China White
Should he intervene or wait to see how good the Wah Ching gunners were at self-defense? How many innocent civilians on their way home from a job or shopping errand would be placed in danger if he sat it out—or if he jumped into the middle of the game?
Scowling, he pulled his MP5K from its canvas tote and stepped on the Camry’s accelerator, playing catch-up on a one-way ride to Hell.
* * *
“YOU WANT TO take them here?” Babur Kazimi asked.
“Not yet,” Ahmad Taraki answered. “Wait until we’re past the park and all the little kiddies, eh?”
“Closer to Chinatown,” Kazimi told him in a cautionary tone.
“Not that far,” Taraki replied. “Just be ready when I tell you.”
Turning to Daoud Rashad in the backseat, he said, “And you, too.”
“I was ready when we started,” Rashad answered.
Taraki had taken some heat on the last hit about the civilians who’d been in his way when they’d taken down the target, but that was a risk of street fighting. The goal had been achieved regardless, and a message had been sent. The Wah Ching Triad was on notice that their days of peddling heroin outside Chinatown were coming to an end. There was a new force to be reckoned with, and the gang would have to step aside or face extinction.
Taking down this shipment from New Jersey, after it had traveled halfway around the world from somewhere in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, would drive home the lesson while putting a cool three million dollars, give or take, into the coffers of Taraki’s crime Family. If he went back without the drugs, there would be no forgiveness from Wasef Kamran. In fact, it would be better if he did not return at all.
Kazimi made the left-hand turn onto Canal Street, rolling past the park. Taraki saw the children playing there, some adults walking dogs, oblivious to what was happening around them. They existed in a world as different and distant from his own as life on Jupiter, believing that their trivial concerns were all that mattered. Braces on the kiddies’ teeth, a raise at work, a plastic bag for dog crap in a purse or pocket when they took a stroll. The daily grind for wage slaves in the city.
But somewhere within the next half dozen blocks, before the Wah Ching couriers had crossed the borderline of Chinatown, Taraki meant to give the drones around him a surprise. A little glimpse of life in his world, where the struggle for survival meant exactly that. If someone got between Taraki and his target...well, they’d simply have to die.
Stopping the Ford was no great problem. Shoot the driver, shoot the engine, shoot the tires. The operative word was shoot. But at the same time, even knowing that the Ford was bound to crash, its occupants riddled with bullets, getting to the heroin remained Taraki’s top priority. He couldn’t let it burn, and he would get no thanks if he returned the suitcase shot to hell, blood soaking through the plastic bags inside it. He’d been ordered to deliver, and the shipment had to be intact.
Case closed.
“Remember what I told you,” he advised Rashad, half turning in his seat.
“Head shots. No problem.”
Rashad could shoot, no problem there. Back home he’d been a member of the Afghan National Army Commando Brigade, created by the U.S. and its Coalition allies to hunt members of the Taliban. Taraki didn’t know how many men Rashad had killed before the brass cashiered him, citing his excessive zeal in clearing rural villages, but no one ever questioned his ability or willingness to pull a trigger. Stopping him once he got started was another matter, thus the warning in advance to keep it clean and not indulge in sloppy overkill.
“No damage to the suitcase,” Taraki said, driving home his point.
“I know the difference between a suitcase and a man,” Rashad gruffly replied.
Taraki let it go. Making his backseat shooter angry, seconds prior to firing on the enemy, would be a foolish move.
Instead he turned back to Kazimi. “No collision with their car, remember,” he commanded.
“Paint chips. FBI lab. Yodel-yodel.”
Meaning yada-yada, Taraki thought, but correcting the driver was a waste of time and energy. He’d never come to grips with English slang, habitually garbling what he learned from television.
They were approaching Hudson Street and its intersection with Canal. A block beyond it lay another park, this one located on Taraki’s right. The neighborhood was called Tribeca—meaning, as Taraki understood it, “Triangle Below Canal Street”—sprawling out immediately west of Chinatown.
This was their last chance for a hit outside Wah Ching Triad turf.
