Mission To Burma

3

The village was in lockdown. U Than’s place was lit up like a Christmas tree, but the village was dark and nothing moved. The only activity was a pair of armed men who stood on the little bamboo pier smoking cigarettes, clearly bored with guard duty.

Bolan and Nyin made their approach through the tiny, muddy lanes between the huts. Most of the huts were up on low stilts, and beneath them pigs grunted in their pens and an occasional chicken squawked. In the distance, a water buffalo lowed in its enclosure. Bolan and Nyin moved past canoes up on racks and fishing nets hanging to dry from posts.

At five yards Bolan drew his blades.

He lunged as one of the sentries turned to spit betel juice into the river. The man went limp as the tomahawk head crunched into the top of his skull. The second sentry’s cigarette sagged in his mouth in shock. Before he could do anything other than stare, Nyin’s dha flashed from its sheath with alacrity that would have given a Japanese samurai pause. The sentry’s head came a few tendons short from flying off his neck. Bolan thought rumors about Nyin doing some headhunting with the Naga tribes might not be entirely scurrilous. Bone splintered as Bolan retrieved his tomahawk. Nyin took a moment to relieve the dead gangsters of their money, betel and cigarettes, and then he and Bolan slid the two corpses into the river and washed the blood from their blades. Nyin shoved a leaf-wrapped quid of betel into his mouth and offered the pouch to Bolan.

The soldier shook his head. “I’m trying to give it up.”

Nyin grinned and resheathed his blade. “Well, we have conquered Ta village.”

So they had. “Fort U Than may be a little harder.”

“Maybe,” Nyin agreed.

Bolan climbed to the top of the open, A-frame canoe shelter and turned his binoculars on U Than’s domicile. Nyin perched next to him and pulled out his own binoculars. Bolan scanned the grounds and stopped as he came to the wide porch leading to the main house. Most Burmese barely cracked five feet tall, and most of the guards’ assault rifles seemed almost as large as they were. The four men up on the porch were all pushing six feet, were heavily tattooed and had the physiques of gladiators. “Those men on the porch. U Than’s personal bodyguard?”

“Mmm,” Nyin grunted. “Thai kickboxers. Leg breakers. Bad men.”

U Than seemed to be recruiting from the heavyweight division. An even larger man came out on the porch. His head was shaved, and his ears were cauliflowered masses hanging from his head. The man’s eyebrows appeared to be mostly scar tissue. He appeared to be several inches taller than Bolan and perhaps half again as heavy. Thrust in his sash was a Colt .45, and the hilt of a dha twice as large as Nyin’s stuck up over his left shoulder. “Who’s the gorilla?”

“That is Maung. Very bad man.”

Maung gave off the unmistakable air of command. “U Than’s number two?”

“Yes.”

Bolan sighed. “Rescue missions…”

Nyin cocked his head. “What?”

“Nothing.” Bolan put away his binoculars and slid off the roof of the canoe shed. “Let’s do this.”

“How?” Nyin hopped down. “Place locked up tight.”

Bolan glanced at the dark, dappled waters of the river. It flowed down around the hill, and U Than had some canoes and speedboats tied up on a bamboo pier of his own. “Can you swim?”

“No.” Nyin stared at the river in horror. “And there are crocodiles.”

Bolan glanced behind him at the village canoes. The men in the guard tower would undoubtedly see them long before they got to the pier. “I guess we do it the hard way.”

“You will want a diversion.”

Bolan smiled. “Yeah, I’m gonna want a diversion. You know what to do with an M-203?”

Nyin was a small man with teeth that belonged in the mouth of a horse rather than a human, and he showed them. “As private, I was grenadier in my squad.”

“Good.” Bolan handed Nyin his rifle and pulled three grenades from his bandolier. “This one is offensive, high explosive, big boom. When I give you the signal, I’m going to want you to lob it into the compound. That’s when I’ll use flexible charge to cut through the palisade. The second one is tear gas, which will keep everyone occupied and intrigued while I make my insertion into the big house. Number three is white phosphorus. When I send you the signal, I want you to light up U Than’s cottage like a torch.”

Nyin’s smile threatened to give away their position. “I light ’em up good!”

