Pacific Creed
A few more moments might be all they needed. All evidence and Bolan’s hard-won instincts reaffirmed that something very bad was going to happen soon.
Bolan kept the frown off his face. If they added a few stolen military uniforms to the mix, the secessionists would be able to drive up to a Hawaiian military base as if they belonged and engage in some serious slaughter. “A lot more are going to cost a lot of money.” Bolan gazed meaningfully at the inland pot grower’s paradise. “Mary Jane going to pay for that?”
The Lua master went Island-style stone face. “How bad you want to know?”
Koa put down the weapon. “I trust you, and Uncle Aikane. Whatever it is, I’m down with it. All the way. Makaha?”
Bolan nodded slowly. “You got me out of Pennsylvania, back to my island and back to my ohana.” Everyone nodded at the all-encompassing Hawaiian word for family. Ohana meant family by blood or otherwise, friendship, as well as race. “If I don’t have your six by now, then you should have left me. You decide to jump in the volcano? I’ll jump in right next to you.”
“Good.” The Lua man nodded. “Good. Then follow me a little farther.” Bolan and Koa walked into the nearly pitch black once more. The ocean breeze began to blow stiffly in their faces. They broke out into starlight and found themselves on a cliff. The Lua man spoke over his shoulder as he vanished through a cleft in the rock. “Careful.”
Bolan climbed down ancient steps cut into the lava rock. The Pacific thundered and crashed against the cliffs below. Happy Valley and Wailuku were close to the beach, but their shores were not tourist destinations. The locals were not particularly friendly, and the rip tides and undertows made surfing and swimming a suicidal proposition. The rest of the coastline was a series of jagged lava cliffs carved by eons of tidal surges.
Bolan knew from experience that lava eruptions and the action of the ocean often meant caves.
The steps were so steep they almost became a ladder, and then the ladder turned into a lava chimney. The Lua master’s voice spoke from below. “Six more feet, brah.” Bolan clambered down into the blackness. His bottom foot found empty air and a huge hand caught his ankle. “Just drop.”
Bolan dropped and bent his knees as he hit soft sand. He found himself in a cave lit by a red emergency light, with the roar of the surf outside. The soldier grinned at the Lua man guilelessly. “You did that climb one-handed?”
The man made a pleased grunt. “Been doing it since I was six, bruddah.”
Bolan knew he was on Hawaiian Holy Ground. The muted sound of feminine fear and misery coming from the gloom told him Hawaiian Holy Ground had been violated.
Koa dropped down, followed by Tino and the thin man. Bolan kept an exhilarated look on his face as Ferret-face came hobbling out of the dark on crutches with his hatchet jaw set in an orthodontic brace. If the big kill was going to come, it was going to come now, and his bundled body would be consigned to the surf outside.
Tino spoke happily to Ferret-face. “They’re in! All the way!”
The thin man spoke. “We’re gonna see.”
Ferret-face turned and crutched awkwardly through the sand back the way he’d come. The thin man took up an electric lantern and turned it on. Bolan saw a pair of small boats parked in the sand and more sawhorse tables laden with boxes and crates. Beside solar panels stacked for the night the cave was equipped with a pair of small gas-powered generators and fuel drums. A threesome of small shipping containers that had been dragged in with obvious effort dominated the back of the cave. Two of them had been converted into living quarters.
The group stopped beside a little side cave formed by a pocket of superheated gas eons ago.
Bolan kept his thoughts off his face as he gazed upon the battered, terrified women weeping and squinting blindly into the LED glare of the lantern. Bolan counted seven women. Most of them were blonde and in their teens and they cringed and clutched each other with their bound hands. One woman might have been in her forties, with somewhat obvious surgical enhancements to her face and body. She glared at Bolan and company in open defiance despite a black eye. Tino’s huge meat hook slammed onto Bolan’s shoulder and gave it a meaningful squeeze. “This is a pass-fail situation, brah.”
The soldier knew what was expected of him. He pointed at the older one. “Her.”
“Nice choice!” Tino laughed. “No one misses a slice from a cut loaf!”
The men in the cave laughed as though this was the height of humor.
Bolan let some ugliness come into his voice. “I just want to wipe that look off her face.”
More laughs followed. The woman continued to glare but tears spilled down her face. She yipped as Bolan seized her by the neck and propelled her across the sand toward one of the containers to the cheers of the other men.
