Blood Tide

by Don Pendleton

  The Executioner made a fist with his right hand. His arm felt like it was asleep except that he had complete control over it, like he’d hypnotized someone else’s arm and had mental command over it.

  “Nice work, Cal. We got an ETA on those choppers?”

  James spoke low into his com link. “ETA fifteen minutes.”

  “I’d say they’re Chinese. They’re not waiting for dark. They’re coming to kick ass and take back what’s theirs before it becomes an embarrassment.”

  “That’s the way I got it figured, too. How do you want to play it?”

  “You and Pol stay back and stay low. You’re our ace in the hole. Take action as you see fit, but try not to get spotted by any of our boys. See if you can take out their scouts.”

  “Roger that.” The shrubbery rustled as James pulled a fade into the jungle.

  Bolan broke into a run back across the beach. His voice rose like thunder. “Chosen men! To me!”

  Heads jerked up all around the village. Ali and half a dozen of Bolan’s riflemen instantly jumped up and ran to his side. Jusuf strode out a hut with his pistol in his hand. He didn’t look amused. Bolan saw the saber drawn for the first time. It was a wickedly curved ribbon of blue steel with gleaming twin points. “What is it you think you are doing?” Jusuf demanded.

  “I was on the other side of the island. I—”

  Jusuf interrupted, “What were you doing on the other—”

  “I heard helicopters.”

  Jusuf’s face froze.

  “They’ll be here any moment. We have to arm, now.”

  “Raul!” Jusuf snapped his head, and Raul sprinted into the trees. The Indonesian turned back to Bolan. “If this is some kind of trick…”

  “We’re running out of time.”

  Jusuf holstered his pistol and raised his saber high. “Everyone! Arm yourselves!”

  The Indonesian’s hand clamped down on Bolan’s injured arm as the rest of the warriors made a beeline for the armory. “Not you, Makeen.”

  Ali began handing out rifles and bandoliers of loaded magazines. Bolan noted with approval that his chosen men were the first to be armed. They swiftly checked their weapons, loaded them and were the first to come racing back.

  “If this is a trick…” Jusuf repeated. He gave Bolan’s arm a brutal squeeze. The mottled, swollen bruising turned white as Jusuf’s fingers vised down into his flesh. “Your chosen men shall be your firing squad.”

  Bolan locked eyes with the Indonesian. “Move your hand, or I’ll break it.”

  Jusuf’s eyes flared in surprise.

  Bolan kept the eye contact. Jusuf had made a mistake. He was too close, and he had holstered his pistol. Jusuf had put himself within grappling distance, and Bolan was pumped full of painkillers. If the twin tips of the saber moved even a hair, he would tackle Jusuf and snap his neck.

  If he failed, Jusuf would cut him down.

  But the choppers were coming, and Bolan was weary of the Indonesian and his pissing contest.

  “I said move your hand.”

  Jusuf’s eyes narrowed with rage. “You—”

  “Jusuf!” Raul burst out the trees in full sprint. “Jusuf!”

  Jusuf released Bolan’s arm and took a prudent step back. His saber rose between them at groin level. “What did you see?”

  “Helicopters!” Raul put his hands on his knees and fought for breath. “Four of them!”

  “Civilian or military?”

  “Civilian! But they are deploying men!”

  “And who is coming out of them?”

  “Armed men!” Raul gasped. “Dozens of them! In camouflage! They’re coming through the trees! They are moments behind me!”

  “Do you have any idea who they are?”

  Raul straightened. “Jusuf, I think they are Chinese!”

  Jusuf’s eyes flicked to Bolan, and a decision was made. “Get a rifle. Lead your men.”

  CAPTAIN KAI’S MEN moved like shadows through the trees. He had just over a platoon of men. He would have preferred a night attack with combat swimmers deploying from a submarine, but the urgency of the mission had dictated otherwise. They had to take the island as swiftly as possible without the Indonesian government becoming aware of it. Dragon Team consisted of a squad of special-purpose troops, Maritime Special Forces who had been off duty in Jakarta and every available intelligence field agent in the Indonesian islands.