“I’ll be coming out fast. Plan A is that I steal a speedboat and pick you up. Failing that, I want you to put a Willy Pete into U Than’s boat dock, and I’ll meet you back on the promontory where we first met. If it goes to hell, just get out. You have a cell phone?”

“Yes. Unfortunately battery is low.”

Bolan pulled a phone from his web gear. “Take mine.” Bolan tapped the motherboard strapped to his forearm. “I can call you with this. Give me thirty minutes to get to the far side of the palisade.”

Nyin put a hand on Bolan’s shoulder. “It is not a bad plan. I am honored to fight with you.”

Bolan clapped him on the shoulder. “You just keep your head up, your ass down and your eyes open. Like I said, I’ll be coming back fast.”

“I will await your signal.”

Bolan moved back through the village lanes. He could hear people murmuring within the huts, but no one opened a shutter or peered down. The Ta villagers had long ago learned not to be too curious about what went on in their valley late at night. Bolan jogged back into the rain forest and took a game trail that circled wide around U Than’s castle. Once again, he had to pull a fade into the towering hardwoods as a patrol of gangsters came by. The good news was they were patrolling the wrong way. Bolan moved around to the back of the compound. He cut a length of flexible charge from his knapsack and a hoop just big enough to crawl through. He exposed the adhesive strip, pushed in a detonator pin and pressed the hoop into the bamboo. Bolan threaded a suppressor tube onto the muzzle of his machine pistol and text-messaged Nyin.

“Do it.”

The M-203 thumped down in the village.

Bolan put his finger on the detonator button and counted down the seconds. The compound lit up in an orange flash as the offensive grenade detonated. Bolan pressed his own detonator, and the crack of the flexible charge was lost in the thunder. Armed men spilled out of the main house like a kicked-over anthill. The tear-gas grenade landed, and its multiple skip-chaser bomblets broke apart and began spewing out gray gas. The two men in the watchtower were shouting and pointing frantically. The men below began flailing and clawing at their eyes as what they thought was smoke from the explosion turned out to be war-strength CN tear gas.

Bolan pushed in the panel of bamboo he’d cut with his charge and crawled into the compound. Everyone was running toward the commotion while Bolan moved toward the back of the main house. The back of the fortress was more prosaic than the front and marked by pig enclosures, outdoor barbecue pits large enough to roast entire hogs and heat woks large enough for a grown man to go sledding in. Bolan moved through laundry lines hung with Western clothes, as well as native sarongs and tunics. He dropped between two stone washbasins as the back door flew open and a pair of men with submachine guns checked the back perimeter. Bolan waited a moment to be sure no one was behind them, then rose up with the 93-R in both hands. The machine pistol barely whispered as he put a 3-round burst into each man’s chest. Bolan moved up the low stone steps past the two dead men and entered U Than’s compound.

The back porch opened onto the kitchen. A pair of women wearing turbans were huddled in a corner clutching each other as gunfire rattled from the front of the compound. They stared in slack-jawed horror at the grease-painted, camouflaged giant who had appeared in their midst. Bolan put a finger to his lips, and the two women nodded in vigorous assent. One of the women had a bruise under her eye, and Bolan suspected U Than and the boys weren’t too respectful of the hired help. They cringed as Bolan loomed over them and tried to press themselves back through the wall as he dropped to a knee in front of them. Their fear turned to awe as Bolan displayed Lily’s photo on the PDA on his wrist. He reached into a pocket of web gear and produced two thick folds of Burmese currency. He held the money up and shrugged. “Where?” he asked quietly.

Both women pointed back the way Bolan had come.

Bolan cleared the screen on his PDA and brought up the sketching function. He took out the stylus and drew a quick sketch with a circle for the palisade and squares for the main house and the outbuildings. Bolan shrugged again.

Both women pointed at the smaller square directly behind the main house.

Bolan handed them the money and retraced his steps. His target was the largest of the outbuildings. It was a heavy-beamed A-frame with bamboo for walls, and the smell of smoked meat and fish radiated out from it. The Burmese people were overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhists, but most were also confirmed carnivores. Bolan’s destination was the meat-smoking and slaughterhouse. There was a light on within it.

