The Executioner stared into the man’s eyes

“You aren’t a Tiger. Who are you working for?”

An evil smile curled the lips of the man on the ground. “You will never know,” he spit.

“What have you got planned for America?” Bolan asked. He could see that the man’s time was growing short. He’d bleed out in a few minutes. “What’s Subing going to pull off in the States?”

“That…I will…you,” the dying terrorist said, “because you…will never find him in time.” He paused, then breathed out one faint and final word. “Nuke.”

Charlie Latham looked at Bolan. “Oh, hell.”

Other titles available in this series:

Deadfall

Onslaught

Battle Force

Rampage

Takedown

Death’s Head

Hellground

Inferno

Ambush

Blood Strike

Killpoint

Vendetta

Stalk Line

Omega Game

Shock Tactic

Showdown

Precision Kill

Jungle Law

Dead Center

Tooth and Claw

Thermal Strike

Day of the Vulture

Flames of Wrath

High Aggression

Code of Bushido

Terror Spin

Judgment in Stone

Rage for Justice

Rebels and Hostiles

Ultimate Game

Blood Feud

Renegade Force

Retribution

Initiation

Cloud of Death

Termination Point

Hellfire Strike

Code of Conflict

Vengeance

Executive Action

Killsport

Conflagration

Storm Front

War Season

Evil Alliance

Scorched Earth

Deception

Destiny’s Hour

Power of the Lance

A Dying Evil

Deep Treachery

War Load

Sworn Enemies

Dark Truth

Breakaway

Blood and Sand

Caged

Sleepers

Strike and Retrieve

Age of War

Line of Control

Breached

Retaliation

Pressure Point

Silent Running

Stolen Arrows

Zero Option

Predator Paradise

Circle of Deception

Devil’s Bargain

False Front

Mack Bolan®

Don Pendleton

Whatever deceives seems to exercise a kind of magical enchantment.

—Plato,

The Republic, III, c.350 B.C.

There are two kinds of evil in this world—the kind that’s planned, reveled in and enjoyed, and the kind to which men who are otherwise good fall prey during weak moments. Many have been the victim of the latter. My mission is to obliterate the former.

—Mack Bolan

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

PROLOGUE

The smell was what he noticed first, a blend of old and new. At one time there had been cattle in the building and the scent of manure still lingered. Hay had been stored in the second-floor loft but it had molded away, leaving only its stench.

The scents of rotted wood and unwashed human bodies, however, were current. Old and new, the numerous odors combined to produce a smell far more nauseating than any one could have generated by itself and, as he stepped into the barn, the foul mixture hit Candido Subing like a baseball bat between the eyes.

Subing stopped just inside the door. One odor was separate from the others and seemed to rise alone above them. And it filled the air like a hanging corpse.

Fear.

Subing had caught the man following him off guard with his sudden stop and his fellow freedom fighter slammed into his back, the hard lens of the video camera the man carried cracking into his spine. Subing sent an angry glance over his shoulder, then turned his attention back to the six hostages huddled in the corner farthest from the door of the barn. Four men and two women were seated in the mud, their backs against the wall. Their hands were bound in front of them by a rope that traveled around their waists before dropping to secure their ankles. Makeshift hoods, which had once held grain for the animals who had inhabited the barn, covered each prisoner from the top of the head to the shoulders.

Subing felt his face twist into a sneer. The people beneath the hoods were worse than mere infidels. They were Christian missionaries, sent from the Great Satan America to infiltrate the Philippines and to snatch his people from the one true god, Allah, and his prophet.

Subing waded through the muddy floor to the cowering figures. He had no need to remove the hoods to know what lay in each prisoner’s eyes. Terror in some. Acceptance of their fate in others. But at least some hope still left in most of them.

And outright defiance in one.

Subing stopped in front of the seated captives. He had seen their faces earlier in the day when the hoods had been removed. As soon as their eyes had adjusted to the unaccustomed light, one of the women and two of the men had wept. Two other missionaries—a husband and wife—had closed their eyes and he’d seen their lips move silently as they’d offered up some infidel prayer. But none had dared to meet his eyes. At least, none but one. And that man still mocked him. Subing stared at that man now, his eyes filled with hatred.

Before he killed them—and he would kill them all, regardless of whether or not the Filipino and American authorities agreed to the demands he had put forth to them—he would force them each to denounce their false savior. He continued to stare at the hood over the face of the defiant one.

He would denounce his false doctrine this very day.

Subing narrowed his eyes, savoring this moment. The man who defied him sat between the two women. Worden was his name. The Reverend James A. Worden.

Subing waved the cameraman to his position in front of the hostages and the man began to unfold the legs of his tripod. Like the other hostages, Worden had been given many opportunities to renounce his false religion and embrace Islam. But he had refused and his refusal had kept the other, weaker-willed missionaries stalwart in their own faith. Two of the men, he suspected, would have denounced Jesus Christ as their savior had it not been for Worden’s strength. The husband and wife he couldn’t be sure about. They appeared to have some personal strength of their own. But at least their refusals had come fearfully, which meant that time might eventually wear them down. Worden, on the other hand, refused to convert with apparent joy in his heart. And as Subing stared at the ragged, mud-encrusted clothes and equally filthy hood that enshrouded the recalcitrant man, he knew that beneath the cloth James A. Worden was still smiling the same smile he always had on his face when his hood came off. And that knowledge infuriated him.

Candido Subing’s hand fell to the barong sheathed in the carved wooden scabbard at his side. In his mind he saw himself draw the short sword and bring its razor-edge down across the back of James Worden’s neck. Would he finally see fear in the American’s eyes as his head left his body and rolled across the ground? Would he see pain? Horror?

He didn’t know. But he was about to find out.

Subing sloshed his black combat boots two more steps forward in the mud and halted between the hostages and the video camera. The prisoners shifted uncomfortably, sensing his presence near them. Standing guard were ten of his fellow Tigers. He moved a step closer to the group, then turned his attention toward Reynaldo Taboada. The man was a new-comer to the Tigers, but he showed potential. Catching the man’s eye, he said, “Remove the hoods.”

Taboada looked hesitant for a moment, but Subing suspected the new man was merely nervous because of his presence. Subing’s duties took him away from this operation often and he had met Taboada only a few times before. In any case, after a moment’s delay, the man walked along the line jerking the dirty feed sacks from the heads of the prisoners.

