China White

NARCO BREAKDOWN

The drug syndicate running the heroin pipeline from the Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan crosses a line when it begins hijacking the narco-traffic markets controlled by Asia’s Triads. When the ensuing turf war claims lives on America’s streets, Mack Bolan prepares to do battle—without official sanction. The Executioner is willing to do or die to prevent a bloodbath on U.S. soil.

In a retaliatory strike, Bolan hits New York’s Chinatown, where a scorched earth message ignites fear and uncertainty. Exactly as planned. Now all he has to do is follow the panicked trail to the big predators across the ocean in France and Hong Kong. As his relentless pursuit puts a savage enemy on the defensive, the Executioner homes in for the kill. To cripple both factions, he must successfully play the rivals off each other. Victory means both cartels go down in flames.

The HE grenade blew the door off its hinges

As the triad overlord sprawled across a sofa, bleeding from a gash below his hairline, he fumbled in vain for the semiauto pistols he’d dropped when he was taken down. He stared up into Mack Bolan’s eyes.

“Who are you?”

“I’m your judgment,” Bolan replied, dropping the grenade launcher and whipping out his pistol, drilling the man with a 9 mm Parabellum round between his arched eyebrows. The overlord sagged and slid off the couch, leaving his final thoughts spread over the upholstery.

“Back out the way we came,” Bolan advised Bizhani, brushing past him on the short run toward the service stairs. He now had the Steyr AUG in hand, prepared to greet gunners waiting on the flights below.

Job done, and all that remained now was for the Executioner to get out of here. Alive.

China White

Don Pendleton

Justice should remove the bandage from her eyes long enough to distinguish between the vicious and the unfortunate.

—Robert Ingersoll, 1833–1899

My eyes are clear. I recognize the guilty. They have judged themselves.

—Mack Bolan

For Staff Sergeant Clinton Romesha, U.S. Army

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Confucius Plaza, New York City

Tommy Mu was starting to get nervous. He was due on Mott Street, at the Lucky Dragon, in ten minutes, and he wasn’t sure that he could make it. Being late was bad, particularly with the product he was carrying. It could mean punishment.

But getting killed along the way was worse.

He had been followed from the pickup, though he hadn’t seen the stalkers on his tail until his taxi had crossed Henry Street and rolled into Chinatown. He had begun to let his guard down, relaxing as he made it back to his home turf, and then he’d spotted it: a jet-black SUV he’d glimpsed before, while he was getting in the cab, and hadn’t thought to watch for on the ride downtown.

Stupid.

He should have paid closer attention, should have known there might be watchers, what with all the other crazy shit that had been going on the past few weeks. The SUV’s windshield was tinted just enough that Mu couldn’t make out who was trailing him, but he felt safe in ruling out the DEA. If they’d been on his case, they would have swooped in at the pickup, grabbing him with the product, his supplier with the cash he’d handed over. Get the whole damn ball of wax.

No. This was someone else.

Which only made it worse.

If he’d been busted, Mu could have called his lawyer, posted bail and started thinking about where to run and hide in lieu of facing trial. But these weren’t cops. And that meant, if they took him in, the odds of him coming back were nil. He might wind up in the East River, or he might just disappear.

Whatever. Dead was dead, and Mu wasn’t ready for it.

So he’d told the cabbie that he’d changed his mind about going to Mott Street. He had the hack stop at Confucius Square, where there were people all around, making a snatch more hazardous.

Back in the old days, Mu understood, New Yorkers might have stood and watched him be slaughtered on the street without lifting a hand or bothering to call for help. These days, post–9/11, things were different. Someone would definitely call the cops, and likely film the snatch squad on his or her cell phone at the same time. Now that he was back in Chinatown, someone might even recognize him and call Jimmy Wen.

Not that his boys could reach the scene in time.