Bolan crept to the door. It wasn’t particularly well fitted, and through the seams he could see it was barred from the inside. He could also hear voices within. Bolan cut a two-inch length of flexible charge and pressed it into the doorjamb. The charge hissed as he pressed the detonator, and the shaped charged burned through the bar. The soldier put his boot into the door, and it flung open on its leather hinges.

Two men started up in shock from playing with a laptop and reached for their automatic rifles. Bolan nailed both men in the chest with a triburst each, and they dropped to the dirt floor. Lily Na hung two feet from the floor in a bamboo tiger cage. Only sweat and humidity kept the shredded remnants of her black cocktail dress clinging to a divinely curved body. She had a black eye, but she perked the eyebrow over her good one in interest as she took in the commando before her and managed a smirk. “Hey, sailor.”

Bolan shook his head at her situation. “This U Than asshole comes straight out of a comic book.”

“He has issues.” Lily shrugged. “No doubt.”

“Miss Na, my name is Cooper. I’m here to rescue you.” Bolan took in the tiger cage. It was made of bamboo, but the shafts were as thick as his arm and the knots of hemp that bound it together were like fists. A heavy iron padlock bound the door shut. He had only a foot of flexible charge left, and trying to saw or hack his way through any part of it would take too much time. Bolan handed Lily his pistol and pulled his lock-pick case from a pouch in his web gear. He chose a pair of tensile steel picks, put his tactical light between his teeth and began working the lock.

Lily spoke low. “Men are coming.”

Bolan ignored her and repeated the breaking-and-entering mantra. “Forget everything else, work the lock.”

“They are almost here,” she urged.

Bolan worked the lock.

“They are upon us.”

Bolan didn’t speak Burmese, but he understood the snarl of command coming from the open door. Lily spoke in a whisper. “Maung is here with two of his men. They are telling me to drop my gun and you to freeze.”

“Do it,” Bolan ordered.

Maung shouted in broken English. “You! Drop gun!”

“But—”

“Do it!”

The Beretta fell through the floor of the cage. Bolan sighed inwardly as the weapon dropped into the blood-catching cistern set in the floor. A voice shouted the same angry words in Burmese twice. Lily flinched. “He says turn—”

“You! Turn round!” Maung snarled.

Bolan turned slowly.

Maung was flanked by a pair of U Than’s kickboxers. All three carried licensed copies of Uzi submachine guns. Bolan dropped the lock picks. Maung motioned at the tactical light between the Executioner’s teeth. He very slowly removed it.

Maung smiled to reveal his gold teeth in triumph.

Bolan spun the bezel in the buttcap with his thumb, and the flashlight went to full-strength-strobe mode. Most tactical lights had an output of eighty to one hundred lumens. Bolan’s Farm-modified light sprayed out at a thousand and blinked at over twenty times per second. It would burn up his battery in moments, but light strobing at that intensity was known to induce seizures in epileptics, and during tests even trained soldiers and martial artists lost their spatial orientation and were reduced to staggering like blind drunks.

The man to Maung’s right took a step forward and fell to his hands and knees. The man to Maung’s left teetered and stumbled against the doorjamb. Maung stood like a man leaning into a high wind and sprayed off a blind burst with his weapon. Lily yelped and cringed as bullets tore splinters from her bamboo cage.

Bolan strode forward strobing continuously. The massive amping up of the light’s candlepower wasn’t the only modification. The body of the flashlight was titanium, and the rim surrounding the lens sported teeth like the jaws of a bear trap for impact fighting. Bolan drove the still strobing light between Maung’s eyes like an ice pick.

Maung’s septum disintegrated beneath the blow. The shock of it dropped him to the floor as limp as a fish. Bolan drove his boot up between the legs of the man leaning against the door, and he fell vomiting next to his kneeling comrade. His comrade’s jaw shattered beneath Bolan’s heel. The big American drew his tomahawk and began chopping furiously at the hemp bindings of the cage. It was like chopping wood, but the strands slowly came apart. Bolan grabbed the bars of the cage and ripped the door off its hinges.

Lily hopped down and grabbed her laptop.

Bolan scooped up a fallen weapon and checked the loads. “That’s it?”

