Czytaj książkę: «Contagion Option»

CHAPTER ONE

The Gulf of Thailand, twenty miles out of Pattaya

It was business as usual for Mack Bolan, a.k.a. the Executioner, as Jack Grimaldi raced Dragon Slayer low over the Gulf of Thailand, so low that the sea spray pelted the windshield. The high-tech combat helicopter was loaded to the gills with electronics and weaponry to give Bolan the kind of edge he needed when fighting impossible odds. The war bird had been designed specifically for the soldier’s crusade against the forces of evil. With encrypted communications, wireless satellite computer links and sensors that could pick up anything across the spectrum, Dragon Slayer could find almost any target. Laden with rocket and grenade launchers, and the awesome .50-caliber GECAL multibarreled machine gun, the helicopter could destroy even a small column of tanks.

Grimaldi held them low over the water, about five feet between the belly of the sleek bird and the tops of the tallest waves. With speakers that reflected the sound of the bird’s own rotor slap at ninety-degree angles to the original sound, the normal thunder and roar of the helicopter was muffled to little more than a low hum. This was a stealth insertion on a freighter loaded with contraband from Thailand.

The ship was on course for North Korea. The freighter was registered to Liberia, which enabled it to travel around the world without more than a second glance. Sometimes that registry also covered illegal operations, but since major corporations profited from both tourism and “under the counter” transportation of goods, powerful sponsorship kept governments from looking too closely at the problem.

Mack Bolan wasn’t the government. He wasn’t a civil servant with a license to kill. Certainly, through the Sensitive Operations Group at Stony Man Farm, he had official backup in the form of intelligence, a gunsmith and occasionally two of the best covert strike teams on the planet. Still, the Executioner considered them just that—backup. He enjoyed his camaraderie with the warriors and support crew at Stony Man, but he was his own man, with his own resources and his own crusades. Even Dragon Slayer had been funded from the massive war chest that Bolan had accumulated, the spoils of countless wars against organized crime. While the aircraft was assigned to Stony Man Farm and was registered to the United States Justice Department by the Federal Aviation Commission, the Executioner didn’t let taxpayer dollars fund his arsenal. Instead, the sleek aircraft had been funded from money “donated” by gangsters, drug dealers and terrorists.

Where the donors had been sent, they wouldn’t ever need money again.

“Coming up on the freighter. ETA thirty seconds,” Grimaldi said over Bolan’s LASH radio.

“Smooth ride as usual,” he told the pilot.

Grimaldi smiled. “Well, the last time the lady was flying in Thailand, she took a pounding. She’s proving to Daddy that she can handle this.”

Bolan grinned, then opened the side door. He’d have to get out quickly. Even with a radar signature the size of a hummingbird, and making not much more sound, the rotor wash would be noticeable to anyone on the freighter’s deck. In addition, the helicopter itself wasn’t invisible, despite its dark-colored hull. The ship’s running lights would betray Dragon Slayer’s presence in a heartbeat.

He gripped the sides of the door opening as Grimaldi popped the helicopter up and over the rail. With a surge of muscles, Bolan leaped to the deck, landing in a crouch, then rolling into a somersault as Grimaldi dipped the helicopter back and out of sight. The drop was fifteen feet, but Bolan was strong and agile, and he allowed momentum and supple movement to absorb most of the shock.

As soon as he hit, Bolan drew his Beretta 93-R, folding grip snapped down, sound suppressor in place.

On a data screen in the passenger cabin of Dragon Slayer, he’d kept an eye on infrared blobs, humans walking the decks, memorizing where his enemies were on this ship. According to the scanners, there were twenty-five people on board in various compartments.

That didn’t count the containers in the hold. Infrared scans had trouble going through both the hull and the tractor-trailer containers in the hold, but there was a definite heat signature that caught Bolan’s attention. He was here on the advice of an old ally in Thailand who had said that the ship was smuggling people to North Korea. Bolan had pulled a few strings to get Dragon Slayer delivered, because he knew the sleek high-tech aircraft could possibly be needed to get wounded or dying bystanders back to shore.