Chapter 4
Mack Bolan slung his chosen woman into the container and slammed the door shut behind them. Tino whooped. A part of Bolan had been trying to build some kind of empathy for the Samoan street criminal. Tino’s cavalier attitude toward sexual slavery had just soured the relationship. The woman cringed as Bolan took out his phone and hit the Farm-built electronic surveillance app. She was still defiant. “Screw you, asshole!”
Bolan grinned and hit the camera app. His phone flashed as he walked around the woman and took pictures of her. At the same time, the camera application was firing off infrared lasers looking for camera lenses and the electronic countermeasures probed for bugs. Bolan’s phone flashed an extra time. That told him the phone had detected nothing. He suspected that if he was being watched, the cavalry would have hit the container hard and told him no flash photography of the fun was allowed. Bolan sent the woman’s picture to the Farm and left the audio on for Kurtzman. “What’s your name?”
“Screw you.”
“And what do your friends call you?”
She sobbed. “Becca.”
“Rebecca?”
“Why do you care?”
Bolan laughed loud and spoke low. “Because I’m going to get you out of here.”
Becca stared at Bolan with something as dangerous as hope. “You mean that?”
“You have two ways out of here. Neither of them is good.”
Becca’s collagen-enhanced lips twisted. Bolan suspected Becca might be or had been a pro. She had seen bad times and bad things. A slave-cave below the water line in Hawaii with a one-way ticket to hell was pushing her limits. A terrible, fragile smile of defiance crossed Becca’s face. “Lay it on me, Island boy.”
“I’m not from the Islands.” Bolan forked his fingers at his arctic-blue orbs. “Look in these eyes.”
Becca stared back in surprise. “You’re no choir boy.” A short, broken laugh forced itself out of Becca. “But you’re a Boy Scout, aren’t you?”
Bolan considered his past. “What if I told you I would have gone for Eagle Scout but a war got in the way?”
Becca smiled. “What’re my two choices again?”
“A and B. A is you saying ‘get me out of here now,’ so we walk out of this container and I try to kill our way out against all resistance.”
Becca’s smile died. “And what’s Option B?”
“They sell you and the other girls for guns, intel and who knows what else. They put you on a boat and sail you west to God knows where. But I can put a tracking device on you and try to rescue you before you hit slave market central. Option A? Frankly I give me and my friend about a ten percent chance of overpowering everybody with our bare hands and finding our way out of the forest with you and the rest of the girls alive. Option B? You and the girls are most likely going to get loaded into a boat. I track you and rescue you.” Bolan didn’t sugarcoat it. “And you endure whatever happens until then.”
“And which one are you recommending?”
“Would you believe B?”
“God, you’re an asshole!”
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Bolan conceded. “The problem is we’re outnumbered, I don’t have a gun, and it’s a fight to the finish. No way they’ll let us get out of here alive. B gives me a chance to gear up, and it also gives me a lead on where you’re being taken, which means I can crush the slave trade at both ends.”
“And you’re going to put a tracking device on me how?”
Bolan took out his phone, opened the battery compartment and slid out the RFID the Farm was tracking him with. It was far more powerful and sophisticated than the one he had injected into the Lua man’s hand. It was the size and shape of a quarter and about as thick as a PC’s processing chip. “You can’t swallow it—it won’t stand up to digestive juices.”
Becca gave the tracking device a very dry look. “I’ve dealt with worse.”
Bolan handed Becca the device. She blinked as he stripped off his shirt and flopped on a futon. “Would you give me a back rub? I need to stay awhile.”
Becca straddled Bolan’s hips and dug her thumbs into his trapezius with skill and alacrity.
* * *
Bolan left the container. Becca whimpered and cried in a convincing show of shame and degradation.
“You’re my hero, brah!” Tino’s voice boomed. “Man, I gotta get me a piece of that—”
“She’s mine, until she’s gone,” Bolan said.
“Well, shit, brah, you don’t have to—”
The Lua master spoke gravely. “This isn’t a party, Tino. This is a grave necessity. We all know Koa’s reputation, but Makaha had to prove that he’s all in. We’re going to hurt the haoles. We’re going to hurt them in every way possible. Makaha had to prove that he’s willing to do what has to be done.”
Bolan gave Koa a defiant look. “Don’t tell Melika.”