All twelve of the infidels’s eyes blinked furiously as the unaccustomed light hit them. A few more tears rolled down three of the faces as they stared at the mud in front of them. The husband and wife team leaned closer to each other and began, once more, to pray.

But the Reverend James A. Worden turned his eyes immediately upward to Subing, and the same infuriating smile the Tigers’s leader had known would be there beamed out at him.

“Jesus loves you,” Worden said from his spot in the mud. “He will forgive you for all of this. All you have to do is ask Him.”

One of the guards stepped in to bring the stock of his AK-47 down on Worden’s shoulder and a loud crunching sound echoed off the rafters. Worden winced and, for a moment, the smile disappeared. But a second later it was back and Subing felt an almost uncontrollable urge to behead the man immediately.

It took all of his self-control to turn toward the cameraman instead. He saw that the video was now ready, clasped his hands behind his back and turned full toward the lens. The cameraman nodded. Subing nodded back. He heard the click as the start button was depressed. “We have done our best,” he said into the camera. “To reach an agreement with your leaders in America. For ten months now we have spared you, and we have not asked so very much in return. We have asked only that the United States release our brother patriots they keep captive and remove all troops from the Philippine Islands and the Mideast.” He paused, turning sideways now and addressing the missionaries themselves. “Our pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Your President does not care about you—he does not care if you live or die.” Pausing dramatically he said, “Or perhaps he does not believe we are serious.”

Turning once more to the camera, he scowled into the lens. “If the American President does not care about his people, there is little I can do. But if he does not believe I will carry through with my promises…” He let his voice trail off, took a deep breath, then said, “Then I must prove to him that I will.”

Twisting slightly, Subing nodded to two of the guards. They moved in next to the Reverend James Worden and hauled the man to his feet, dragging his bound legs through the mud to a spot directly in front of the video camera. One of the guards kicked Worden’s legs out from under him and the missionary fell facedown into the soggy earth. The other guard knelt, grabbed the man by the back of his hair and jerked him up to his hands and knees.

Worden’s mud-splattered face looked directly into the camera. And smiled.

Again pure rage and hatred rushed through Candido Subing’s body like a disease. He yearned to kill the insolent infidel now, without further delay. But he had carefully scripted his next moves to make the most lasting impression possible on the news agencies to which copies of the video would be sent. Improvisation would be counterproductive. He wanted the American people to see what he was about to do and to know that it had been done with little, if any, emotion.

America had become a nation of cowards who coddled the weak and took pride in being victims. His killing without emotion would frighten them far more than anger.

So, biting back the indignation in his breast, Subing gave the camera his own smile. He forced himself to speak calmly, “I am giving this man—this American Reverend James A. Worden—one final chance to renounce his false belief and embrace the true faith.” As he spoke, he pulled the barong from its scabbard. Then, raising it to his eyes, he glanced at the inscription on the blade: there is no god but Allah.

“James Worden,” Subing said, looking down at the still-smiling face beneath him, “I ask you now to repeat after me.” After a short pause he said, “There is only one god.”

To Subing’s surprise, the smiling face below him said, “There is only one god.”

“And Mohammed is his prophet,” Subing said.

“And Jesus Christ is His son,” Worden said.

Anger and hatred shot once more though Subing’s veins. And this time he couldn’t hold it back. Grasping the barong with both hands, he brought it up over his head, then down toward the back of the Reverend James A. Worden’s neck.

A geyser of blood shot out from the severed arteries to the brain, spotting the camera lens with crimson dots. Worden’s body stayed frozen on all fours for a second, then collapsed into the mud.

Subing saw the cameraman frantically wipe at the lens with a rag as he stooped forward to retrieve the bloody mass of flesh and bone from the ground. Grasping it by the tufts of hair at the front hairline, he held it up to the camera. Vanished now were his hopes of showing no emotion and he screamed, “America must release our brethren! American must remove all soldiers from our islands and all Muslim nations!” With a dramatic sweep of his free hand he indicated the shocked hostages behind him. “Or I will kill each and every one of them! Allah be praised!”

As Subing had ordered him to do, the cameraman panned the faces of the missionaries, pausing long enough to register each one’s dismay and horror before moving on to the next. Then he pressed the stop button and ended the recording.

Subing realized he had been holding his breath since speaking and finally let it out with a sigh. But when he looked down at the head dangling from his fingers, the sight caused him to suck in another sudden breath and hold it.

Reverend James A. Worden might be dead, but the smile was still on his lips. And it looked wider and more peaceful than it ever had in life.

CHAPTER ONE

The plane in the distance grew smaller, gradually becoming a mere speck in the sky before vanishing from sight altogether. Mack Bolan was alone, but such was almost always the case with the man also known as the Executioner.

Bolan looked down as he free-fell through the sky. Below he could see the deep blue waters of the Sulu Sea. Farther east lay the island of Mindanao, in the Philippines. In a moment he would open his parachute, but it would still be some time before he reached land. The Executioner had chosen a HAHO—High Altitude High Opening—dive both to avoid detection and to give himself room to maneuver the treacherous winds just north of the Sulu Archipelago. If all went as planned, it would take him approximately twenty minutes to reach the arranged landing zone where two already-on-the-ground contacts would be waiting for him. One was a CIA agent who had been trying to infiltrate the Liberty Tigers for several weeks. The other was a retired Delta Force special operations soldier who was also an old friend of another counterterrorist operative who worked out of Stony Man Farm.

Wind whipped at his face as the Executioner free-fell toward the white-capped waves below. Finally he grabbed the ripcord with his right hand, jerked, and the chute shot out over his head. Bolan watched as the canopy hit the end of the lines and saw that there was a problem.

It hadn’t opened.

As he continued to plummet, Bolan stared at the flat chute that some jumpers called a “Roman Candle.” Other parachutists referred to them as “streamers.” But no matter what you called it, the bottom line was that the canopy had failed. It looked like a long, limp dishrag or the tail on a child’s homemade kite as it followed him down through the sky toward certain death.

The Executioner’s jaw set tightly as he reviewed the pre-jump equipment check in his memory. Everything had been in place. Everything in order. Everything had checked out. So why hadn’t the canopy opened properly? He didn’t know. And probably never would.

Bolan continued to fall, forcing himself to stay calm, not a particularly difficult task for a man who had lived a life such as his. Remaining composed in the face of impending destruction had become second nature to him. He had stared into the dark face of the Grim Reaper many times and each time the man with the sickle had been the one to break eye contact and back down. Bolan had too much experience under his gun belt to be upset now.