Bolan had engaged the slave trade in Thailand once before, and had dropped a brutal ax on its neck. The trade still existed and thrived, because the Executioner had been able to take out only one mastermind of the insidious child slavery ring and his organization—the San United Army.

Still, he had his ear to the ground, and when he had the opportunity, he’d stop by and give the flesh peddlers a taste of long-delayed justice. With a crusade against the forces of terrorism and crime that went on around the world, Bolan couldn’t be everywhere at once. But when he arrived, he made up for lost time.

“Anyone catch sight of me?” Bolan asked over his radio.

“Nobody moving your way, no one taking up arms against you,” Grimaldi answered. “You don’t exist.”

Bolan pressed his lips tightly together. “Good, I intend to keep it that way for a while.”

Sliding through the shadows, clad in his skintight blacksuit, Bolan slipped between cargo hold lids and containers on the deck.

With every trailer, he paused and pressed a small cup against the container. The cup contained sensitive electronics that amplified sound and fed it through his LASH radio. The hands-free unit would tell him if there was anyone inside breathing or moving. Whispers would be as clear as straight to his ear. With a quick look over his shoulder, he’d listen for a few minutes, then move on.

He heard the rattle of machinery in most of the containers, metal jostling against metal. He wasn’t certain if it was farm machinery or crates of rifles, but whatever it was, it wasn’t in need of immediate attention.

“We’ve got movement on the bridge,” Grimaldi warned, and the Executioner slipped deeper into shadow, Beretta 93-R at the ready. Dragon Slayer hovered silently, back a full klick, but the Stony Man pilot could keep a close eye with telephoto lenses and other advanced surveillance gear.

Bolan, nearly invisible, looked toward the bridge. A pair of gunmen exited the bridge, being ordered around by the captain, a swarthy man who looked to be from the Mediterranean. The guards were Asian, and they didn’t look happy to be ordered around. The Executioner knew that their mission would be urgent, simply because of their weapons and how quickly they were dismissed by the irate man in command. Bolan closed across the deck, cautious not to let the enemy know he was there.

The guards reached a stairwell that led to the hold, and paused. One lit a cigarette and started to speak in Vietnamese, a language Bolan understood all too well.

“That Italian idiot thinks he can push us around like he owns us…” one man said.

“He’s Greek, not Italian.”

“Greek, Italian, they’re all hook-nosed bastards who think because they have round eyes they can see everything better than we can,” the first man muttered. “I left Dhom Phoc for this?”

“Hey, would you rather live on a commune?” the other man asked. “Pham, we’re making money here.”

Pham tossed away his cigarette, the butt bouncing off the toe of Bolan’s boot as he stood in the shadows. “Yes. Money. I have to remember that. Besides, it’s better than being blown out of the water by the Chinese navy for being pirates.”

The second smuggler laughed. “Don’t worry. Once we get the cargo back to Korea, we’ll be transporting drugs and booze as usual.”

Pham shrugged. “If you say so. Come on.”

They started down the steps and Bolan gave them a few moments lead time before he strolled onto the deck, walking with purpose as if he belonged there. He followed the two Vietnamese smugglers down the steps, Beretta 93-R holstered under his arm. Still, he had the pommel of his forearm knife resting in his palm, ready to slice flesh and draw blood with a simple flick of the wrist.

The two Vietnamese sentries chattered and continued to complain about the Greek man in charge, unaware that they were being followed. Out at sea, with no one around for miles, sailors tended to think that they were immune to intrusion.

One of the Vietnamese looked back and spotted Bolan, and the soldier lifted his hand in a half wave before turning into the first hatchway he could find. The sentry waved back to Bolan and called out something in an unintelligible effort at Italian. The Executioner poked his head out the hatchway and responded in his own Italian.

“What did you say?” he asked, keeping his body and the suspicious-looking blacksuit and battle harness out of sight behind the doorjamb.

The Vietnamese paused and thought hard about what he needed to say. “I said, nice night.”

Bolan smiled. “Wouldn’t know. I’ve been belowdecks all evening. Where are you going?”

The other Vietnamese translated for his less articulate friend, then answered.