Lily closed the laptop and picked up a fallen Uzi. “Yes, they did not know what they had. They were using it to peruse pornography.”

“Let’s get you out of here.” Bolan and Lily ran from the smokehouse.

The soldier snatched a sarong and a man’s shirt from the clothesline in passing as they ran for the hole burned in the wall. The men in the guard tower were pointing and screaming, but no one on the ground and in the gas was paying them any attention.

Bolan spoke into his phone. “Fatso, hit the tower, then fire the house.”

“I have bad guys coming my way!” Nyin responded, but the grenade launcher down in Ta village thumped. The two men up in the tower noticed Bolan and Lily as they reached the palisade. One began shouting, while the other raised a rifle.

The grenade launcher thumped again as Lily wriggled through the hole. The Willy Pete hit the front of the house, and the men on the porch screamed as white-hot smoke and streamers of burning metal erupted in all directions. Bolan slid outside. Men continued to stream out the gate, and at the pier engines were roaring into life as armed men piled into the boats for an amphibious assault on the grenadier in the village.

Bolan spoke into his motherboard. “Fatso, I’m not going to be able to reach the boats. Extract, and I’ll meet you at the promontory.”

“Yes, Coop!” Nyin responded. “I am extracting!”

Bolan grabbed Lily’s hand and ran for the tree line. Behind them gray gas and white smoke was blanketing U Than’s fortress in a fog of war. It was a war that had just begun, and tomorrow it would become a hunt. U Than was going to want some payback.

It was more than five hundred miles to the border of Thailand.

4

Ta village

Captain Tam-Sam Dai passed out small bribes and iron-palmed slaps liberally among the villagers. None seemed to be able to give him any useful information, and he doubted hard interrogation would yield anything more. U Than had kept the village locked down for two days after salvaging everything of value from the crashed jet and capturing the woman. The villagers had heard the fighting the previous night and had quite prudently locked their shutters and doors and huddled in their huts with the lights off.

Dai was a member of the PRC’s Special Operations Forces, specifically their highly secretive Special Purpose Force, or infiltration unit. The PRC kept special forces units whose members could pass as citizens of every nation they had a common border with, as well as many they did not. Dai was a member of China’s ethnic Shan minority. His skin was copper colored, and though incredibly broad shouldered he stood barely five feet tall. He spoke perfect Burmese and could easily pass himself as a native hill man of Burma, Thailand or Laos.

Chinese military satellites had been intensely scrutinizing the area of the crash site. Dai and his team had been dropped in immediately but found the wreckage and the bodies stripped of all valuables. The satellites had detected the battle last night and vectored Dai and his men in. Dai had captured a villager, given him an envelope with a very thick stack of Chinese one-hundred yuan notes to take to U Than, along with the message that he would like to meet with him.

The meeting had gone well. Several million yuan had soothed U Than’s troubled soul. Promise of aid in rebuilding had further convinced the warlord that he should conduct business with the Chinese triads rather than the syndicates in Thailand. All very profitable. Captain Dai’s superiors in Beijing had already commended him on it; however, the loyalties of U Than were not the main issue here.

Dai glanced up as Sergeant Hwa-Che came trotting down from the burned-out mansion and gave his report. He, too, was Shan but he gave his report in Mandarin so that U Than and his people would not know what was said. “Captain, we have discovered residue of high explosive in the tower top and in the crater in the compound. The house was clearly burned down with white phosphorous. The hole in the palisade was cut with flexible charge. I believe the grenade barrage was done from Ta village and acted as a diversion while the Na woman and the computer were extracted.” The sergeant spit betel and frowned mightily. “It is clearly the work of U.S. Special Forces.”

Captain Dai had already surmised that. He frowned at Hwa-Che. He knew the sergeant’s ways well. “What is bothering you?”

Hwa-Che slid his eye over to the pier where U Than and several of his men were gathered by the boats. “I have spoken with Maung.”

Dai was an adept at snake-hand kung fu, but even he had to admit the hulking man gave him pause. “And what says the mighty Maung?”

“He says there was only one American.”

Dai scowled. “One?”

“Yes, and have you noticed Maung’s face, Captain?”