To most men, the unopened chute would have been cause for panic. But to the Executioner, a primary canopy malfunction seemed hardly more dangerous than a bee sting.

The irony of dying from something so minor, however, was not lost on Bolan. A small grin broke at the corners of his lips as he was reminded that warriors were still human and that in addition to the extra dangers they faced they were still subject to all the hazards waiting to ensnare the normal man. General George S. Patton, Jr., had been killed in a car wreck. Colonel Rex Applegate had died of complications following an easily treated stroke. Bolan had known warriors who had succumbed to cancer and other terminal diseases. The truth was that warriors sometimes died like warriors. Other times they passed on in ways that seemed more befitting schoolteachers, accountants and stockbrokers.

Bolan spread both arms and legs to slow his fall. What had started out as a HAHO jump would now be turned into a mid-opener at best. He reached up to the harness at his left shoulder as, below, the whitecaps became more distinct. He could even make out several black spots that he assumed to be fishing boats. The island of Mindanao was still at least a mile in the distance.

Tugging the D-ring of the reserve chute, the Executioner glanced upward once more to see the streamer break free and fly off into space. That was the first step in the emergency procedure—to get the failed chute out of the way so it didn’t entangle the emergency canopy. Bolan counted—one…two…three—then saw the second canopy shoot up and out, blossoming into a life-saving orb that suddenly slowed his descent.

The Executioner had remained tranquil throughout the minor emergency. Still, he breathed a sigh of relief as he began to steer his way toward the landing site. He had work to do and it was that work to which his mind now turned.

As he floated through the sky, Bolan’s mind floated, as well—back to the telephone conversation he’d had only hours before with Hal Brognola, director of the Sensitive Operations Group at Stony Man Farm. The CIA had intercepted intelligence that a mammoth terrorist strike against the U.S. was imminent. Details as to exactly what, where, how and when were sketchy, but the chatter was that it would make September 11, 2001 seem like little more than a firecracker. What was clear was the “who.” Candido “Candy” Subing and his terrorist group, the Liberty Tigers of the Philippines, were planning the attack. A Filipino Moro-Muslim terrorist organization, the Tigers, as they were commonly called, had achieved notoriety during the past year by kidnapping six American missionaries. Just the day before, the major news networks had all received a videotape of Subing brutally murdering one of the hostages. An edited version had been aired throughout most of the world. Al-Jazeera, of course, had shown the entire gruesome ordeal.

The waves and fishing boats below him, and even the land in the distance, became more distinct as the Executioner sailed to the ground. At the same time, other distinctions filled his mind. First and foremost was the fact that much of the intelligence the CIA had about Candy Subing and his Tigers didn’t quite add up. Even before intercepting the intelligence from the CIA, Stony Man Farm had been monitoring the progress of a Filipino military force tasked with locating the hostages. But their attempt appeared halfhearted at best and so far their search had been unsuccessful.

Yes, Bolan thought, Candy Subing was a nasty little terrorist. But was he capable of any kind of major strike at the U.S.? Doubtful. The Liberty Tigers were simply too small and too limited financially to pull off such a thing. In the Executioner’s estimation the group simply didn’t have what it would take to carry out a large-scale strike on other side of the world. At least not without help. And there had been no mention of any of the other terrorist groups teaming up with them.

Finally over land, Bolan worked the toggles, steering the canopy. The failed primary chute had thrown him slightly off course, but not enough to worry him. He was still several miles north of Zamboanga, the southwestmost city on the island of Mindanao. He might not come down exactly where his ride was supposed to be waiting, but as long as he landed reasonably close, the men would easily spot him. If not, all Bolan needed to do was to make his way to the nearby main—and only—road that followed the coastline. His pickup would have no choice but to drive on it even if he gave up on finding him.

Bolan’s mind turned back to the captive missionaries. While their location was still a mystery, the CIA had finally learned that Subing himself slipped in and out of a small village near Zamboanga to visit his uncle. They had notified the President that they were about to send in a team of covert operatives who would do their best to take the Tigers’s leader alive, then pump him for information concerning both the hostages and the strike planned for America. If live capture proved impossible, Subing would be assassinated with the hope that the strike in the U.S. would end before it got off the ground.

Bolan shook his head as he dropped closer to the trees. The CIA plan had far too many ifs, ands and ors to suit the President. The Man in the White House had contacted Stony Man Farm and specifically told Brognola who he wanted on the job: the best. Mack Bolan. And he had ordered the CIA director to have only one agent link up with the Executioner—who would be going by the name Matt Cooper. The President had also made it clear who would be in charge, and it wasn’t the CIA.

Bolan looked down on the coastal area of Mindanao. Unless he was mistaken, he could see some kind of vehicle parked to the side of the road. A figure was getting out of the driver’s side and it looked as if he was wearing a hat.

THE MAN IN THE BATTERED straw cowboy hat pulled the Jeep Cherokee off the pitted asphalt, killed the engine and turned to face the thick foliage that paralleled the road. He reached into one of the pockets of his khaki cargo shorts and pulled out a round tin of chewing tobacco. Dropping a pinch of the finely cut substance under his bottom lip, he thought of mouth cancer for a moment, then pushed the troublesome possibility from his mind. Tapping the lid back into place, he returned the tin to his pocket.

Charlie Latham stared at the sky, watching the black speck he’d first spotted a few seconds earlier grow larger, finally dividing into two parts. As the dots continued to grow, he was able to discern the outline of both man and parachute. A frown creased his forehead as he sucked on the tobacco. He’d been told the jumper—a man he should call Matt Cooper—would have no trouble finding the clearing across the road. The guy was an expert skydiver.

But as he watched the sky now, Latham had to wonder just how accurate that evaluation had been. Considering the wind direction and the parachutist’s current positioning, it looked as though Cooper would come down at least a mile north of where he was supposed to land. And a glance at his watch made him wonder about the other man who was supposed to meet them here. A CIA agent named Reverte. Where the hell was he?

Latham twisted the key in the Cherokee’s ignition and the engine roared to life. After a quick glance in his rearview mirror, he pulled back onto the pothole-pocked asphalt the people of Mindanao called a highway. He drove slowly; he had plenty of time. Matt Cooper wouldn’t find his feet on solid ground for a good ten minutes or so.

Topping a rise, Latham saw another break in the trees, twenty yards off the road. A glance upward told him Cooper was maneuvering toward that spot to land. Latham lost sight of the clearing as the road dipped down but when he reached a point he guessed was directly across from it he pulled off the road and killed the engine again.