“The captain sent us to bring up a couple of girls for some after-dinner entertainment,” the second one said.

Bolan kept the anger out of his face and nodded. “Oh…great.”

“Yeah, I know. Getting that greasy bastard’s leftovers sucks,” the Vietnamese with the better Italian answered.

“We aren’t supposed to be sampling the merchandise,” Bolan mentioned.

“It’s not like the Koreans are going to know anything’s missing. Most of these girls are professionals, so it’s not like the clients are going to expect virgins,” the guard responded.

Bolan shrugged. “Yeah. Well, when the North Korean military brass end up with the clap, you can explain that to Kim Jong-il.”

The chatty guard stepped closer to the doorway. “What?”

Bolan sighed. “Didn’t know that the captain had the gift that keeps on giving?”

The Vietnamese guard looked to his friend and exploded rapidly in his native tongue. “Oh dammit! That greasy Greek gave us the clap!”

The second one’s face paled. “You’re kidding!”

“This guy said the captain has…” The sentry paused and looked back toward Bolan. “Wait…I haven’t seen you bef—”

Bolan reached out and slammed his left hand tightly around the guard’s throat, cutting off whatever else he had to say. The forearm knife dropped into his other hand and launched like a dart. The Executioner’s throw was true, the sharp spike of steel imbedding deeply into the second man’s chest, a gush of blood squirting in a long, lazy, crimson arch.

The wounded guard gurgled, trying to gain his breath, but several inches of steel had pierced his lung, making speech difficult as the organ flooded with blood.

Bolan’s captive enemy struggled to break his grasp, forgetting about his guns. Panic had overtaken the smuggler, and if he had his wits about him, he would have reached for any of his weapons, or even one of Bolan’s pistols, and ended his torment—and the Executioner’s intrusion—with a pull of the trigger. However, fingers like steel savagely crushed his windpipe and jugular, making the Vietnamese resort to primitively hammer against Bolan’s forearm. Given the big man’s musculature, it was akin to trying to punch through a thick oak tree branch.

The Executioner pulled the Beretta and shot his captive’s partner through the forehead, finishing the man’s suffering before his lung completely filled with blood and he drowned. Then he pushed the suppressor between his adversary’s lips and grated in the man’s native language, “You make a sound, you die, even slower than your friend.”

He eased the pressure on his captive’s throat, and the man nodded.

“How many are in the hold?” Bolan asked, pulling the gun back so his hostage could speak.

“We started out with one hundred, but four died already,” the guard said.

Bolan pushed the Vietnamese’s head hard against the unyielding bulkhead. The result was that the pirate’s almond-shaped eyes crossed. “How did they die?”

“Two were already sick…another cut her wrists…and the last one…Captain Tinopoulos beat her to death.”

Bolan’s jaw locked as he put a stopper on his fury. He needed more answers. “How healthy are the rest?”

“They’re still in good shape,” the sentry said. “But some are seasick. At least, they’re throwing up, and they have a fever. We had them belowdecks for two days before we set out.”

Bolan knew it wasn’t seasickness. If these young victims were being sent to Korea, then that meant they were discards from the Thai sex slavery trade. Many of them were probably suffering from heroin or opium withdrawal. The Thai flesh peddlers often used drugs as a very short leash to keep their slaves under control. “Take me to them.”

The guard nodded. “My name is Pham…”

Bolan squeezed his throat more tightly. “I’m not interested.”

Pham coughed and sputtered, “Sorry.” Finally, Bolan released the pressure.

“Shut up,” Bolan said. “You’re not going to get any sympathy from me by telling me your name.”

Pham’s lips pulled tight. “But—”

“You joined in on raping these girls…”

“They’re just pros—”

Bolan’s fingers tightened and Pham’s eyes widened in horror as his feet left the deck. The pressure on his throat was enormous, not only from the crush of the Executioner’s grasp, but the weight of his own squirming body. Pham’s fingers dug into Bolan’s forearm, trying to pry it away to relieve the force of his own mass on his windpipe. “They never chose this life. Not that someone like you would care.”