Koa gave Bolan a faux “saddened that you would even ask” look. “That’s not going to happen.”
“It’s like killing people, Makaha!” Tino just kept digging his own grave as he leered. “It gets easier with practice, except it’s not as much fun.”
“Done that.” Bolan stared into the middle distance in memory. “It never got easier. I just got better at it.”
The Lua master, Ferret-face and the thin man reappraised Bolan. The Lua man took out two thick, rubber-banded rolls of twenties. “Take this.”
“You want to pay me?” Bolan put pure disdain on his face as he jerked his head at the container. “For that?”
The man looked genuinely hurt. “No, Makaha. This is walking-around money. From your uncle Aikane. You telling me you’re flush?”
Bolan looked away as though he was ashamed. “Nah, I spent my last bills on chicken and beer today. Koa spent all he had on plane tickets.”
The thin man’s voice went from sneering to a neutral tone that almost had a tinge of respect. “Tino will take you home. Take a day off. Take two. Forget chicken and beer. Get some real grind. Koa, get reacquainted with your home.” The thin man came dangerously close to being friendly as he wrinkled his nose at Bolan. “And show this lost home-slice what he’s been missing.”
Even Ferret-face beamed a little.
Honolulu safehouse
“I gotta go.” Bolan shoved a few personals into a bag. They hadn’t gotten out of the forest and back in Wailuku Valley until after sunrise. He suspected the girls had been taken out to a ship and were already on their way to a short life of sex slavery, heroin addiction and an unceremonious death, dismemberment and dumping.
“You sure you don’t want me along?” Koa asked.
“I need you to take Peg, like now, and get Melika. Kidnap her if you have to, but then disappear as though we four went on a romantic couples’ weekend.”
Koa raised his hands in warning. “If Peg and I show up and say, ‘Hey, let’s go meet Makaha,’ she’ll come, but if you aren’t there? She won’t take kidnapping too kindly, man. Back in the ’70s, Mama Melika was like a genuine Island-style Ma Barker, and she taught her daughter well. There’s a reason we found all the uncles hanging out at her place yesterday.”
Agent Hu tossed her hair. “I’m not afraid of her.”
“I am,” Koa countered. “And you should be.”
“I need Melika on our side.” Bolan gave Koa a hard look. “And I need her sat on until I get back and can turn her.”
“Matt, we got Uncle Aikane trusting us. We can work with that.”
“I think Melika might be my key to getting in all the way.”
Koa clearly didn’t like it. “I know it was my idea, but we took a big chance going into her bar and—”
“And I’m doubling down. Koa, I’m getting the feeling this is starting to step on your loyalties, and I get it, but I need you to get her. Get her now, or punch out of this mission.”
Koa went pure Island-style stone face. Bolan realized Koa had deeper misgivings about this mission than he’d let on. Koa lifted his chin. “And if me and Peg sit on Melika and your charms fail, what are you going to do with the home girl?”
“Let her go.”
Koa’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You’re just going to let her go, and let her compromise us and burn the entire mission down.”
“No, I’ll hold her for forty-eight hours first, and me, you and Hu go in hard, guns blazing on the camp, the cave, Uncle Aikane and the targets we know. We try to break it open the ugly way. Melika comes to no harm from my end.”
“Well, shit,” Koa opined.
“Yeah, it’s a bad deal all the way around.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it, and you can hate me after. Question is, will you do it?”
“You know I volunteered for this one.”
“I know, and thanks.”
Koa nodded at Hu. “Pack for a picnic and a kidnapping.”
Hu shot a killer grin. “I can take her.”
Koa shook his head sadly. “No, you can’t.”
Bolan tapped an app on his phone. “Bear.”
Kurtzman came on instantly. “Striker.”
“Tell me we have tracking.”
“Tracking confirmed, Striker.” Kurtzman added, “But we don’t have tracking on you, and your tracer is no longer connected to your phone’s battery. Our tracking window is getting narrow.”
“Where are they headed?”
“West, as you can imagine. But when it comes to slavery there are a host of final destinations along the way.”
“Best estimate?”
“The tracker is currently on board a small freighter, the Pukulan Anggun. She has Dutch registration, but she’s currently flying Indonesian colors.”
Bolan saw the scenario. “Heading southwest for the North Equatorial Current. Straight shot for the Jakarta or Manila flesh markets.”