It was hard not to. Maung was incredibly ugly to begin with, but now both of his eyes were a raccoon’s mask of bruising and his shattered nose looked like a flattened squid. “Yes, I have noticed.”

“He said the American did it. Maung and two of the Thai bullyboys had the drop on the American, yet he defeated them with a flashlight and his bare hands and then took the woman. One has a broken jaw and the other sits on a sack of ice and pees blood.”

Dai’s scowl deepened. “I find that hard to believe.”

“I have also spoken with our Naga trackers. There are only one pair of boot prints leading to and away from the compound, and leading away the bare feet of a single woman.”

“What about here in the village?”

Hwa-Che shrugged. “All the footprints in Ta village are bare feet or native sandals. On the other hand, the Naga say the boot prints in the compound are large, definitely Caucasian, and undoubtedly belonging to a man such as Maung has described.”

Dai settled on his plan. “Have the Naga begin tracking immediately. Gather the men and any of U Than’s who seem likely, and tell U Than he will be well rewarded for any assistance he gives us.”

“What is the plan, Captain?”

“One or two Americans, operating alone, could play hide-and-seek with us for months up here in the mountains, but that is not their mission. They must try to break out of Burma.”

Hwa-Che brightened as he saw it. “The woman!”

“Yes, the woman is the key. She is not American Special Forces. She is Taiwanese intelligence. Whoring, spying and assassination are her game. She will slow her rescuers.”

One look at the woman had convinced U Than there was a hefty ransom somewhere, and he had kept his men from abusing the woman. Captain Dai had told U Than over the phone as he came in that China wanted the woman intact. That was not out of any sense of propriety. Lily Na would be horribly punished, but Chinese interrogators would start the punishment, and they did not feel like swimming in dirty water. Dai’s men had all seen her picture and been briefed on the mission. They were already gambling numbers for who would take her first. Dai did not discourage such talk. Their only orders concerning her were to bring her back alive and ready for interrogation. As captain, he would of course get first dibs.

Dai peered up into the thickly wooded hills. “We will run them down.”

FOR A WOMAN who had spent two days lost in the mountains and twenty-four hours as the guest of an opium lord hanging in a cage, Bolan thought Lily looked fantastic. She had cut the flowered batik-print sarong Bolan had stolen for her to above the knees for action and knotted the men’s dress shirt under her ribs. She carried her Uzi with familiar ease.

But her feet were bruised, abraded and swollen. She had been barefoot for forty-eight hours in the mountains, and their night run from U Than’s compound hadn’t done her any favors. By the end of another day of hiking, her feet would be broken open, bleeding and going septic in the Southeast Asian soil and Bolan would be carrying her.

Lily sat against a tree and wiggled her swollen toes. “So what is our plan for extraction?”

“That’s a good question,” Bolan replied. “Burma is shaped like a diamond, and we’re in the north. We’ve got six hundred miles of Chinese border to the east, and then about the same to the west with India.”

Her jade eyes narrowed slightly. “India is in play?”

“It looks that way, and they may not be our friends on this one. I have forged documents for both of us and money. There are two airports in the north, Seniku and Bhamo. Both are about equidistant to us. We could clean ourselves up and pretend to be tourists, or just try bribing our way onto a plane. Then again we have to assume Chinese and Indian intelligence will be watching all the airports, and you and I are going to stand out in a crowd. For that matter, Burma just had a plane shot down over her airspace and we have to assume security is on high alert nationwide. We have to assume Chinese intelligence will be informing key operatives and informants to be on the lookout for us.”

Lily’s lips quirked slightly. “So, the Thai border.”

“Yeah,” Bolan agreed. “If we can get close enough to it, the U.S. and several of her allies have the assets to send in an extraction team for us, or if worse comes to worst we can just walk across it. We could also head southeast for the coast and arrange a submarine extraction. That’s about the same distance.”

The woman looked at her feet. “Five hundred miles either way, and almost all of it mountains.”

“Like I said, you and I stick out. It’s best if we stay off the roads and out of the towns. We can try stealing a car or truck and let Nyin drive, or do the same with a boat down one of the major rivers, but military checkpoints are frequent.”