Taraki cocked his AKS-74U carbine, the shortest and lightest Kalashnikov made. It measured nineteen inches with its skeletal stock folded to the left side, and weighed six pounds without its magazine containing thirty 5.45 mm rounds. Its automatic rate of fire was 700 rounds per minute, but he’d set the fire selector switch for semiauto, playing safe. A clean shot through the head was better than a spray of fire to shred the driver’s body while the Ford went racing like a rocket sled across the park.
But could he pull it off?
Taraki hit the button for his window, instantly rewarded with a rush of warm air in his face, and twisted in his seat, tracking the driver with the V-notch of his weapon’s open sights.
* * *
AS SOON AS Bolan saw the rifles jutting from the Chevy’s windows, he immediately had a choice to make. He could hang back and let it happen, let the trackers and his targets fight it out, then maybe waste the winners, or he could attempt to intervene.
For what?
No matter how it played, once shooting started, the Wah Ching gunners would not be leading him to their HQ in Chinatown. That move was foiled the second that the third car joined their little caravan and made its move to strike. Beyond that plan, he didn’t care if the young gangsters lived or died—would probably have wound up killing them himself, in time—but he did care about the innocents going about their business, motoring along Canal Street as it turned into a battle zone.
He let the Camry drift, came up behind the Trailblazer and gave its right rear bumper just the slightest nudge, then backed away. It was enough to spoil the shooters’ aims, their first rounds jarred off-target, gouging shiny divots in the black Ford’s roof.
The Wah Ching driver gunned it, rapidly accelerating, while his backseat passenger—the one they’d picked up at the ferry terminal—rolled down his window, ready to return fire.
Bolan rolled down his window and reached across with his left hand to lift his submachine gun, even as he checked his rearview for patrol cars. They were clear so far, but every driver and pedestrian along Canal Street likely had a cell phone and was fumbling for it now, to punch up 9-1-1 and shout some garbled message about gunfire on the road.
No time to waste, then.
Bolan swung his MP5K out the window, bracing it against his wing mirror, and fired a 3-round burst into the SUV’s lift gate. The 9 mm Parabellum rounds shattered the tinted glass, one of them flying on to crack the windshield while another ripped the backseat dome light from its socket. Bolan knew the hunters had to be going crazy in there, wondering who had brought them under fire, just as the Wah Ching gunner who had brought the heroin from Jersey started popping at them with a semiauto pistol.
Bolan swung his stuttergun around to fire a burst across the Camry’s hood, stitching three holes across the Ford’s C-pillar inches from the triad gunner’s face and shooting arm. The young man lurched backward, out of sight, just as his wheelman tried to milk more speed out of the Ford’s 2.0-liter Duratec engine. A short burst from the Chevy’s shotgun rider ripped across the Ford’s trunk as it fled, while Bolan saw the backseat shooter leaning well out of the SUV to bring his Camry under fire.
He swerved back to the left-hand lane, putting himself behind the Trailblazer just as his adversary loosed a burst, his bullets wasted on thin air. Bolan responded with another three rounds through the lift gate’s yawning maw, putting them roughly where the SUV’s tail gunner ought to be. This time the Chevy veered off to starboard, running up behind the Focus in Canal Street’s right-hand lane, its left rear window gliding down to give the soldier in the rear another angle on his mark.
Bolan was faster, falling into line behind the Chevrolet and pumping three more rounds into it. When the SUV began to swerve, he guessed he might have winged the driver, but it straightened out again in seconds flat and Bolan had to duck a short burst rattling through the blank space where the lift gate used to be. Most of the bullets missed, but one punched through his windshield near the upper frame and sent his rearview mirror flying somewhere toward the seat behind him.
It became a duel then, Bolan swerving back and forth to keep the Chevy shooter guessing, ruining his aim, and all the while returning 3-round bursts that scarred the SUV’s tailgate, rattling around inside the passenger compartment. In the driver’s seat, wounded or not, the Chevy’s driver did whatever he could think of to evade incoming rounds, while still pursuing his intended targets in the Ford.
They’d nearly cleared the park when the Trailblazer swung around as if to pass the Wah Ching vehicle, then swerved hard right to slam the Ford along its driver’s side and force it off the pavement onto sloping grass. Tires churned brown tracks across the turf, lost traction, turned them into long sidewinding loops, the Chevy following the Ford and both cars spitting gunfire. Civilians scattered, ran for cover where some scattered trees provided it, or simply hit the ground and prayed.