“That’s the way I’m seeing it, Striker.”
“Bear, it’s going to be a solo airborne mid-ocean interdiction. I need a plane and a jump rig.”
“Way ahead of you. I have a bird lined up at Coast Guard Maui station. I think we can get you in the air within twenty-four.”
Bolan breathed a sigh of relief. The U.S. Coast Guard had a very strong presence in Hawaii and often got some of the latest ships and aircraft. “I need a war load, stat.”
“The commander of Coast Guard North Pacific Sector has been informed that he’ll have a guest to whom, if he felt so inclined, he might show every courtesy. You’ll have your pick of their armory and stores, but it’s going to be Coast Guard armory and stores. Their rigs are mostly rescue jumpers rather than military stealth, but that is your fastest option, and you have a green light as of five minutes ago.”
Bolan quoted the United States Coast Guard motto. “‘Semper Paratus.’” Always Ready.
Kurtzman made an amused noise. “I will see to it that the USCG is loved and thanked for their cooperation.”
“Thanks, Bear. Koa and Hu are going to kidnap a U.S. citizen and go dark.”
Kurtzman paused for a second. “How is that again?”
“I’ll let Koa explain it to you.”
Koa folded his arms and shook his head. “You’re a dick.”
Bolan nodded and scooped up his bug-out bag. “Bear, I’m in a Jeep and inbound for the Oahu Coast Guard station.”
Chapter 5
North Pacific, 6,000 feet
A maelstrom of violent air roared into the hold of the
HC-144A Ocean Sentry search and rescue plane as the loading ramp lowered. The interior lights blinked off and the emergency red lights lit. The bewildered and amused U.S. Coast Guard jumpmaster shouted over the wind. “Two minutes to target!”
Bolan rose. “Thank you, Sergeant!”
The six-man United States Coast Guard Port Security unit that had been scrambled out of Honolulu cradled their Colt carbines and Remington shotguns and observed Bolan with keen interest.
Bolan was dripping in Coast Guard issue. The jump rig was big, bulky and far from stealthy, but it was designed for operations at sea. The Mk11 Mod 0 rifle he carried resembled an M-16 on steroids. At nearly four feet long and weighing more than ten pounds, it wasn’t the ideal weapon to jump out of a plane with. However this was the only weapon in the Coast Guard armory that had a sound suppressor attached. Bolan hoped the sight of the big, silent, semiautomatic sniper rifle would put the fear of God into sailor and slaver alike. With luck they would never see it at all, much less hear it. He had also picked up a pair of .40 caliber SIG pistols and a Mark 3 Navy knife along with his jump rig and night-vision goggles. Spare magazines, flash stun grenades and flares made up the rest of his kit.
Sergeant Goldstein of the Security Unit gave Bolan a sympathetic look. “You sure you don’t want someone to come with you? I got three men who are jump qualified, including me!”
“Nothing I would like more, Sergeant. But not this time.”
“Are you expendable and deniable ’n’ stuff?” the sergeant inquired.
Bolan nodded. “’N’ stuff.”
“Awesome!”
“One minute!” the jumpmaster shouted. “We have an FLIR on target. The rain shouldn’t start for another ten minutes. The sea is pretty heavy and she’s only doing eight knots. You have a good glide path and a good window. Within thirty it’s going to start getting rough.”
Bolan nodded. The Ocean Sentry’s Forward Looking Infrared RADAR had eyes on the target and that meant so did he. He pulled his night-vision goggles over his eyes and powered them up. The world turned into a grainy screen of greens, blacks and grays.
The freighter’s manifest indicated it had taken on coffee and automotive parts on the main island. According to an NSA satellite Kurtzman had access to, the Anggun was also carrying the RFID Bolan had given Becca. Bolan was hoping it meant she was still alive.
The red lights blinked. The jumpmaster got excited. “You are over the target! Go! Go! Go!”
Bolan nodded and gave the jumpmaster a thumbs-up.
The soldier stepped into space and arched hard. The dark bulk of the blacked-out Ocean Sentry was silhouetted by the stars for a few fleeting moments and then it droned away to leave him with nothing but the bejeweled sky above and the water below. Bolan pulled his ripcord and felt his straps cinch as the canopy filled with air and the sudden drag yanked against his weight.