  They descended upon the village in a skirmishing line with a squad of men held back as a reserve. They were lightly equipped for speed and surprise. Intelligence reported the enemy was brave but poorly armed and not proficient with what firearms they had, preferring close combat with bladed weapons. Kai’s men carried submachine guns, tear-gas and stun grenades.

  The islanders would be dead or controlled before they knew what hit them.

  “Chow, what do the scouts report?”

  Lieutenant Chow put a hand to his earpiece. “Captain, scouts…” Chow’s brow furrowed. “Captain, I…I cannot raise the scouts.”

  Captain Kai held up his fist and his line halted, crouching with their weapons ready.

  “Try again.”

  Chow spoke quietly into his throat mike. “No response, Captain. From either Liu or Shin.”

  They had found no trace of sentries on the far side of the island. Even in the unlikely event someone had heard the helicopters on the other side, there should have been no time to mount an effective defense.

  “Fatt.” Kai looked to his sergeant. They had been through thick and thin together throughout Southeast Asia.

  Sergeant Fatt crept ahead of the column, moving from cover to cover. He stopped and knelt as he came to some broken reeds. There were boot prints in the sand. He recognized one tread as PRC jungle issue. The other was a foreign pattern. Fatt read the terrain like a book. Shin had been deployed on the right front of the line. Someone had snuck up behind him. There had been a brief struggle. The heel ruts in the sand indicated that Shin had lost, and his body had been dragged away.

  Fatt rose to a crouch and scanned the jungle. “Captain Kai—”

  The thunder of a high-power rifle cut Fatt’s communication short. An immense impact hit him in the chest, lifting him up onto his heels and dropping him back against a tree.

  Kai knew the sound of a Dragunov sniper rifle from long experience. The enemy had a sniper in the forest. Initial surprise had been lost. The only course of action was to attack swiftly, overrunning the sentry and overwhelming the village. “Dragon Team!” Kai roared. “Attack! Attack! Attack!”

  Attack whistles shrieked up and down the skirmish line, and Dragon Team stormed forward. Their sound-suppressed submachine guns whispered in their hands and shivered the jungle foliage.

  The rifle thundered again above the sound of the charge, and Chow staggered and fell, his face going fish-white as the bullet imbedded in his heart and dropped his blood pressure to zero. Kai caught the flash of the rifle in the trees and hurled a stun grenade. “There!” he roared. “The sniper! The sniper!”

  Dragon Team loped forward like wolves for the kill.

  “Chosen men!” a voice boomed in English. “Fire!”

  The stun grenade detonated, but its sound was eclipsed as a line of automatic rifles roared into life point-blank into Dragon Team. Men twisted and fell in the surprise onslaught.

  “Fall back!” Kai screamed through his com link. “Fall back and reform!”

  “Attack!” the enemy commander roared. “Go! Go! Go!”

  The enemy assaulted through the trees. Their rifles fired on full-auto, their fixed bayonets gleamed. The sniper rifle boomed and boomed on rapid semi-automatic above the sound of the smaller caliber automatic rifles. Dragon Team was being slaughtered. “Fall back!” Kai repeated. “Reserve forward and—”

  “Allah Akhbar!” The war cry thundered in the forest. Men came out of the trees on Kai’s left flank. They sprayed pistols and automatic rifles one-handed while they waved shining steel blades in the othe
r.

  Kai slammed a fresh magazine into his submachine gun. He hammered down a charging rifleman in front of him and then put a burst through the belly of a man screaming in on his left.

  Dragon Team had been sucked in by the sniper’s draw, then counter attacked and flanked. The battle was going hand-to-hand. Captain Kai fired his Type 64 dry and dropped the spent weapon, clawing for his pistol as another rifleman closed on him.

  A voice shouted a few yards away. “Ali!”

  Kai whirled. His machine pistol cleared the holster on his thigh.

  In that split second, Kai caught sight of the figure exploding from cover. He was larger than the men around him by a head. His blue eyes blazed as he lunged holding a Dragunov rifle in a low guard. The Dragunov was the only sniper rifle in the world with a bayonet fitting, and sharpened steel hung from the muzzle. Kai swung his pistol up. He was fast, but his opponent moved with liquid speed.

  The bayonet slapped Kai’s machine pistol aside and plunged into his throat. Kai dropped his pistol as the blade cut through arteries and severed his ties to this world.