It was not what he’d hoped for, but the Executioner had long since mastered adaptation in adversity. Without a second thought he braced himself and swung off-road, trailing the two combatant vehicles into the wedge-shaped park between Canal Street and Sixth Avenue.
CHAPTER TWO
Two Days Earlier
Winchester Regional Airport
Frederick County, Virginia
“I could have driven down,” Bolan said to Jack Grimaldi after their handshake on the tarmac.
“What, and miss the pleasure of my company?” Grimaldi replied, smiling.
“Point taken. Any idea what we’re looking at?”
Grimaldi shook his head, saying, “I got a call to show up here and prep the chopper. End of story.”
Sitting on the helipad in front of them, the chopper was a Fairchild Hiller FH-1100 four-seater, powered by a Rolls-Royce M-250 turboshaft engine. It was small, as helicopters went, just under twenty-eight feet long and nine feet high, with a maximum takeoff weight of 2,750 pounds. It cruised at 122 miles per hour, with a service ceiling of 14,200 feet and a range of 348 miles. It was enough to make the eighty-odd-mile trip to Stony Man Farm and back four times.
“I’ve done the checklist,” Grimaldi said, “if you want to get on board.”
Bolan secured his carry-on behind the copilot’s seat, then settled in and buckled up, donning the headphones that would be required for any kind of normal conversation once Grimaldi switched on the chopper’s engine. The soldier’s old friend was at his side a moment later, strapped into the pilot’s seat, scanning the perimeter and checking gauges, engaging the clutch switch, contacting the tower in preparation for liftoff. Once they were airborne, Bolan settled back and let himself appreciate the scenery.
Winchester was located in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, between the Appalachian Mountains and the Blue Ridge range. They would be following the path of Skyline Drive, a 105-mile road running the length of Shenandoah National Park, until they reached Stony Man Farm and set the chopper down some ten miles north of Waynseboro.
It would be safe to land because they were expected. Uninvited drop-ins didn’t happen at the Farm, the secret base of the nation’s top antiterrorist squads—at least not twice for any given trespasser. Tall fences posted with specific warnings kept the normal hikers out. Those who arrived with mischief on their minds—a rare occurrence—would be taken into custody for questioning, all depending on the circumstances. Any aircraft that attempted to land on the property without advance approval would be blasted from the sky by FIM-92 Stinger missiles or shredded in flight by M134 Miniguns spewing four thousand 7.62 mm NATO rounds per minute.
It was serious business if you were on the receiving end.
Bolan normally drove to the Farm, and often spent his downtime there if he was in-country between assignments, but this time he had been mopping up a little something in St. Louis when the summons came from Hal Brognola, routing him to Winchester, where Jack Grimaldi waited with the whirlybird. Brognola would be flying down from Washington—had likely reached the Farm ahead of them, in fact—with information on a rush job he had marked for handling by the Executioner.
It could be anything, as Bolan knew from long experience. He didn’t try to second-guess Brognola based on what was in the news from Asia, Africa, wherever. Crises-making headlines were normally covered by established law enforcement or intelligence agencies, while Stony Man tried to stay ahead of the curve, defusing situations that were working up to detonation or pursuing fugitives who had outwitted every other operative sent to bag them. Stony Man—and, by extension, Bolan—was the court of last resort, employed when following “The Book” had failed and nothing else would do except a hellfire visit from a fighting man who specialized in neutralizing human predators.
So it was going to be bad. He knew that going in, and focused on the woodland scenery below instead of trying to imagine just how bad it might turn out to be. Sufficient unto each day was the evil it contained.
Amen.
A line of white-tailed deer crossing Skyline Drive paused to glance up at the helicopter passing overhead before they bolted, seeking cover in the forest on the other side. Another half mile farther on, two motorcycles rode in tandem, northbound, trailing vapor from their tailpipes in the chilly morning air.
The flight from Winchester took forty minutes, give or take, approximately half the time it would have taken Bolan to drive down from Washington once he had cleared the capital itself. He liked the drive, relaxing in whatever vehicle he happened to be using at the moment, but if Brognola wanted Grimaldi on the new assignment that meant there would be more flying in their future, maybe international.
No problem.