The good news: Mu had his equalizer with him, just as always. He preferred the SIG SAUER Mosquito, light and fast, packing ten .22-caliber Long Rifle rounds, its muzzle threaded for attaching a suppressor if he had a special job to do. It wouldn’t knock a man down from a block away, but it would kill him, hell yeah, if you hit him in the right spots, and it didn’t have the shocking recoil of a larger caliber.

The question: would he have a chance to use it if the stalkers moved on him?

The plan: cross Bowery westbound and walk against Bayard Street’s one-way traffic, so the hunters couldn’t follow him. Make them drop down to Pell and try to keep up with him, wondering the whole time if they’d come this far to lose him altogether.

Psy-war, man, he thought. Just hope it works.

If not...

He made the move; dodged into traffic, barely checking left or right, and made it to the other side intact.

So far, so good.

* * *

“YOU’RE LOSING HIM,” Ahmad Taraki growled.

“What can I do?” Babur Kazimi asked him from the driver’s seat. “You see the one-way sign.”

“Turn that way!” Taraki shouted, then cursed with feeling.

He pointed south, toward Pell Street, one-way westbound. They could track their pigeon that way, farther into Chinatown, and pick him up on Mott Street when he tried to cross.

“You sure?” Daoud Rashad asked from the backseat. “He could go some other way or—”

Furious and nearly shouting now, Taraki told his driver, “Do as you are told!”

Kazimi made the turn, horns blaring at them, and Taraki gave them all the finger. He wished he could have sprayed them with the AK-105 he was carrying and shut them up forever. That would be a satisfying moment, but he couldn’t spare the time, much less risk drawing in police before his job was done.

Pell Street was half the length of Bayard and dead-ended into Mott. Taraki had a fair idea of where his boy was going, and their task would be to cut him off before he got there, thus avoiding any payback from his homeboys. It was meant to be a simple job, decisive, not a running firefight through the streets.

“Hurry!” he snapped at Kazimi. “If you let him get away, it’s your ass.”

“Two more minutes,” the driver answered. “But I can’t stop him from going someplace else.”

“Then pray he doesn’t, for your own sake,” Taraki said.

As if God gave a damn whether they caught the man or not.

But Wasef Kamran cared. And if Taraki failed him, there would certainly be hell to pay.

* * *

TOMMY MU FELT BETTER; thought he might have made it after all. Some of the people he passed on Bayard Street were likely wondering why he’d been running past them, jostling a couple here and there, but no one challenged him. They knew better, could recognize him by his haircut, clothes and haste as someone dangerous. They’d be thinking he wasn’t a person to mess with, and their instincts were correct.

Approaching Mott Street, he slowed to a walking pace, figuring the SUV could still be fighting traffic down on Pell. And if it wasn’t...well, he didn’t want to blunder into anything. The package underneath his arm was worth more than his life to Paul Mei-Lun.

Something to bear in mind.

Mu was cautious as he cleared the last few yards, keeping his right hand underneath his jacket, near the Stinger, ready for a quick draw if he needed it. It would be better for him if he ditched the hunters, rather than start a shooting match on his home turf, but he would do whatever was required to make it back alive.

Mott Street was his salvation, one-way traffic running north to south, so even if the SUV caught up with him, its driver couldn’t turn against the flow and follow him to the Lucky Dragon. He’d be safe then, with his brothers all around him, making the delivery. If he was not on time, at least he would be close and no one would have taken the package away from him.

Arriving at the corner, Mu felt sweet relief—until he saw the SUV parked at the corner to his left, downrange. He was about to flip them off, laugh in their faces, until he focused on the black car’s open windows and the weapons angling toward him from inside. Mu wasn’t sure if he should run or pull the Stinger, and before he had a chance to make his mind up it was already too late.

The bullets hit him like a pelting hailstorm, ripping through his stylish jacket, through his flesh, lifting him off his feet. The package underneath his arm burst open, powder rising in a cloud around him as he fell, no longer snow-white as it had been when he’d taken delivery. It was all red and clotted now, with Mu’s blood. Beyond him, farther down the street, the slugs struck others, killing, wounding.