Latham glanced once more into the rearview mirror, this time to lift the weathered straw hat off his head. The leather sweat band came up off his scalp and he felt a quick rush of cool breeze roll over his closely cropped hair. It was a nice relief from the sultry Filipino heat and he almost dropped the hat onto the seat beside him. But the sun would beat down on his face and neck if he did, and besides, he was from Texas. The only time he’d ever felt right without a hat was when he wore a helmet. Football in high school. Then U.S. Army until a year or so ago.

Settling the hat back onto his head with a sigh, Latham reached into the back seat and grabbed a rusty two-dollar machete. He got out of the Jeep, crossed the road into the semi-thick vines of the coastal secondary jungle and lifted the long blade over his head.

A thin trickle of sweat ran down his cheek as he began slicing a path toward the clearing. The jungle canopy blocked his view of the sky, but he knew Cooper had to be nearing the site. It was the only open landing zone in the immediate area.

By the time he had cut himself into the clearing, Cooper was clearly visible in the sky. Latham was surprised to see that the chute beneath which the big man drifted was smaller than he would have expected for such a jump. In addition to the usual parachute gear, Cooper wore a huge backpack. Other equipment carriers were belted around his waist and strapped to his shoulders. Almost as quickly as his brain registered these details Latham was able to answer his earlier question as to why the man was so far off course. No, it wasn’t due to a lack of expertise as he had originally guessed. In fact it appeared that Cooper might be even beyond expert. At least the man knew how to keep his head in the face of danger. His main chute hadn’t opened and he was landing with the small reserve canopy. That was what had thrown him off course. He was loaded down like a pack mule and, considering the tricky winds through which he’d just come, the fact that he’d even survived with the small reserve chute gave him master-jumper status as far as Latham was concerned.

The Texan stepped out of the trees into the clearing and let the machete hang at the end of his arm. He suspected Cooper could see him by now. Even if he couldn’t, the big American would know someone was down here waiting for him by the sunlight shining off the large silver belt buckle that held up Latham’s shorts. As he continued to wait, the Texan chuckled silently at himself.

After retiring from the Army, the last ten years of which he’d been assigned to Delta Force, Charlie Latham had come to the Philippines to further pursue his life-long love affair with the Filipino martial arts. But he had brought a part of Texas with him and the unusual combination of clothing he wore was a pretty good indication of his bifurcated personality. The straw Stetson screamed Texas!, as did the Western belt and buckle. But the Philippines were just too hot for denim jeans and boots, so the rest of his attire consisted of a tank top, khaki cargo shorts and sandals. It was an unusual, eclectic image he projected, he knew, but he didn’t care. He was an unusual man—a mixture of nineteenth-century gunfighter and twenty-first-century soldier with a little bit of Eastern mystic thrown in. He saw no reason his clothes shouldn’t reflect that mix.

Latham’s mind jerked back to the present as Cooper landed expertly on his feet, rolled to his side, then popped back up to a standing position. In his mind, he gave the man an A-plus on landing to go with the high grade he’d already earned in canopy steering. The Texan could see now that, beneath all the equipment, Cooper wore some kind of skintight blacksuit that had to be hotter than his aunt Betty’s salsa. He grinned to himself as he walked forward.

He hoped the man had brought along some cooler rags. Finding anything to fit a guy his size in this land where a man who weighed 130 pounds and stood over 5’ 4” in height was considered a giant wasn’t going to be easy.

Cooper was already gathering up the chute by the time Latham reached him. He shifted the machete to his left hand and extended his right. Before he could speak, the big man turned his way and said, “You’re Charlie Latham?”

Latham nodded as he shook the hand. “And you’re Matt Cooper.” The handshake was firm and confident without being overly hard. Latham was glad of that. He got the feeling that had this guy wanted to, he could have snapped off several of his fingers.

Bolan released his hand and frowned, his eyes scanning the area around and behind the Texan. “Where’s the CIA man?” he asked.

Latham shrugged. “You got me. He hadn’t shown up at your original landing site by the time I saw where you were heading and left.”

Bolan nodded. “Something may have delayed him. We’ll check the spot on the way back.”

“Sounds good to me,” Latham said. He reached to the ground and lifted two of the heavy equipment bags the parachutist had shrugged out of when he’d hit the ground. “Ready to do it?” he asked. “Sounds like it should be fairly easy.”

Bolan hoisted the rest of his gear. “Yeah,” he said. “To be honest, it sounds too easy.” He let the Texan take the lead and followed the man along a recently cut path through the trees. Walking single file as they were wasn’t conducive to conversation and both men lapsed into silence as they dodged branches and vines. Left to his own thoughts, the Executioner found himself questioning certain aspects of the mission once more.

He still hadn’t gotten over the fact that there were parts of the CIA intelligence reports that didn’t make a lot of sense. One of them was how easily Candy Subing could be located. If the man slipped in and out of Zamboanga all the time as the CIA believed, why hadn’t the Filipino search force already grabbed him? Better yet, why hadn’t they put a tail on him and followed him back to where the missionaries were being held? The CIA even had an address for Subing’s uncle. So what, exactly, had this CIA man—Reverte was his name—been doing over the past few weeks? For that matter, where was the man now?

Reaching the Jeep Cherokee parked on the side of the road cut Bolan’s thoughts off again as he and Latham tossed the equipment bags into the back. The Executioner shook his head. His mission sounded easy on the surface—capture Candido Subing, interrogate the man concerning both the hostages and the “big strike” the Tigers had planned in the U.S., free the hostages and take whatever action was called for in regard to the American strike.

Bolan found that he was grinding his teeth together as he contemplated the situation. If everything was all that cut and dried, somebody would have already done it.

With the Cherokee’s tailgate still open, Bolan unzipped one of the ballistic nylon bags and pulled out a short-sleeved blue chambray shirt, a pair of khaki cargo pants and a plain white T-shirt. The blacksuit he had worn for the jump came off and the khakis went on. The Executioner felt a hard rectangular lump in one of the hip pockets, a micro-cassette recorder brought along for one simple reason—he didn’t speak or understand any of the languages in the Philippines except English. Tagalog—sometimes referred to as Pilipino—was the major tongue, but there were close to a hundred other languages and dialects used throughout the islands. According to what he’d been told, Latham was fluent in Tagalog and could get by in a couple of the tribal tongues. Reverte was reported to have the same skills. But the Executioner could foresee an eventuality in which something he suspected was important might be said with neither one of them present. If that happened, it would benefit him to be able to record it and have the words translated later.