Bolan let go and Pham crashed to the floor. The guard reached for his weapons, but somewhere along the line, probably in one of those moments when the air was being squeezed out of him, the tall, grim avenger had disarmed him. He crawled on all fours when Bolan stepped on his ankle, pinning him between two hundred plus pounds of muscle and sinew and crushing steel grating. Pham grit his teeth to keep from crying out. Bolan’s hand laced into the Vietnamese’s hair and yanked him up to a kneeling position. “I can find the hold myself. I don’t need a tour guide.”

Pham whimpered. “All right…all right…”

Bolan let go and Pham crawled to his feet. He walked with a limp, but by now, his spirit had been broken. Pham had no will to escape.

“Give me the knife and drag your dead friend into this cabin,” Bolan ordered.

Pham obeyed without a hint of protest. He pried the blade out of the corpse and handed it, pommel first, to Bolan. The soldier put the blade back in its quick-draw forearm sheath.

The Executioner wasn’t a cruel man, but he was practical. A display of just how much pain he could inflict was often enough to prevent an enemy from pushing his luck. It also had given the big warrior the opportunity to vent his rage somewhat.

Bolan had encountered sex slavers before across his career, from Las Vegas to Bangkok, and all points in between. He’d begun his crusade when his teenage sister had been pressed into prostitution by an organized crime group, and the fallout had resulted in his family exploding from within. Those who profited from adults were already scum, but it took a special kind of evil to engage in selling and destroying the innocence of adolescents and children. Bolan still thought of Cindy as a kid, even though she was in her late teens when she’d been forced into “the life,” so this was one crime that the Executioner felt very close to. Though the world was too big for the Executioner to focus on any one brand of evil, he had been lucky enough to get a tip from an ally in Thailand about a large shipment of slaves being shipped to another nation. Bolan figured that he’d deal himself in for this hand. It wouldn’t take long out of his War Everlasting, and he didn’t have any urgent, upcoming missions right now.

It was time the underworld learned once more that trading in human lives was a fatal mistake.

Pham limped along, sufficiently cowed. Since Bolan had demonstrated facility at understanding two of the languages the young man spoke, he doubted Pham would try to warn his friends in another language. Instead, he went silent, sullenly walking what he expected to be his final mile. Bolan wouldn’t have any compunctions if the young smuggler stopped a bullet, but someone would have to live to spread the word to the underworld that an executioner still stalked those who traded in flesh. Every battle Bolan fought, even though it was a very secret war, left a footprint, spreading fear and terror among those who didn’t fear the law.

“Play your cards right, Pham,” Bolan told him in Vietnamese. “I need a messenger to tell the world what happened here. You might just limp away with only a broken ankle.”

After seeing what happened to his partner, Pham considered a broken ankle a small price to pay. As they reached the hold, Pham stopped and looked back at Bolan.

“There are already guards on shift here,” Pham said. “We were just supposed to pick up a couple of girls.”

Bolan nodded. He took Pham’s rifle, dropped its magazine and emptied the chamber. He flicked on its safety and stuck the magazine back in. “It’ll take you too long to cock and get this rifle ready to fire. Don’t even think about it.”

Pham nodded. “I told you, because I don’t want to stop a bullet.”

“Good idea.”

Pham led the way into the hold where the guards were playing cards and smoking cigarettes. The smell of Turkish tobacco assaulted Bolan’s nostrils and he saw several more men of Western European heritage as well as a couple of Asians. Apparently, the Greek and Italian crewmen were sharing some of their vices with their Oriental counterparts. One Asian puffed on a Turkish cigarette, blowing smoke rings as the others laughed.

Shielded by Pham and staying in the shadows, Bolan hadn’t been noticed yet as the Vietnamese smuggler limped along toward the group.

“Hey, the captain wants us to bring up a couple of girls,” Pham called.

“What happened to your foot, Pham?” the smoke-ring-blower asked.

Pham shrugged. “Stupid. I slipped on a step coming down.”

“And Coy?” the ringmaster asked.

“Cap sent me,” Bolan answered in Italian.

One of the Italians squinted through the shadows. “Who—”

Bolan answered with a 9 mm bullet through the Italian’s forehead, his brains exploding out the back of his skull. The others were frozen in shock at the gory death of their compatriot.