Mu was dead before he hit the sidewalk.

The SUV turned south and vanished into traffic as the first screams rose in Chinatown. Sirens would take a little longer, and they’d be too late.

The war had already begun.

CHAPTER ONE

Manhattan Cruise Terminal

Waiting was the hard part, if you weren’t accustomed to it. Early on, Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, had acquired the gift of patience, something schooled into him by his military training and experience in war zones where a hasty move meant losing everything. It came as second nature to him now, a part of life and every mission that he undertook. He couldn’t always be proactive. Sometimes it came down to sit, and watch, and wait.

Like now.

The ferry from New Jersey was on time, no problem there, and he’d picked out the guys who had been sent to meet it. The two young males were Asian, Chinese American presumably, although they could be FOB for all he knew. Fresh off the boat that was, in common slang, although their journey from Hong Kong, Macau or points west on the Chinese mainland would have brought them to New York by air, or maybe overland from Canada.

No matter.

They were here to do a job, the same as he was. Not the same job, but the three of them were waiting for the same boat and the same guy, carrying a suitcase full of misery.

Bolan wasn’t concerned right now with how the heroin had reached the States from Southeast Asia. He would find that out in time, by one means or another, and pursue the powder trail. This day, right here and now, his job was to follow this shipment to its destination somewhere in the heart of Chinatown and to make sure it went no further.

Ten keys, maybe twelve, as pure as any lab could make it. Ready to be stepped on and distributed to addicts citywide at a tremendous profit for the men in charge. At last report, a kilo went for sixty thousand dollars, wholesale. Cut to 50 percent purity with powdered vitamin B or some other nontoxic substance, it doubled in volume and was then packaged into thirty thousand single-dose glassine envelopes for sale to street dealers at five bucks apiece. That was ninety thousand dollars profit to the cutters, while the dealers turned around and sold each dose for ten to fifteen bucks, somewhere between three hundred thousand and four hundred fifty thousand on the street.

Simple arithmetic. Ten kilos would be worth three million, minimum, in street sales; maybe four point five, with any luck. Who could resist a deal like that?

There would be risks, of course. City and state police, the DEA and FBI, all would be hungry for a major bust to raise their profiles, justify their budgets and convince a weary public that the war on drugs was still worth fighting in these days when the United States jailed more people than any other nation on the planet, at a cost some said was hurting the already-bruised economy.

And then there were the hijackers. Why spend six hundred thousand dollars on a suitcase full of smack if you could rip it off for nothing? Make a score like that, you clipped the rightful owner for the wholesale cost and cleared a cool three million, minus whatever it cost to cut the product. All you had to risk was life and limb.

The pickup team would be well armed, and so was Bolan. On the shotgun seat beside him in his gray Toyota Camry, a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun with a 100-round Beta C-Mag drum lay hidden in a canvas tote bag. Beneath his left arm hung his backup piece: a Glock 22 chambered in .40 caliber, with fifteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. In a crunch, Bolan could empty both guns in something like ten seconds, leaving devastation in his wake.

And he had something else the two young Wah Ching Triad soldiers couldn’t match: experience. He had been fighting for his life before the pair of them was out of grade school. He’d sent hundreds of mafiosi to their graves during his one-man war against the Cosa Nostra, by the FBI’s best estimate, and no one had been keeping score since he had pioneered the war on terrorism, operating on behalf of Uncle Sam.

All that since he had “died”—on paper, anyway—roughly a half mile from the spot where he was parked right now, in Central Park. Broad daylight, he’d been shot to hell, incinerated in front of a flock of witnesses.

Or so the story went.

And maybe it was true what people said. You couldn’t keep a good man down.

He saw the ferry coming now, making its slow and steady way across the broad East River. In the old days, Dutch Schultz and his ilk had dropped their adversaries into that gray water, their feet set in concrete. How many skeletons were down there, even now, their eyeless sockets gazing upward at the ferry as it passed?