The white T-shirt came down over Bolan’s head, then he unclipped the TOPS Loner combat-utility knife that had been fastened upside down on his blacksuit. Slipping the thick four-and-one-half-inch blade into a Concealex inside-the-waistband sheath, he fastened it to his belt at the small of his back. In his peripheral vision the Executioner saw Latham’s eyes widen slightly as he slid on the shoulder rig that carried his sound suppressed 9 mm pistol.

The Texan squinted under the sun. “Beretta 92?” he asked.

Bolan adjusted the gun in its holster. “It’s a 93-R.”

“Ah, yeah,” Latham said. “I see the front grip tucked under there now. Three-round-burst selector, right?”

The Executioner nodded, snapping the belt retainers on both sides into place. Under his right armpit the shoulder rig carried a double magazine pouch, also of the form-fitted plastic known as Concealex.

Latham’s eyes got even wider and his mouth dropped open slightly when the Executioner pulled the mammoth .44 Desert Eagle magnum from the same bag. It was already at home in an inside-the-waistband holster of the same space-age plastic.

“Far as I know,” Latham said, “we’re going after a man, not an elephant.”

Bolan chuckled as he stuck the big pistol into his pants and looped the retaining snap around his belt. “You remember the legend of the Model 1911 .45 auto, don’t you?” he asked the Texan.

Latham nodded at the Executioner. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Spanish-American War. Our troops kept shooting the Filipino Moros on Mindanao with their little bitty .38 Colts and the Moros kept coming anyway, cutting us to shreds with bolos, barongs, krises—any blade they could get their hands on. Which led to the development of the bigger, harder-hitting .45 ACP.”

Bolan zipped up his bag, slammed the tailgate door and walked around the Cherokee toward the passenger’s side. “Right,” he said as he got into the vehicle. “And what island are we on?”

“Mindanao,” Latham said.

“And who are we looking for?”

“A Moro-Islamic terrorist named Candido Subing.” Latham slid behind the wheel.

Bolan tapped the big .44 beneath his shirt. “Well, this thing hits even harder than a .45,” he said.

Latham nodded, then reached across the Executioner and opened the glove compartment. “Thanks for reminding me.” He pulled out a cocked-and-locked Browning Hi-Power with a stainless-steel frame, blued slide and what looked like black plastic and rubber grips. As he lifted the weapon and brought it across to his belt, Bolan noticed a small ramp at the top of the grip just behind the trigger guard. And as the gun moved through the air, a tiny red dot raced across the dashboard in front of the barrel.

“That 9 mm or .40?” Bolan asked as Latham jammed the weapon into his shorts.

“It’s a .40 S&W,” Latham replied, grinning. “Remember the Moros.”

Latham reached into the glove compartment again and pulled out a black nylon double magazine carrier, which he stuffed into one of his pockets. Bolan settled back in his seat as his contact pulled the Cherokee onto the road. He didn’t need to ask about the red dot he’d seen dancing in front of the Browning. A laser site. And the ramp in the grip and lack of any exterior wiring on the pistol, meant the laser was one of Crimson Trace’s new models for the Hi-Power. The laser beam shot out the front of the ramp when a button—activated by taking a normal grip on the weapon—was depressed. Wherever the red dot fell, the bullet followed as soon as the trigger was pulled.

Latham drove back to the spot where they had originally planned to meet. But there was still no sign of the CIA man. He turned to Bolan, but before he could speak the big man said, “Let’s go on. We’ll either hook up with him later or we won’t.”

The Texan nodded. “Undercover work never was my specialty,” he said. “But I’ve done some. And if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that you can get delayed. You’re always working on someone else’s timetable.”

“Maybe he’ll have some decent intel when he shows up,” Bolan said.

The two men fell into silence again as the Cherokee bounced over the bumps and cavities in the asphalt. Ahead, the outskirts of Zamboanga appeared and clusters of stilt houses—running from the shoreline well out over the sea above the water—began to sprout.

Latham was the first to speak again. “Hawk told me you weren’t the most talkative guy around,” he said as he twisted the wheel and turned the vehicle onto San Jose Road.

“I talk when I’ve got something to say,” Bolan told him.

“That’s not what I meant,” Latham said as rural Mindanao continued to become more suburban. “What I meant was, Hawk advised me not to ask you a lot of questions about yourself.” He glanced at the Executioner then turned his eyes back to the road. “Like, what your real name is or where you’re from or who you work for.”

Bolan turned sideways in his seat. For a long moment he didn’t answer. The connection between him and Latham had come through T. J. Hawkins of Phoenix Force—one of the counterterrorist teams working out of Stony Man Farm. Hawkins and Latham had been friends as kids growing up in Texas and by chance had become reacquainted when both had been assigned to Delta Force. Hawkins eventually resigned and later joined Phoenix Force. Latham had retired, too, becoming an American ex-patriot on Mindanao to study the martial arts.

Finally the Executioner said, “Did T.J. tell you who he worked for when he called?”

“Nope,” said the man behind the wheel. “Sure didn’t.”

“But you asked?”

“Sure did.”

“Well, I can’t tell you, either,” the Executioner said as he turned back toward the windshield. “Thanks for picking me up. I appreciate it. And while T.J. tells me you were as good as him when you were both with Delta Force—and I could use some backup while I’m here—I’ll understand if you want to bail out. No hard feelings.” He paused a second, then added, “I’m not sure I’d trust someone I just met on a deal like this.”

A look of genuine surprise shot across Latham’s face as they passed a large athletic field set well off the road. “Hawk’s word about you is good enough for me,” he said. “I’m in for the duration—or until you kick me out. To tell the truth, things get a little boring around here after a while. I mean, how long can you bang rattan sticks against each other and stab your training partner with rubber training knives before you’d kind of like to get out and do something else for a while? “He paused, took in a deep breath and let it out again. “Don’t get me wrong. I love what I’m doing. Kali, Arnis, Escrima—the Philippines have the most practical martial arts in the world, you ask me, and the best of the best is right here on Mindanao. But other than that, once you’ve been to Fort Pilar and seen the Yakan Weaving Village, there’s not a whole lot left to do.”

When Bolan didn’t respond, Latham went on.