He was up to date on his inoculations, kept himself informed on all the major hot spots of the world and could absorb whatever job-specific information might be necessary as he went along. Specifics varied, but his task remained essentially the same: apply force to some selected enemy or obstacle until said enemy or obstacle had been eliminated. Bolan rarely took prisoners, obeyed no rules beyond a code of conduct that was self-imposed and didn’t worry about finding evidence to build a case in court.
The jobs reserved for him had gone beyond that stage of civilized behavior. Bolan’s specialty was going for the jugular and hanging on until his enemies no longer had an ounce of fight or life left in them. Whether it was sniping from a mile away or fighting hand to hand, he was a master of his craft.
Thirty-seven minutes out, Grimaldi raised the Farm by radio and confirmed that they were cleared for touchdown at the heliport behind the rambling farmhouse that served as headquarters for the Stony Man teams. Once they were cleared, he veered away from Skyline Drive, flew over treetops and then swept across cultivated fields that marked the Farm itself.
It was a farm, in fact, producing crops in season, but the “farm hands” were selected from elite groups of the U.S. military, Special Forces, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs and the Marine Special Operations Regiment, as well as the occasional police officer or FBI agent. They worked a short rotation under oath-bound vows of secrecy, dressed in civilian garb but never without weapons close at hand. Those assigned to watch the gates were courteous but firm with wayward travelers. And if a prowler managed to intrude, well, courtesy was no longer an issue. On occasion these farm hands, also known as blacksuits, provided backup to Bolan.
The soldier saw the farmhouse now. It felt like coming home, but any sanctuary that he found at Stony Man was temporary. As Grimaldi hovered for his landing, Bolan wondered where his War Everlasting would take him next.
* * *
STEPPING FROM THE chopper in a whirl of rotor wash, Bolan saw Barbara Price, Aaron Kurtzman and Hal Brognola waiting for him on the far side of the helipad. The big Fed had begun to show his age, but kept in shape with a determined regimen he cheerfully despised. Price was drop-dead gorgeous; no change there. Kurtzman—“the Bear,” to friends—was in the wheelchair where a bullet to the spine had left him when Stony Man’s security was seriously breached.
They all knew Bolan too well for the standard handshake ritual, reduced in Brognola’s case to a nod as Jack Grimaldi joined them after shutting down the copter. “You made good time,” he observed.
“Tailwind,” Grimaldi offered with a crooked smile.
“Something to eat or...?”
“We might as well get to it,” Bolan said.
Brognola nodded and then led the way inside. They got a “Hey, guys!” from Akira Tokaido, the youngest member of the Farm’s cybernetic team, who passed them in a hallway, doing something with a tablet.
There was room for all five of them in the spacious elevator; it was a short ride to the basement. Kurtzman led them to the War Room, his wheelchair moving silently toward a door with a keypad. He keyed in a short sequence of numbers and gained entry.
Inside, a conference table with a dozen seats stood waiting. Brognola went for the single chair at the far end, where a 152-inch flat-screen TV was mounted on the wall behind and above him. Bolan took the chair to the big Fed’s left, facing Price across the table, with Grimaldi at his side. Kurtzman rolled to the table’s other end, where a keyboard controlled the room’s lights and the giant TV.
“We’ve got a problem in New York,” Brognola said by way of introduction. “There’s a drug war coming, and it has already claimed three civilian lives.”
Bolan decided not to ask why it was their problem instead of the DEA’s or the NYPD’s. Brognola liked to set the stage, and as he spoke, the giant screen behind him came alive with news footage of bodies on a sidewalk stained with blood, two uniformed policemen grappling with a Chinese man who tried to bull his way past them, tears streaming down his face.
“Mott Street,” Brognola said. “Manhattan’s Chinatown, two days ago. The target was a member of the Wah Ching Triad, who was carrying a key of heroin. In one shot there, you see some of it on the sidewalk.”
Bolan saw it, like a sugar dusting on the sidewalk mixed with blood. A pastry recipe from Hell.
“The shooters, we believe, are from an Afghan outfit that’s been growing since the DEA took down the Noorzai organization in 2008.”