Good riddance, Bolan thought. There’d always be a new crop lining up to fill the slots dead mobsters left behind.

As the ferry docked, he raised a pair of compact field glasses and focused on the gangway, waiting for his target to appear.

* * *

“WE SHOULD’VE SENT somebody with him,” John Lin said, watching the ferry as it nosed into the pier.

Smoking a cigarette beside him, Louis Chao said, “He was covered in New Jersey, all the way to boarding.”

“Still, after that shit with Tommy—”

“Nobody’s about to jump him on the ferry,” Chao said, interrupting him. “They can’t get off the boat until it docks, and there’d be cops all over, waiting for them.”

“Right. Sounds good, unless you’re dealing with a bunch of lunatics.”

“Hey, we’re the lunatics, remember?” Chao was smiling at him through a haze of smoke. “And payback’s gonna be a stone-cold bitch.”

“I don’t like all these cars around here,” Lin complained.

“We’re in a parking lot, for Christ’s sake. What did you expect?”

“I mean, they could be anywhere, you know? Just waiting.”

“Then you’d better keep your eyes peeled, Johnny Boy. Be ready for them.”

Lin was ready, even looking forward to it, with his Uzi cocked and locked, ready to rip if anyone looked sideways at the courier they’d come to meet. He was another Wah Ching brother, Martin Tang, who’d carried cash across the river bright and early, met his escorts on the Jersey side, and called home when the deal was done. Now he was on his way back with the skag, and it was Lin’s job to deliver both—the man and what he carried—to their boss in Chinatown.

So Lin was strapped, backing the Uzi with a sleek Beretta Px4 tucked underneath his belt, around in back, and for insurance, in an ankle holster, a little Colt Mustang .380. If none of that worked, he had a Balisong knife with a seven-inch blade in his pocket, sharp enough to shave with or to cut off some miserable lowlife’s head.

All that and Chao still had him outgunned. He’d brought a Bushmaster Adaptive Combat Rifle, made by Remington, and wore a double shoulder holster bearing a matched pair of Glock 33s, chambered for .357 SIG rounds. That still was not enough for his partner, though. He also carried a 4-shot COP .357 Magnum derringer, and just for luck, had put two M-67 fragmentation grenades in the glove compartment of their black Ford Focus.

They were ready for war, and as much as John Lin ached for payback, he hoped they could make it back to the Lucky Dragon without killing anyone along the way. Or getting killed themselves.

“I see him,” Chao said. “He’s just starting down the ramp.”

Tang was younger than Lin by six months or so, but had proved himself in action for the Wah Ching Triad. Nothing super-hideous, a little cutting and a drive-by, but he’d passed the test and this was graduation day. He might be nervous, but it wasn’t showing as he ambled down the ferry’s boarding ramp, keeping it casual among the tourists and commuters, careful not to jostle anybody with his suitcase full of powdered treasure.

It had come a long way from the Golden Triangle, halfway around the planet, to wind up in New York City, where it would keep several thousand junkies flying high and looking forward to their next fix, and the next one after that. Between times, they could rob their neighbors, prostitute themselves, do whatever it took to raise the cash for one more in an endless series of departures from reality. Lin knew the drill and didn’t care what kind of suffering the product ultimately caused, as long as he was paid his share to make it happen.

He was all about free enterprise.

Lin thought of Tommy Mu again and scanned the parking lot with restless eyes. He had a fair idea of who had taken Mu down, and no one he had spotted so far looked the part. They might have hired white boys to do the dirty work, of course, but as Lin understood it, Afghans weren’t averse to bloody hands.

It was something they had in common with the Wah Ching brotherhood.

Tang had disembarked, had seen their car and was moving toward it at a normal walking pace. The trick was not to stand out in a crowd, whether you had a package to deliver or were closing on a hit in broad daylight. Look normal, even boring. Fly under the radar.

“Hey, man, how’d it go?” Chao asked as the courier put his bag in the backseat and slid in next to it.

“No sweat,” Tang replied. “This end?”