“Okay, look,” the Texan said, lifting his hat off his head and wiping a hand across his scalp. “Hawk was the best friend I had when I was a kid. I could tell you stories about trouble we got into that would curl your ears.” He stopped, glanced at the Executioner, then amended the statement. “Well, maybe not your ears but most people’s. And Hawk was the best trooper to ever come out of Delta Force, too—don’t listen to him when he tells you I was just as good. I wasn’t. Anyway, one thing you could always count on out of Hawk was getting the truth. Bottom line—if he says you’re okay and I should work with you and not ask questions, that’s good enough for me.”

The Cherokee passed Don Basillio Navarro Street, then turned south on Alvarez. A few minutes later it turned east and entered the city proper. Barely slowing the vehicle, Latham guided them in and out of residential and business areas, past houses, restaurants and bars. The streets were alive with activity. Children played happily in front of houses and older, more sullen youths, gathered on street corners to glower as they passed.

Bolan was reminded that Mindanao’s cities, as well as its hinterland, were hotbeds of crime. Robberies, rapes and murders of both tourists and natives were common, and kidnapping for ransom—especially of Americans—was almost the national sport.

Pablo Lorenzo Street took them to Valderoza and they drove past Fort Pilar, which Latham had mentioned earlier. Bolan recalled that the fort had been founded by the Spaniards in the early seventeenth century, and conquered at various times by the Dutch, Moros, British and even the Japanese during World War II. Finally claimed by the Filipinos themselves, the fort now housed a marine museum and an ethnographic gallery that concentrated on the Badjao—or sea gypsies—who spent most of their lives on houseboats along the Sulu Archipelago.

Just past the fort they turned away from the city. According to the CIA, Subing’s home was in Rio Hondo, a small village—almost a suburb—to the east.

The Jeep topped a rise in the road and in the distance they could see the spiral towers of a village mosque. The Texan snorted humorously and shook his head. “Rio Hondo,” he said. “Sounds like a John Wayne movie, doesn’t it?”

Bolan smiled as they drove toward the village. He had taken a liking to Charlie Latham and appreciated the man’s unique way of viewing life. Latham was a straightforward type and, according to Hawkins, one heck of a fighter both with, and without, weapons. The Executioner hadn’t seen any firsthand proof of it yet but he suspected he’d find out up close and personal before this mission ended. Until then Hawkins’s word—which had given Latham confidence in Bolan—also meant the Executioner could trust the Texan when the going got tough.

The road rose and fell as they neared Rio Hondo and with each rise Bolan caught glimpses of the shoreline and water beyond. Several shallow-draft sailboats—vintas—moved gently back and forth along the coast. In them he could see tiny brown figures casting fishing nets over the sides. He was so occupied when he suddenly heard Latham say, “Uh-oh,” in a calm voice.

The Executioner turned his attention back to the road. They had just rounded a curve and Latham was slamming on the brakes, barely coming to a halt before hitting an ancient, rusting Chevrolet parked in the lane in front of them. Blocking the oncoming lane—and preventing them from passing—stood an equally old Ford Fairlane with a huge dent in the front fender. Two men stood between the vehicles, their arms waving wildly as they shouted at each other. To the average tourist it would have appeared that they had just been involved in an accident and were attempting to assign the blame.

But Bolan was neither tourist nor average. And neither was Latham.

“Kidnappers,” Latham said quickly as he pulled the Browning from his waistband. “Fake car accident. Standard ploy.”

Bolan didn’t need to be told. The Desert Eagle had come out of its holster the moment he’d seen the two cars. Now, as the two arguing men turned to face the Cherokee, he held the big .44 Magnum pistol just out of sight below the dashboard.

Both men wore dingy brown shirts, the tails untucked over baggy, tropical fabric slacks. They smiled as they began to casually walk forward as if to ask for assistance.

Then the shirttails came up and both men pulled pistols from their belts.

The Executioner twisted the door handle, threw open the door and leaped from the Cherokee. As he did, he saw a half dozen more men with AK-47s suddenly rush out of the jungle at the side of the road. The outbreak of automatic rifle fire behind him told Bolan that even more gunmen had appeared from the jungle on the other side of the road. As he dived below a burst of 7.62 mm rounds he wondered briefly if Latham had gotten out of the car. He hadn’t heard the man’s door open amid the explosions.

Bolan returned his attention to the men on his side of the vehicle. Latham was either alive or he was dead. Either way, there was nothing the Executioner could do to help him at the moment.

Another volley of fire struck the Cherokee as Bolan hit the ground and curled his body into a shoulder roll. As he rolled he caught a flash sight of the six men in front of him, his brain registering the fact that they wore a mixture of camouflage and more traditional dress. He wondered briefly if kidnapping was really their objective. The ambush was taking on more of the aura of a well-thought-out terrorist op.

Maybe even an assassination. Did the Tigers know he was on the island?

The Executioner pushed the possibility to the back burner for the moment. Right now it made little difference who the men were or what they wanted. They meant to kill both him and Latham, and at this point the important thing was to make sure they didn’t get it done.

Bullets struck the highway’s shoulder to both of the Executioner’s sides. Huge chunks of black asphalt, heated to softness by the hot Mindanao sun, ripped open as if tiny earthquakes had erupted. Bolan’s brain raced at near-inhuman speed, analyzing, evaluating, taking in the details of the situation. He weighed the odds and calculated the percentages of every possible course of action as he rolled beneath the onslaught.

The bottom line was grim. He was outnumbered and outgunned. There were six men directly in front of him, and even if he could make it to the rear of the Cherokee some of them would still be angled for clear shots. But the rear of the vehicle was the nearest thing to cover available so it was toward that goal he would have to fight.

Bolan rolled again amid a shower of lead. The gunmen on Latham’s side of the vehicle continued their assault, their rounds exploding from that direction.

The Executioner rolled up to one knee and lifted the Desert Eagle. The enemy had both superior manpower and firepower. He and Latham had superior thinking, superior thinking that could be turned into superior strategy. And both the thinking and the strategy would have to be far superior.

The Executioner pointed the barrel of the Desert Eagle at the man closest to the rear of the Cherokee. Heavyset and bareheaded, the would-be kidnapper wore what looked like faded blue gym shorts and sandals below a camouflage BDU blouse. A tap of the trigger sent a 240-grain semijacketed hollowpoint round exploding from the .44 Magnum pistol’s barrel. It drilled through the third button in the stenciled leaf-pattern cammie shirt, snapped the man’s spine in two, then blew on out of his back taking with it a hurricane of mangled muscle tissue, blood and splintered bone. The man himself went limp, collapsing to the ground like a dropped rag doll.

