China White
Mei-Lun peered at his watch again, counting the hours since the slaughter on Canal Street, guessing how long it would take to have a team airborne from Hong Kong to the States. As he remembered it, the flight to San Francisco took approximately fifteen hours, then they’d face another seven hours in the air, if they were fortunate enough to catch a nonstop flight from Frisco to LaGuardia or JFK. If they were airborne now, Mei-Lun shouldn’t expect to see them nosing around Chinatown until sometime tomorrow afternoon.
No sweat.
He’d have the problem solved by then, the merchandise in hand, and they could tell Chan that he’d taken care of business without any interference from the East. And if that didn’t satisfy the Dragon Head, perhaps they ought to meet and talk about it, face-to-face.
Maybe, Mei-Lun decided, it was time for him to think about advancement in the Family.
Flushing, Queens
“THIS MAKES NO SENSE, WASEF,” Ghulam Munadi said.
Wasef Kamran shrugged in response. “This man stole heroin we planned to steal, and now he wants to sell it. What confuses you?”
“First, that he knows the number where to reach you.”
“Anyone can find a number nowadays,” Kamran replied. “The internet is free to all, and this man has skills.”
“Too many skills,” Munadi countered. “He is some kind of policeman. I’m convinced of it.”
“Some kind? What kind? He asks for money to return an item that was stolen. There is nothing to incriminate us, eh?”
“Until we claim the bag. Then they arrest us.”
“Think, Ghulam! Would the police kill six men in the public eye, then steal the drugs just to arrest us?” Kamran did not wait for his lieutenant to reply. “Of course not! If this person is a cop, he’s more like us. Trying to save a little for retirement, eh?”
“And what if it’s a trap?” Munadi asked.
“I can assure you that it is. We seem to take the bait, then close the noose around his neck. With fifteen men, what can he do?”
Munadi frowned. “I don’t like going to this island.”
“Tell me what you do like, Ghulam. It’s a shorter list, I’m sure.”
“What I would like is to forget this business. Since we can’t do that, I’d like you to remain here under tight security until the bag has been retrieved and this is settled.”
“Stay at home and miss the show this bastard has planned for me especially? I wouldn’t think of it.”
“You’ll wear the Kevlar, though?”
“Of course. I’m not an idiot,” Kamran replied.
He would be armed, as well, with his usual sidearm for a start, a Heckler & Koch P30 chambered in .40 S&W, with a 13-round magazine. To back it up, another favorite: the Spectre M4 submachine gun with its casket magazine containing fifty 9 mm Parabellum rounds, less than fourteen inches long with its metal stock folded above the receiver. With the Spectre he could lay down 800 rounds per minute, killing anyone or anything that stood between him and his goal.
Including this killer who believed that he could dupe Kamran somehow, perhaps make off with Kamran’s hard-earned money, and the heroin besides.
“Good luck with that,” he muttered to himself.
“What did you say?” Munadi asked.
“Nothing. Go and make sure the men are ready. We should leave soon.”
“But it’s only—”
“Yes, I know the time. I want to be there, waiting, when our friend arrives. Let us surprise him, eh?”
“As you wish it, Wasef.”
He was looking forward to the meeting with this stranger who had robbed him—or, in truth, who’d robbed the Chinese Kamran had meant to rob. He felt a sneaking kind of admiration for such courage and audacity, but it required a harsh response to salvage Kamran’s reputation as a man whose enemies enjoyed short, miserable lives.
This one, whoever he might be, would have been wiser to go hunting somewhere else, perhaps rob the Jamaicans or Dominicans, maybe the damned Armenians. He was about to learn a lesson that Afghanis had been teaching Westerners since 1839. Kamran’s people could not be vanquished in their homeland—not by England, Russia or America—and now they were expanding into every corner of the planet to assert themselves and claim their proper share of wealth.
This night, Roosevelt Island. This time next year, perhaps Manhattan. And beyond that...who could say? It was a whole new world, beyond Khalil Nazari’s wildest dreams from Kabul, where the old ways mired him down. Perhaps a younger, stronger man was needed to command that new domain and bend it to his will.
Job one: collect the heroin without dispensing any cash to the audacious thief. Then, having proved himself, Wasef Kamran could think about tomorrow and the great things he was going to accomplish.
All he had to do was make it through the night alive.