“We’re cool,” Chao said.

Lin thought things were okay so far, but kept it to himself.

Two minutes later they were rolling south along 12th Avenue, which would become the Lincoln Highway once they crossed West 42nd Street. From there it was a straight run to the juncture where Canal Street paralleled the Holland Tunnel, and a left turn through Lower Manhattan on their way to Chinatown.

An easy trip, unless you were at war and being hunted.

Lin drove well, obeying all the laws, watching the traffic up ahead and flicking frequent glances at his rearview mirror, watching for a tail.

Eternal vigilance was the price of running an illegal business in New York.

* * *

BOLAN TRAILED THE Ford south at a cautious distance. Taking out the couriers was not part of his plan. He wanted them to lead him home, show him the drop and let him scout the neighborhood for angles of attack.

It wouldn’t be the simplest job he’d ever done. White faces were anomalies in Chinatown. Locals could spot the tourists, often coming by the Gray Line busload, trooping in and out of cheesy shops to drop their money. But a round-eye snooping on his own meant cop or worse, and he’d get nothing in the way of information from the members of that closed community. Start poking into corners on his own, and he could meet resistance well beyond a simple wall of silence.

Picking up the Jersey shipment was a coup of sorts. He’d had to squeeze a dealer for the intel, then make sure his source was in no shape to rat him out to the higher-ups. Call that the first kill on his latest visit to New York, but not the last. Before they found the dealer’s body, Bolan reckoned he’d be finished in Manhattan, likely on his way to some more distant battleground.

But he was taking care of first things first.

There was a war brewing in New York City, ready to explode between the Wah Ching Triad and a gang of interlopers from Afghanistan. Two syndicates financed primarily by the sale of heroin produced in their respective bailiwicks had come to blows, and the prognosis was for worse to come. In other circumstances Bolan would have been content to stand aside and let them kill each other, but the action had already claimed civilian lives and that was where he drew the line.

Police were on it, sure, along with Feds from several agencies. For all he knew, the Afghan angle might be setting off alarms at Homeland Security back in D.C. That made it doubly dicey, jumping into the middle of a war and dodging cops of all persuasions in the process. It was nothing that he hadn’t done before, but still a challenge.

One more chance to do or die.

The Ford was making good time, rolling south with Lincoln Highway turning into West Street once they got past Barrow. Bolan knew they’d likely take Canal Street, veering off southeastward from the river on its way to Chinatown, just south of Little Italy. He’d spent his share of time in that vicinity, as well, when he was hunting killers of a different complexion, but the local Mafia—whatever might be left of it—was safe from him today.

Next week...who knew?

Part of the deal this day was to watch out for other tails. A shipment on the road, ten keys at least, made an inviting target for the other side. The last thing Bolan wanted was to get caught in a cross fire or, worse yet, to see the delivery go up in smoke before he marked its final destination. Later, sure, he’d torch the smack himself, and everyone associated with it.

So he was watching when the midsize SUV with three male passengers became a fixture in his rearview. Bolan made it as a Chevy Trailblazer, as black as the Ford that he was following, hanging behind him in no rush to pass. It could be coincidence, since Bolan hadn’t seen the vehicle at the ferry terminal, but he already had that itchy feeling he’d learned to trust in situations where his life was riding on the line.

A tail, maybe. He bumped it up to definitely when the shotgun rider shifted in his seat and let the muzzle of a weapon rise above the dash for just an instant. It was there and gone but Bolan caught it, and he didn’t think it was a pogo stick, a fishing pole or the antenna on a satellite phone. Those were hunters in the SUV. The only question now: were they on Bolan’s tail or following the heroin?

He got his answer as they closed in on Canal Street where it split, divided by Canal Park’s wedge of greenery between the west-and eastbound lanes. The Chevy made its move then, swinging out to pass Bolan’s Toyota, speeding up to overtake the Ford. Some kind of hit was going down in front of him, and Bolan had to make a split-second decision.