The soldier swung the Desert Eagle to his left, toward the next man closest to the rear of the Cherokee.

This man sported a stringy mustache and equally wispy growth of beard. Like the gunner who had fallen before him, he, too, would still have a direct line of fire at the back of the vehicle once Bolan reached it. Which meant he had to go next.

The Executioner squeezed the trigger once more and a second .44 Magnum hollowpoint round blasted from the barrel. It caught the attacker high in the chest, the velocity throwing him backward into a complete flip in the air. He came to rest on his belly, his chin caught on the ground, his face staring back at the Executioner. But the open eyes above the thin mustache saw nothing. Nor would they ever again.

Four more kidnappers remained on his side of the Cherokee and their return fire now zeroed in on Bolan’s sides. He rolled to the ground again, angling toward the Cherokee’s rear, the rounds exploding in his ears. One bullet cut through the sleeve of his blue chambray shirt, scorching the skin on his arm as it passed. The Executioner barely noticed it as he pulled the trigger, sending another pair of rounds into the blurry mass of camouflage that whirled past his eyes. As he continued to roll he caught another flash picture.

But this time the picture was of Charlie Latham. The Texan had indeed exited the Cherokee. Somehow he had even made it to cover beneath the vehicle.

Coming to a halt on his stomach, the Executioner extended the big .44, gripped in both hands. The four men still in front of him had expected him to rise to his knees and their auto-volleys raged high over his head. Bolan pulled the trigger back once more and watched a man wearing a mud-stained yellow T-shirt take the result between the eyes. The top of his head disintegrated from the nose up.

Three down, three to go. But that didn’t count the attackers on Latham’s side. Or the two men posing as auto accident victims to his front. In the back of his mind, as the front dealt with the more immediate crisis, the Executioner registered that the phony drivers seemed to have disappeared.

Bolan swung the .44 left again, letting the front sight fall onto a burly, bare-chested Filipino wearing nothing but camouflage pants. His long, straight black hair was tied back from his face with a white cloth. The white made a perfect target. The Executioner let the sight fall on the bright strip across the man’s forehead then pulled the trigger. The would-be kidnapper lost the top half of his head the same way his friend had.

With four of the assailants on his side now down and out of the game, the Executioner rolled behind the Cherokee and came up onto his knees, his head just above the bumper. On Latham’s side of the vehicle he saw two men firing at the Cherokee. One .44 Magnum round took out a clean-shaven kidnapper wearing blue jeans and a BDU blouse. A second after he’d pulled the trigger, the Executioner saw a faint red dot appear on the black T-shirt of another man. The sun was too bright for Latham’s laser sight to be at its best, but at close range it could at least be seen. He heard a boom from beneath the car and the man in black went down.

Bolan smiled inwardly as he fought on. The red dot meant that both the Crimson Trace laser sight and Charlie Latham were still working.

Another massive Magnum round from the Desert Eagle took out a young Filipino with an acne-pocked face. Now, with both sides temporarily clear, the Executioner dropped the near-empty magazine from the Desert Eagle, jammed a fresh load between the grips and transferred the big gun to his left hand. As he drew the Beretta 93-R with his right, rounds continued to pepper the vehicle from the front.

Bolan took advantage of the short pause in the action to evaluate the situation as it now stood. He didn’t know how many men Latham had been able to take out. He did know if Latham was still alive. The man might well be wounded but he had to find out the Texan’s status before he went on. Latham’s condition would have a major effect on his next moves.

The Executioner leaned down under the bumper. “Charlie!” he yelled over the cacophony. “You all right?”

“I’m not hit if that’s what you mean!” Latham yelled from beneath the vehicle. “But ‘all right’ might be stretching it a bit. I’ve been—” Yet another barrage of rifle fire drowned out whatever else he had to say.

Bolan had ascertained Latham was unharmed, but that could change at any second. There were still two men with pistols in front of the Cherokee. Still a pair of AK-47s blasting away near the front on the Cherokee’s passenger’s side. To reexamine his battle plan, it was imperative that he find out exactly how many men were still in the fight.

Round after round continued to bombard the Cherokee. Jamming the Desert Eagle into his belt, the Executioner quickly unscrewed the sound suppressor from the Beretta. There were times when you needed a quiet weapon. Other times you wanted noise and confusion. This situation fell into the latter category.

Bolan’s arm snaked around the rear bumper, firing a blind burst of three 9 mm rounds toward the two men still on the passenger’s side. Then, without hesitation, he leaned the other way and triggered the Desert Eagle twice.

Then he stood.

In the fraction of a second during which he was forced to make himself a perfect target, the Executioner saw three bodies on the ground—one he remembered shooting himself, the others evidently fallen to Latham’s Browning. Two other men stood near the corpses. They started to swing their AKs his way as the Executioner’s eyes skirted to the other side of the vehicle.

The two men he had left standing on that side still fired away full-auto. More shots—slower, from pistols—came from behind the parked cars in front of the Cherokee.

Bolan nodded to himself. That had to be where the phony accident victims had taken cover.

Bolan hunkered down behind the Cherokee a half second ahead of a thunderstorm of 7.62 mm rounds that now sailed his way. Dropping to his belly, he saw Latham’s shadowy form still under the car. The Texan turned to look at him as the Executioner squirmed beneath the bumper toward the right rear tire well. Latham lay on his back, the Browning Hi-Power aimed toward the passenger side of the vehicle. As the Executioner moved beneath the Jeep, his head passed within a foot of the Texan’s.

Latham turned to face him in the shadows. “What I was trying to say earlier, before we were so rudely interrupted,” he said, “was that I’ve been better.”

Bolan grinned as he moved in farther beneath the Cherokee. T. J. Hawkins had been right. Latham could definitely keep his cool under fire.

When he’d come as close as he dared to the edge of the vehicle, the Executioner could see two sets of legs from the knees down. Without hesitation, he extended both hands. The man on the right caught a .44 Magnum round in the shin. The man on the left took a 3-round burst of 9 mm rounds in an ankle. Both men fell to the ground, screaming. Mercy rounds from the Beretta ended their suffering.

The Executioner crawled backward again.

“How many left?” Latham whispered as he passed.

“Two to the right,” Bolan whispered back. “And the two guys faking the accident. Behind their cars.”

“I hit one of them on my way down here to this hobbit hole,” Latham said, looking up at the Jeep’s undercarriage. “Don’t think it killed him, though.”