Roosevelt Island
BOLAN PARKED HIS latest rental car, a Honda CR-V, in the visitor’s lot at Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital, and made his way to the roof of the X-shaped facility’s northwestern wing. From there he had a view across treetops to Lighthouse Park, where his intended targets would be showing up, at least in theory, sometime in the next three hours.
Waiting was a sniper’s specialty. Bolan likely could not have counted all the times he’d lain in wait for enemies in heat and cold, under a drenching rain, while insects crawled over his skin and hummed around his ears. He’d learned to lie in perfect stillness, barely breathing, while a target took its own sweet time about appearing, stepping finally into the crosshairs of his telescopic sight and dying there, struck down from half a mile or more away, with no idea how death had come so suddenly, without a hint of warning.
He was ready now, with his weapon of choice for this phase of the hunt, an M-110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System manufactured by Knight’s Armament in Florida. The rifle measured 46.5 inches with its buttstock extended and a suppressor attached, tipping the scales at just over fifteen pounds with a 20-round magazine full of 7.62 mm NATO rounds. Its AN/PVS-10 night sight would let him place accurate shots out to 875 yards, nearly nine times the range he would be firing from this night. It should be like shooting fish in a barrel.
But these fish might be shooting back.
His plan was simple: place the Afghans and Wah Ching hardmen into proximity, both looking for the same thing, then cut loose and see what happened next. A well-placed shot or two might do the trick, but if the opposition needed any more help, Bolan had a stack of extra magazines on hand and was prepared to use as many as the job required.
Scorched earth, all the way.
He didn’t need to rattle either side for information, since the next stop on his tour had been determined in advance. Khalil Nazari’s opium was processed into bricks of morphine near the poppy fields he cultivated in Afghanistan. Bolan knew approximately where the morphine bricks were sent for their conversion into heroin. The details he did not as yet possess would be available when he arrived on-site, secured by one means or another to complete the next link in the chain.
This night he would be shutting down the pipeline in Manhattan. Not for good; no one could claim permanent victory in any war against a human craving for release. But Bolan could remove the major players in this one dark corner of the world. Maybe incite some other scavengers to take each other off the board while they were grappling to fill the power vacuum that resulted.
Doing what he could with what he had.
His field of fire was open from the hospital’s six-story rooftop to the Blackwell Island Light, four hundred feet northeast of where he sat cradling the rifle, waiting. Once the action started, Bolan’s enemies could break in one of three directions: toward the light, away from him; to cars parked on the left or right, against the river’s edge; or back toward Bolan, seeking refuge among trees that formed a kind of horseshoe shape at his end of the park. Whichever way they ran, it would be under fire from Bolan and from adversaries on the other side, who’d come expecting to go home with ten kilos of heroin.
How many would go home at all?
Bolan never indulged in overconfidence. He trained and practiced, planned and double-checked his plans, then trusted to his own experience and skill. That recipe had kept him in the game so far, but he did not deceive himself into believing that his luck would hold forever. No one had that guarantee, and least of all a fighting man who put himself in harm’s way constantly.
His greatest apprehension at the moment was that Paul Mei-Lun or Wasef Kamran might decide to stay at home, let their gorillas keep the date and see what came of it. If he missed one or both of them this night, he’d have to stick around New York until the job was done, giving his adversaries at the next stop more time to prepare themselves.
For all the good that it would do them.
Even with the news of his Manhattan blitz, they wouldn’t know with whom they were dealing.
They would not be prepared to meet the Executioner.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lighthouse Park, Roosevelt Island
“Remember, everyone,” Paul Mei-Lun said. “No shooting till we see the bag. It’s all for nothing if we go back empty-handed.”
The shooters riding with him in the Hummer H2 all nodded like a bunch of bobbleheads. In Mei-Lun’s hand, a walkie-talkie crackled and a voice came to him from the second vehicle, trailing behind his, with the other Wah Ching soldiers he’d selected for the showdown.
“Got it, boss.”
They were armed to the teeth and stopping for no one, including police. There could be no explaining the weapons they carried, and Mei-Lun knew he was running a risk with the Hummers. CNN had told him they were ticketed by traffic cops five times as often as most other vehicles, and Mei-Lun himself had enough citations to believe it.
But anyone who tried to flag them down this night, Mei-Lun vowed, was shit out of luck.