  BOLAN CHARGED ACROSS the island followed by his riflemen and a mob of crazed fighters. They ran hot on the heels of a few of the Chinese who had managed to retreat. The Chinese were shot in the sand as they burst out of the trees.

  “Helicopters!” Bolan shouted.

  Bolan’s men opened fire on the aircraft. Two were rising up, and the engines of the other two roared into liftoff power. The islanders boiled out of the trees firing their weapons. The helicopters were civilian aircraft, three Bell-Augustas and a French Dauphin. The massed rifles ripped into their cockpits, spider-webbing the glass with bullet holes and cracks, and painting the interiors with bloody spray. The mob ran forward, leaping into the open cabins with naked blades and slaughtering anyone still alive.

  The Dauphin rose and spun on its axis as bullets poured into it. Smoke bled out of one of its exhausts, but it was a twin-engine aircraft. It dipped its nose over the surf and fled out over the waves chased by the streaming lines of tracers.

  Bolan watched the helicopter fade out of range. “Chosen men! Head count!” he called out.

  Bolan’s riflemen ran to him and assembled. They were twelve. Bolan had started out with over a platoon. Now he barely had a squad. “Spread out,” he ordered. “Search for survivors. I want prisoners if there are any left alive.”

  Jusuf came out of the trees. His pistol was holstered, and he was wiping blood from his saber with a rag of torn Chinese camouflage uniform. Back in the trees, high-pitched screams began issuing from the battlefield. The sound of the women’s screaming was matched by the sound of men howling in agony. The women of the village had come for the fallen with their knives.

  There weren’t going to be any prisoners.

  “You have done well,” Jusuf conceded. The Indonesian was all too aware that without Bolan and the training he’d given his men the entire island would have been wiped out.

  Bolan ignored the compliment. “We have to leave the island and disperse. These are Chinese soldiers. I do not know what the Mahdi has done to anger them, but we have destroyed them. The Chinese will want vengeance. More will come, in overwhelming force.”

  “You are correct. I have contacted the Mahdi. He agrees. Boats are coming. Meanwhile, we run a sweep of the island, gather everything of value and burn the village.”

  “Very well. I will give the order to my men.”

  “Give me your rifle. You are coming with me, now.” Jusuf’s smile reappeared briefly. “The Mahdi wishes to speak with you.”

  21

  Bolan blinked as Jusuf removed his blindfold. He sensed the speedboat ride had taken about an hour. If the island had been on the western edge of the Java Sea, that told him he was probably on the island of Sumatra. He looked around and found himself in a tiny courtyard. The Madhi sat cross-legged on a blanket by a tinkling fountain. His giant sword bearer stood behind him holding the mighty, cruciform blade. A pair of men Bolan did not recognize stood in the corners of the courtyard armed with submachine guns.

  “Ah, Makeen.” The Mahdi rose and embraced Bolan warmly. He stood back and looked sympathetically at Bolan’s arm, but for a moment the Executioner caught the look of pleasure in the madman’s eyes as he gazed at the grotesquely lumped and discolored limb. “Once again, you have exceeded all expectations. You saved many of my followers from death at the hands of infidels.”

  “I did my duty, Holy One.”

  “Indeed, and more.” He gestured toward a blue-painted wooden gate in the courtyard. “Come, walk with me.”

  Bolan followed the little man out, and Jusuf and the sword bearer were right behind them. The house was a small, crumbling Spanish-style villa. They followed an overgrown stone path through the trees to a cove. There were no other houses in the cove, and Bolan assumed it was a private estate. Moored at the stone pier was the speedboat they had arrived in. Next to it was one of Rustam Megawatti’s pleasure boats taken from Kouprey Island. A shrimper was moored next to the yacht.

  Bolan kept the smile off his face.

  Beside the fishing boat was his yacht.

  Concealed in her hull, he had weapons and communications gear. The tracking device meant that the Farm knew where the boat was. He would only need a few moments alone.

  “Your boat is beautiful.” The Mahdi turned his gaze lovingly upon Megawatti’s giant yacht. “But can you handle a boat such as that?”

  Bolan ran his eyes over the Pirate King’s floating palace. The gleaming white ship looked to be about forty-five meters and powered by twin diesels. The yacht’s clean, aerodynamic racing lines and tinted windows made it look more like a fighter plane than a ship.