Pham swung his rifle around and smashed the smoke-ring-blower across the jaw with its butt, then tossed aside the relatively useless weapon, dropped to the deck and curled up into a ball as Bolan cut loose, flicking the Beretta to burst mode. The Vietnamese sentry had bought the Executioner another heartbeat, and Bolan charged hard into the breech, tribursts of 9 mm slugs chopping into two of the Asian crewmen before they could grab their rifles. Corpses flopped to the floor, weapons clattering atop them when two swarthy Greeks lunged at Bolan.

The Executioner got off a burst into the gut of one of the sailors before the other tackled him, hands clamped around Bolan’s forearm and the Beretta tumbled away. He snaked his foot behind the Greek’s ankles and pushed hard with his forearm, toppling the hapless smuggler to the floor. With a pivot, Bolan buried his heel into the downed smuggler’s solar plexus and pulled his forearm knife. The fallen Greek vomited blood as shattered ribs slashed through his lungs.

A third man, an Italian, reached for the Beretta holstered on his hip, but being only a stride away, the Executioner speared him under the chin with the wicked forearm knife. Sharp steel tore through soft flesh, tongue and the roof of the goon’s mouth before coming to a halt in his brain. Dead on his feet, the gunman toppled backward. Bolan scooped the unused handgun out of the corpse’s insensate fingers and turned the pistol against a third Asian who rushed at him in a blur of speed.

Before Bolan could pull the trigger, a hard kick rammed his forearm. The 9 mm slug speared into the chest of a fourth sailor who was still trying to make sense of the melee, despite the revolver that was clenched in his fist. Bolan whirled with the force of the kick and dropped to one knee. His other leg swept out like a broom and caught the Asian across the knees, hurling him to the floor. The Executioner brought up the Beretta with both hands and fired two bullets into the downed martial artist before he could recover, both slugs smashing through his belly and tearing up into his rib cage.

The wounded man with the revolver coughed up blood and cut loose at the Executioner, but wounded and confused, his gunfire flew wildly. Pham yelled out and wrapped his arms around the sailor’s legs, throwing his balance off even more. Bolan snapped off three shots into the gunman’s head. The slugs crushed bone and burrowed into gray matter.

The hold fell eerily silent.

The Executioner retrieved his machine pistol and holstered it. He lowered the hammer on the handgun in his fist and walked over to the Vietnamese captive. He tapped his toe against Pham’s thigh.

“You can let go. It’s over,” Bolan said.

Pham looked up, eyes bloodshot, forehead damp with sweat. Hair was matted against his bronzed skin, and he took a deep breath.

“Thanks for the assistance,” Bolan said, and helped Pham to his feet.

“I don’t want to die,” the smuggler explained.

Bolan looked at the pommel of his knife poking out the jaw of his third opponent, and considered the blade buried too deep to retrieve easily. He left it pinioned through the skull of the smuggler like some form of cannibalistic shish kebab. The man Pham had hit with the butt of his rifle hadn’t moved, and Bolan felt for a pulse. There was nothing, and the Asian’s neck rolled with nauseating ease on the floor at the slightest touch.

“Broke his neck,” Bolan told him.

Pham shrugged. “Eh. The bastard kept stealing my cigarettes.”

Bolan shook his head. He looked at the containers and from the infrared scans of the ship, he knew which ones were occupied. He didn’t have an accurate map, but it was a good place to begin.

Then he paused, looking into the darkness. The musky scent of livestock filled the air and he realized that half the containers that had registered heat were full of cattle.

“Livestock?” Bolan asked.

“Yeah,” Pham said, limping along. “I don’t get it, either. You’d think the Koreans would find an easier way to get hamburger meat.”

Bolan frowned and looked at one of the livestock cars. An animal looked at him from within, large brown eyes blinking lazily in response. The soldier frowned. “These aren’t Thai livestock.”

“I know,” Pham replied. “It’s weird. All kinds of cattle in Africa and the Middle East, even in Southeast Asia, and the Koreans want European or American stock.”