Truth be told, he was amped for a killing. The skag heist, the loss of four men in a week... It was all bearing down on him, making him look bad, stretching his nerves like piano wire. He needed an outlet, and whether they got back the suitcase or not, someone was bound to die on the island.
Mei-Lun could personally guarantee it.
Once they’d cleared the tunnel from Manhattan—always claustrophobic for him, though he tried to hide it—they got onto Main Street near the tram station and barreled northward, past the interchange for 36th Avenue and the Roosevelt Island Bridge to Queens, rolling on until Main Street turned into East Road. A giant hospital bulked up beside them on the left, and they slowed down, continuing along the narrow road that led out toward the lighthouse on the island’s northern headland.
Looking at a map before he’d left the Lucky Dragon, Mei-Lun thought that Roosevelt Island looked like a giant condom afloat in the river, right down to what Trojan ads called the “reservoir tip.” He’d started laughing, and his soldiers couldn’t understand it, but he hadn’t bothered to explain. Better if they believed that he was laughing in the face of death than spotting crazy shapes on a road map.
Mei-Lun double-checked the QBZ-95 assault rifle he’d chosen for their little safari. It was the latest thing from China, a bullpup design chambered for the 5.8 mm DBP87 cartridge. Smuggled from his homeland in bulk, the QBZ-95 was selective-fire, feeding from a 30-round box magazine with a cyclic rate of 650 rounds per minute in full-auto mode. The 5-grain full-metal-jacket rounds traveled at 2,900 feet per second and delivered 1,477 foot-pounds of energy on impact, their streamlined shape and steel core designed for increased range and penetration.
Not that he’d be needing any kind of long-range skills this night. The meeting ground, according to his phallic map, was no more than one hundred yards across, its only cover the arc of shade trees screening the hospital’s north-facing windows from the glare of the lighthouse. Their target, whoever he was, should be clearly visible and easy to kill when the time came.
As soon as he showed them the bag filled with sweet China white.
“We’re almost there,” his driver said, and Mei-Lun grunted in reply. He had already seen the lighthouse standing tall against the skyline, sweeping the dark water with its beam to help the barges find their way. The Hummer’s headlights weren’t much competition, but they showed Mei-Lun the sweep of grass where this night’s action would play out.
“We’re early,” someone muttered from the backseat.
“As intended,” Mei-Lun said.
Then he addressed his wheel man. “Stop here. Kill the lights.”
A moment later they were sitting in the near dark with the Hummer’s engine ticking. From the back, again, one of his soldiers said, “Nobody here.”
Mei-Lun palmed the walkie-talkie, giving it to all of them at once. “Get out and take your places. Anybody fires before I give the word, he’s dead.”
* * *
BOLAN TRACKED THE Hummers through his AN/PVS-10 nightscope until they parked and Wah Ching soldiers started climbing out, all clutching long guns. Bolan counted off a dozen targets armed with automatic rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, picked out Paul Mei-Lun among them, then went back to watching for the other team.
The triad boss had played it smart, coming an hour early to the meet and staking out his men to cover both approaches, east and west of Lighthouse Park. It was a sound move, sensible, maybe the best that he could manage without formal military training or a sniper’s long view toward the waiting game. He had the park well covered, but he obviously hadn’t given any thought to checking out the nearby hospital.
Too public and too risky. Now, too late.
Before he’d come out to the island, Bolan had detoured past a vacant lot off FDR Drive, near the Queensboro Bridge, and dumped the stolen heroin, torching it with a can of lighter fluid he’d picked up in transit. The smack was up in smoke, long gone, but still working to Bolan’s benefit, drawing his targets into rifle range.
And now he saw more headlights sweeping toward the park, coming along West Road. A Lincoln Town Car led the new arrivals, followed by a matched pair of Volkswagen Phaetons. They rolled past the hospital’s northwestern wing, slowing as they closed in on the park and the lighthouse beyond. The Lincoln coasted to a halt beyond the tree line, and the Phaetons followed suit.
He waited, watching through the nightscope while doors opened on the luxury sedans and more men bearing weapons stepped onto the pavement, fanning out in a defensive formation. Bolan had no trouble picking out Wasef Kamran, the Lincoln’s shotgun rider, carrying a Spectre M4 SMG. The men arrayed around him were all similarly armed, mostly with variations of the tried and true Kalashnikov assault rifle.
