-pity."
"I didn't know ol' Genghis was such a poet," Larry Jones growled under his breath.
"You will need all of your strength this year. The haul is much larger than usual. We do not have sufficient transport for one march alone." Kam Chek paused, smiled. "It will be necessary, then, to make two marches. Heh-heh."
Bolan could feel the despair building among the captives around him, like some clutching, suffocating force. Then he heard a groan, a plaintive cry from somewhere in the field. Two rows down from where Bolan stood, a prisoner dropped to his knees. The man was weeping.
Kam Chek barked an order in Thai at his guards. Seconds later, a guard stood behind the sobbing prisoner. The guard pulled a Tokarev 9 mm pistol, placed the muzzle against the prisoner's temple, squeezed the trigger. The Russian pistol cracked once. The prisoner disappeared from Bolan's sight, dropping behind the plants like a stone.
Bolan's teeth were clenched, his jaw tight.
A prisoner a few rows away from Bolan cursed Kam Chek softly.
"Workers!" Kam Chek bellowed. "That weakling was a coward. What happened to him is what will happen to you if you show such weakness. Only your punishment will be worse. See that you remain strong. See that you act like men and not like women and children. You are, after all, men, aren't you?"
Bolan was sure now that Kam Chek was looking directly at him, as if the butcher was challenging him.
"Back to work!"
As the prisoners returned to scraping the poppy bulbs, Bolan observed Davis approaching Kam Chek. The pigeon and the warlord began to talk. Even at a distance of more than one hundred feet, Bolan could see the rapid rise and fall of Kam Chek's chest, the anger that blazed in his stare.
Moments later, Kam Chek and "Virginia Slim" walked toward Bolan and the prisoners in his circle. The captives froze in the act of cutting the bulbs.
"Which one?" Kam Chek snapped.
Davis, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, pointed at Carver.
No, Bolan groaned soundlessly. Not now. Damn!
But it was too late.
Three guards encircled Carver, their AK-47s trained on his chest.
Bolan read the naked terror in Carver's eyes. Carver was doomed, and he knew it, Bolan could tell. Then something steeled Carver's expression. Defiance. Carver looked at Kam Chek, as if to say, take me. Go ahead. Beat me. I'll tell you nothing.
"Why were you in another prisoners' quarters last night?" Kam Chek rasped at Carver. The warlord stood menacingly before the prisoner, his legs apart, his hand wrapped around the hilt of his sword. "You were heard discussing something with the prisoners last night. What was the subject of your discussion?"
Carver held his ground in silence, his eyes hardened with hatred.
The guy was going to hang tough to protect the plan, Bolan thought. But he knew where Carver would end up. The black room. Would the soldier endure the hell that Ronny Brennan had suffered? Would he break, save himself by talking, or would he sacrifice his life so that the others might have a chance to attempt the escape?
"No matter," Kam Chek said, softening his tone. "I should interrogate the other prisoners as well, but I cannot afford to spare the manpower at this time. But, you... you, Carver, are expendable!" he rasped. "You will talk. Or you will cry out for death and welcome her. Take him!" he ordered the guards.
As the guards dragged Carver away from the field, Kam Chek walked up to Bolan. The warlord shook with suppressed rage.
"Bo-leen... understand that I will be watching you very carefully from now on. You will march the entire time in front of me. I will disperse the men of your hut throughout the line. Whatever you are thinking, do not think it." Kam Chek lowered his voice to a chilling whisper. "I do not want to kill you, Bo-leen. I will keep you alive at all cost
s. You will survive both marches, ferang, I shall see to it. You and your friend will be here for the rest of your lives. You will leave here only in death, with the worms and the maggots eating out your eyes. But your death is a long, long way from coming, Bo-leen. I assure you."
A terrible hunger to spill Kam Chek's blood seemed to swell Bolan's limbs with pressure. Damn, but he wanted to drive the blade of the knife he held into Kam Chek's stomach, rip out his guts with one long wrenching twist. It was a long time since he had experienced such an overpowering rage, such a burning desire for vengeance. A long time, yeah. Perhaps an eternity since the death of April Rose. What fevered his bloodlust even more at the moment was the mere sight of the traitor Davis. The ball-less rat just stood there beside Kam Chek, grinning in triumph, puffing on his cigarette.
"Get back to work, Bolan," Davis ordered.
Bolan didn't move.
Kam Chek drew his sword.
Bolan heard bolts cocking back, turned, saw the muzzles of two AK-47s pointed at his face.
Kam Chek chuckled, the samurai sword hanging low by his side. The sun's rays glinted off the gold of the hilt and the finely polished steel of the blade. "It will be very difficult for you to finish the harvest with only one arm, my friend," Kam Chek said. "That does not mean you cannot march tomorrow. If you have no legs and no arms, Bo-leen, you will still march. You will crawl the whole way, I assure you."
Bolan hesitated for another second, then he turned away from Kam Chek.
"It pays to be special, Bolan." Davis hurled the taunt at Bolan's back. The hatred that seemed to emanate from the bodies of other prisoners was palpable. "Right?"
Yeah, right, Bolan thought. You're real special, all right, guy.
Bolan would remember Davis.
When the time came.
No, he was not about to forget the King Rat.
Not until he was finished with the traitor. No. Not even the fires of hell were going to save the bastard from Bolan.
* * *
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