The Anggun wasn’t hard to find. She was a small tramp freighter in a great big ocean but she was the only light source for hundreds of miles. Bolan pulled on his steering toggles and began his approach. Details of the ship swiftly resolved in Bolan’s goggles as he descended. He spotted a dark area—out of sight behind the wheelhouse—crowded with the lifeboat and nautical objects he couldn’t yet identify. Bolan nodded to himself.
That was his LZ.
Bolan began a slow spiral, constantly compensating for the forward motion of the ship. A tailwind was pushing him in faster than he liked. If the soldier missed his LZ he’d be swimming. Bolan flared his chute and pulled his knees into his chest to clear the stern rail. He avoided a capstan and the chain curled around it and hit the deck in a textbook landing. The wet deck countered by shifting beneath his feet in the swell, sending him skidding. The soldier hit the orange steel side of an inverted lifeboat. His NVGs skewed on his head and Bolan fell back.
His chute filled with wind and began dragging him backward. Bolan’s straps cinched as his canopy dipped beneath the level of the rail and began to wildly billow and gyrate in the chop. Bolan tried to grab the slick hull of the lifeboat, but his fingers slid off, wet with his own blood. He was dragged inexorably backward and he lurched as his chute dipped into the sea. The canopy became an instant sea anchor and the soldier was violently pulled toward the rail.
Bolan’s Navy diving knife cleared its sheath with a rasp. He twisted and slashed at his lines. If the canopy managed to tangle in the propeller there was an excellent chance he’d be reeled in like a fish to a watery meat-grinding grave. Bolan hacked through his portside shrouding. The strain eased as the canopy went from a water scoop to a long soggy ribbon in the bow wake. He hooked an arm and a leg into the railing and cut his remaining lines. Bolan sagged to the deck and spat blood. He gave his septum an experimental and mildly agonizing wiggle.
His nose wasn’t broken but blood poured down his chin. Bolan reset his NVGs on his face and made double sure his rifle’s optics and suppressor were still in alignment. He gazed up at the wheelhouse but he had no visual on whoever might be inside. No one had gone to the rear window to see what had happened. The sea was rough, a storm was on the way and ships were noisy. Bolan doubted his landing, inglorious as it was, had registered over the sound of the engines and the swell. The soldier secured his phone to his left forearm and hit an app. Becca’s tracer was blinking away belowdecks.
Bolan rose and moved to the rear hatchway.
The hatch was open. All the lights were on and everybody was home. Bolan pushed up his NVGs and moved down the stairs that led below. The smell of tamarind, hot chilies, peanut sauce and rice frying told him he was indeed on an Indonesian ship.
Bolan moved along the corridor and took the second set of suicide steps down into the main cargo hold. Cigarette smoke and the sound of harsh laughter rose to meet him. Containers were stacked two high with narrow corridors between them. The center of the hold formed a small open area. Becca hung by her wrists from the starboard fork of a forklift at maximum height. Most of her clothes lay on the floor in sliced condition. A shirtless Indonesian man with a traditional parang sneered endearments in Malay as he laid the heavily curved machete blade between the shuddering woman’s collarbones. Five more men sat smoking, drinking beer and shoving fried rice down their maws as they watched. Bolan had the terrible feeling that Becca was considered a little too long in the tooth for the slave market and was being sacrificed to the crew’s appetites. Becca’s bra popped away beneath the blade.
Bolan sent three heavy, subsonic .30 calibers between machete man’s shoulder blades.
The rape crew watched for a stunned moment as the first in line fell and his blade hit the deck with a clang. They heard the clinking of Bolan’s spent brass a half second later and leaped to their feet clawing for pistols and blades. Bolan gave each man two rounds through the face in as many heartbeats. The slavers dropped dead like dominos in a neat semicircle. The soldier stepped out of the shadows, and Becca sagged in her restraints at the sight of him.
“You’re late.”
Bolan took out his knife and cut Becca free. “I know, and I am sorry.” He scooped up the machete man’s cast-off T-shirt and tossed it to her. “Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?”
Becca pulled the stained V-neck over her head. “Just get me and the girls out of here.”
“On it. Can you shoot?”
“My last boyfriend was a cop. He let me shoot his Glock.”
Bolan scooped up two of the slaver’s pistols. “These are Browning Hi-Powers.” He cocked them and left them unlocked. “Just pull the trigger. You have thirteen shots in each one. Where are the rest of the girls?”
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