Bolan counted fifteen Afghans below him, giving them a three-man edge over the Wah Ching team. He saw lips moving, couldn’t tell what they were saying, but he registered surprise on Kamran’s face when Paul Mei-Lun stepped from the shadows to reveal himself.
A frozen moment passed, then Kamran shouted something to his rival, probably a question, possibly a challenge. Mei-Lun shouted something back and stood his ground, confusion written on his face and shifting into anger as he registered betrayal, trying to decide who was responsible.
Bolan focused his night sight on the soldier standing just to Wasef Kamran’s right, placing his crosshairs on the hardman’s dull face two hundred feet in front of him. The range was virtually point-blank for his M-110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System—easy pickings—as he sent 175 grains of sudden death hurtling downrange toward impact at 2,570 feet per second.
The target’s skull exploded, its mangled contents splashing Wasef Kamran’s face and thousand-dollar suit. Kamran recoiled, raising an arm too late to keep the muck out of his eyes and mouth, looking dazed as he shouted something to his other men.
It was the signal they’d been waiting for: to open fire and turn the quiet park into a little slice of hell on earth.
* * *
WASEF KAMRAN COULD NOT believe his eyes when Paul Mei-Lun stepped from the shadows, cradling some kind of spacey-looking weapon in his arms. The Afghan mobster felt his gut churn, knew damn well the stranger he’d arranged the meet with had not been Chinese—but had Mei-Lun arranged the call? It seemed impossible, since he had lost the heroin that afternoon.
“What are you doing here?” Kamran called across the dark expanse of grass.
After a split-second delay, Mei-Lun yelled back at him, “I’m here on business. Why are you here?”
Kamran was considering an answer when it happened. To his right, Amir Sadaty’s head burst open with a sodden ripping sound, as if someone had struck a melon with an ax. Its contents flew in all directions, warm blood spraying Kamran’s shoulder, face and hair. He lurched away before the man collapsed, his legs folding under him, and snapped an order at his other soldiers.
“Fire!”
Along the skirmish line, they all cut loose in unison, their muzzle-flashes lighting up the park. Kamran saw Mei-Lun go down but couldn’t tell if he was hit or merely seeking cover from the storm of bullets hurtling toward him. Kamran wiped the blood out of his right eye with a sleeve, then fired a short burst of his own toward where he’d last seen Mei-Lun standing.
And, of course, the Wah Ching leader had not come alone. In answer to the fire from Kamran’s men, at least a dozen guns were sniping at his party now, their slugs buzzing around him like a swarm of mosquitoes on steroids, all thirsty for blood. He saw another of his soldiers fall, clutching a hip and firing back one-handed as he dropped.
“Behind the cars!” Kamran cried out for those who weren’t already ducking under cover. “Everybody! Quickly!”
Bullets struck the Lincoln Town Car and the two Volkswagens, taking out their windows, hammering their doors and fenders with the noise of a demonic hailstorm. Kamran rolled across the Lincoln’s trunk and landed on his knees, cursing the pain that lanced through them from impact with the pavement.
What were the goddamned triad goons doing here? More to the point, where was his heroin?
Kamran pushed up into a crouch and waddled toward the front end of the Lincoln, where a couple of his men were trading shots with Mei-Lun’s soldiers. They would have to torch the cars when they were finished here, assuming they could even drive away, and file a theft report with the police. But first, they had to finish killing off the Wah Ching gunners who had pinned them down.
And all before someone inside the hospital summoned police.
Kamran had nearly reached his soldiers when the closer of them suddenly pitched over sideways, knocking down the soldier to his left. Kamran had seen the blood spurt from his throat, an inch or two below his right ear, nearly shearing off his head, and knew the angle was all wrong.
He pressed closer against the car, then turned back to face the hospital. The shot had come from that direction, somehow. From the trees or someplace higher up? With all the gunfire ringing in his ears, he could not single out a given shot, but it occurred to him that Mei-Lun had boxed them in to cut off their retreat.
Mei-Lun or someone else.
Once more, he heard the unknown caller’s mocking voice, directing him and giving orders, setting up the meet. A man with the audacity to kill six soldiers and escape with ten kilos of heroin, perhaps? Did that explain the Wah Ching presence at their rendezvous? Were both sides simply chessmen in his deadly game?
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