Bolan knew the basics on Haji Bashir Noorzai, the widely touted, widely hated Asian counterpart of Medellín’s late Pablo Escobar. He’d battled Russian forces in the Reagan years and then served as mayor of Kandahar while selling weapons to the Taliban regime, then switched to aid the U.S. after 9/11, handing over tons of small arms and antiaircraft missiles to the CIA. Since then he’d made a fortune smuggling heroin, largely ignored—some said protected—by America’s intelligence community. Finally convicted in 2008, he had been sentenced to life imprisonment, leaving the remnants of his empire up for grabs.
“Who’s filling in for him?” Bolan asked.
“It’s a whole new crew,” Brognola said. “The man on top, we understand, is one Khalil Nazari.” Cue a string of mug shots, candid photos and a strip of video that showed a swarthy, mustached man emerging from a Humvee, flanked by bodyguards. “He’s forty-five years old and everything a drug lord ought to be. We all know what’s been going on with heroin since the invasion.”
More bad news. During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, regional warlords had financed their guerrilla war with opium, then kept it up with CIA support as they struggled to fill the power vacuum left by Soviet withdrawal in 1989. The Taliban had dabbled in drug trafficking, producing a bumper crop of 4,500 metric tons in 1999, then collaborated with the United Nations to suppress the trade, encouraged by a $43 million “eradication reward” from Washington in early 2001. Everything changed that September, and the warlords had returned with a vengeance, pushing opium and heroin production to the point that drugs accounted for 52 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP and an estimated 80 percent of the world’s smack supply. The Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan had eclipsed Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle in drug exports, and Bolan knew the triads weren’t exactly thrilled by that development.
In fact, it was enough to start a war.
And now, apparently, it had.
Brognola forged ahead, saying, “Nazari’s front man in New York, we’re pretty sure, is this guy.” Cue a younger thug on-screen. “Wasef Kamran, age thirty-one. Supposedly provided information on bin Laden to the Company, but nothing that panned out.”
“So they’re protecting him?” Grimaldi asked.
“I didn’t say that,” Brognola responded, “but I couldn’t rule it out, either.”
“Terrific.”
“On the triad side,” the big Fed said, pressing ahead, “their ‘dragon head’ or ‘mountain master,’ as they like to call him, is a character called Ma Lam Chan.” More video and still shots on the giant flat screen. “Home for him is Hong Kong, where it seems he’s reached some kind of an accommodation with the PRC authorities.”
Bolan translated in his head. The People’s Republic of China had reclaimed the teeming offshore island of Hong Kong in 1997, after something like 150 years of British colonial rule. Despite Washington’s fears that the Reds would wreak havoc on Hong Kong’s thriving capitalist economy, little had changed overall. The worst problems suffered so far had been unexpected outbreaks of disease, each claiming several hundred lives. Meanwhile, cash registers kept ringing and the drugs kept flowing to the West.
“Chan’s guy in New York—” pictures changed on the screen once more “— is Paul Mei-Lun. I’m never sure about his rank. He’d either be a ‘red pole,’ which is an enforcer, or a liaison officer, which they call a ‘straw sandal.’ Take your pick. Either way, he’s in charge on our end and he’s squared off against the Afghans.”
“Deport him,” Grimaldi suggested. “What’s the problem, if you know he’s dirty?”
“That’s the problem,” Brognola replied. “Somehow he came into Manhattan squeaky-clean, at least on paper. He has all the proper documents from Beijing’s end, and State saw no good reason to reject his entry visa. Now he’s here and all that DEA can say is that they’re working on a case against him. There’s nothing solid they can hang a warrant on.”
“Homeland Security?” Bolan suggested. “If the Reds have bent the rules somehow to smooth his way—”
“There’s still no proof of that. And while we’re working on it, Chinatown’s about to be ground zero in a war that’s making no allowance for civilians.”
“So, we’ll be putting out the fire,” Bolan observed.
“For starters,” Brognola agreed. “Beyond that, we should think about discouraging round two, three, four, whatever. Make them gun-shy, somehow. As for details...”
Bolan nodded, thinking that was where he came in.
* * *
THE SOLDIER’S “HOME” at Stony Man was modest; nothing but a bedroom with a private bath. There were a few books on a solitary shelf, mostly suggested reading from Kurtzman, a small TV with DVD player and a laptop with a DSL connection. When his downtime found him there, it was enough.
The only ghosts in residence were those that traveled with him—inescapable.