  Bolan’s stomach tightened.

  There was nothing clean about the startling number of fish, crabs and seabirds bobbing belly-up against the hull. The shrimper had a similar ring of death around it.

  They were deathships.

  The cargo they carried hidden in their bellies was lethally radioactive, and piloting any of the craft to a destination of more than a few miles would be a death sentence. So would going aboard his yacht and accessing the gear hidden in the hold. Bolan knew just walking up the pier past them had exposed him to radiation.

  There was also another unpleasant possibility to consider. If there were opened reactor rods on board, the ionizing radiation they were giving off was most likely to have fried the electronics of his communications gear and the tracking signal.

  It was very likely that he was off the map again.

  “Yes,” the Executioner answered. “I can pilot such a boat.”

  “Good, very good.”

  “Where are my wives, Holy One?”

  “Do not worry.” The Mahdi’s shining smile returned. “They shall meet you soon.”

  Bolan wondered if the Mahdi meant they would meet him soon in the afterlife.

  “Come with me, Makeen.” Jusuf started to lift his hand toward Bolan’s arm and thought better of it. He smiled, and there was nothing shining or beatific in it. “There is someone I want you to meet.”

  The Mahdi and his men stayed gazing down at the death fleet while Jusuf led Bolan back up the path. The fields had gone wild, but the land had clearly been part of a small plantation of some kind in the past. They walked to a low clapboard building that had probably once been quarters for servants or workers. Two men with submachine guns stood outside the door. Bolan lifted his nose slightly as he smelled smoke that was harsher than the hand-rolled cigarettes the Mahdi’s men usually smoked.

  Bolan’s battle instincts began ringing the alarms.

  They walked into the ramshackle building. A man sat in front of a coffee table in a rattan rocking chair. He was a powerfully built Caucasian, unshaved with shaggy brown hair, dressed in a cheap rayon Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and sandals. His nose was broken and there was an obvious knife scar on his chin. A Zastava .357 Magnum revolver was tucked casually into the front of his shorts.

/>   Bolan had been to Bosnia on a number of occasions. He recognized the smell of the cheap, unfiltered Drina cigarette hanging from the man’s lip. Jusuf and the two men with sub-machine guns stood behind Bolan. The man stubbed out his cigarette and rose, smiling.

  Jusuf’s voice dripped venom. “Makeen, I would like you to meet one of your fellow Bosnians. Dragicevic, this is one of our best men, Makeen Boulus.”

  The jaws of the trap slammed shut.

  Bolan stuck out his hand.

  Dragicevic grinned and said something in Bosnian.

  Bolan struck instantly.

  The Bosnian flew backward. The force of the blow sat him down violently, and both he and the rocking chair rolled into a backward somersault.

  Bolan waited for several long seconds. With each heartbeat, he expected the bullets from the guardsman’s guns to come ripping through his back. He slowly turned and glared at Jusuf. “That was foolish.”

  Jusuf’s pistol was aimed at Bolan’s face.

  Bolan scowled. “I understand you wished to test me, but when you told him to see if I spoke the language, you should not have told him to insult me.”

  Jusuf’s eyes slid to Dragicevic, who was spitting teeth and making a feeble attempt to extricate himself from the broken chair.

  Bolan did not speak more than a few phrases of Bosnian he’d picked up on missions, but every soldier knew the choicer insults of any country he visited. Dragicevic had opened up with a modern favorite.

  “His words involved a horse, my pregnant sister and my mother’s grave.” Bolan looked back at the Bosnian as he managed to push himself to a sitting position. “And had I let him finish, my retarded father watching from his wheelchair.”

  Jusuf looked to Dragicevic again. The Bosnian wiped blood from his chin and nodded ruefully. “It is true.”

  Bolan knew he had only seconds before the man said something that he wouldn’t be able to answer with his fist. He ignored the gun at his head and stepped over to the fallen man. Bolan stuck out his hand to help him up. “Come.”

  Dragicevic nodded and took Bolan’s hand. The pointed guns lowered.

  The Executioner heaved the Bosnian up to his feet and then pivoted violently. He hurled the man over his shoulder at Jusuf in a textbook flying mare judo throw.