Bolan emerged from beneath the back bumper, his brain taking in the fact that the quantity of return fire from the kidnappers had withered considerably. Part of that, he knew, came from the fact that many of the riflemen had been killed. But there was more to it than just that.

The kidnappers—if that’s what they really were—had outnumbered the Executioner and Latham twelve to one when the gunfight had begun. They’d planned on an easy snatch of two unarmed foreigners if ransom was their game. Or an easy kill if Subing had sent them to assassinate him. But now, regardless of their motives, within sixty seconds or so, they had lost three-quarters of their manpower. That had a way of playing on the mind and they had to be wondering just what kind of men they’d run into. Which, in turn, was causing them to hesitate.

Bolan leaned down beneath the bumper once more. “Roll out on the driver’s side and cover me,” he ordered Latham. “On three. One, two—”

The Executioner rose up as he said, “Three!” stepping out to the side of the Cherokee. The final two men who had emerged from the jungle on his side of the car had indeed been hesitating. But they had obviously made their decision.

They were one step away from returning to the brush when Bolan shot them with a double tap from the Desert Eagle.

In his peripheral vision, Bolan saw Latham standing next to the open driver’s door. The Texan held his Browning in both hands, sending a slow but steady stream of .40-caliber hollowpoint rounds into the parked vehicles. At this distance, the laser sight was unusable in the bright sun, but Latham was proving he could shoot without it.

The Executioner turned away from the road, leaping over the body of a man he’d shot earlier and darting into the leaves and vines. Quickly, while the men behind the vehicles were concentrating on Latham, he made his away through the foliage until he had gone past the point where the cars were parked.

From there, it was easy.

The Executioner saw that Latham had indeed hit one of the men high in the arm. The man had ripped half his shirt off and tied it around the wound in an attempt to staunch the blood. But the makeshift bandage wasn’t working; crimson fluid drained past his elbow and along the limp limb before splattering onto the asphalt.

Bolan flipped the Beretta selector switch to single shot. With plenty of time to use the sight, he lined the weapon up on the injured man and squeezed the trigger.

A lone 9 mm round streaked from the 93-R into the injured man’s temple.

The other man behind the car whipped his face over his shoulder to stare at the Executioner in shock. The reality of what was happening suddenly spread across his face and he tried to turn farther, swinging his pistol around with him. He didn’t make it.

A second 9 mm round entered his open mouth and blew out the back of his skull.

Suddenly what had sounded like a Chinatown fireworks factory exploding became as quiet as a graveyard. Bolan stepped out of the trees and walked forward. Quickly he stopped by each man he passed to be sure none of the bodies would suddenly rise from the grave to shoot again. All were dead.

The Executioner met Latham between the kidnappers’s parked cars and the Cherokee. “We’ve got to clean this place up and hope one of the vehicles still works,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to see the Ford Fairlaine resting on its rims, all four tires blown out. The Chevy had lost only one tire but water dripped from the punctured radiator. When he stepped forward, the distinct odor of gasoline filled the air. Turning back to the Cherokee, he saw that while the body was riddled with holes, all four tires were still intact. Bolan nodded at the vehicle. “See if it still starts,” he ordered Latham. “And while you’re there, grab my sound suppressor off the ground behind the rear bumper.”

As the Texan walked toward the Cherokee, Bolan began to lift the bodies and drag them toward the jungle. Behind him, he heard Latham’s car cough to life. Or at least a half life. Something beneath the hood had been hit and the timing was off. And a periodic ping meant the half life wouldn’t be long, either.

The Executioner tossed another body into the brush, reached down and sent the AK-47 the man had wielded flying out of sight. In addition to no longer having any faith in the engine, the bullet-ridden Cherokee would be a mobile sign attracting attention they didn’t need. It was time for another change in plans. He’d just have to hope this vehicle would get them out of the immediate vicinity and back into town where they could appropriate a more reliable and less conspicuous mode of transportation.

With the engine still choking and coughing, Latham joined the Executioner in hiding the bodies. When all but two of the attackers had been hidden, they pushed first the Ford, then the Chevy off the road onto the shoulders. Setting a body behind both steering wheels, they turned the dead eyes to face each other across the highway.

To anyone passing, it would look as if two drivers had met on the road and pulled off to have a quick conversation. At least it would look that way as long as no one noticed the pools of blood spotting the asphalt.

Bolan glanced at the mutilated autobody as he hurried to the Cherokee again. Latham’s Jeep looked as if someone had methodically gone over it with an awl, punching holes every half inch into the body. He ducked inside as the Texan took his place behind the wheel again.

“This thing’s gonna stand out in Rio Hondo like an ex-husband at the bride’s second wedding,” Latham said.

The Executioner shook his head. “Change in plans,” he said. “Turn us back toward Zamboanga. We need some new wheels.”

Latham immediately saw the wisdom in the order and didn’t argue. He threw the Cherokee into drive, made a U-turn in the highway and started back toward the city. As soon as they were moving he stuck his tongue into his tobacco can. Twice.

Miraculously, there had been no traffic during the few minutes of the gunfight. But now, having gone less than a hundred yards, a rusty, primer-painted Datsun topped the hill, heading toward them. As the war-damaged Cherokee chugged on, Bolan adjusted the rearview mirror and watched the reaction of the elderly Filipino behind the wheel.

The old man passed the parked cars without giving either of the dead drivers a second look.

As they drove away from the scene, Latham frowned.

“You okay?” Bolan asked. The man had proved himself to be a more than adequate warrior, living up to what Hawkins had promised.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Latham said. “Just trying to remember something.”

It was Bolan’s turn to frown now. “What?” he asked.

“Whether or not I made my last auto insurance payment,” the Texan said.

The Executioner’s frown curled into a grin.

CHAPTER TWO

Bolan was faced with a problem: ditching the bullet-ridden Cherokee and finding a set of wheels that blended with the local atmosphere of Rio Hondo. He and Charlie Latham were going to look out of place as soon as they stepped out of any vehicle. He didn’t need a stand-out car to announce their presence ahead of time adding to that problem.

Dusk fell over the island of Mindanao as Latham drove past Fort Pilar and Bolan pointed toward an intersecting road. He had studied a map during the flight to the Philippines and knew the road curved around the southeast corner of Zamboanga, eventually merging with General V. Alvarez Street and leading to the heart of the city. By the time they reached the downtown area twilight had become nighttime.

Beggars and gangs of youths began to appear on the streets as they drove. The Executioner was reminded that every city, in every country, in all of the world, had its share of “night people,” men and women who were never seen when the sun was in the sky but emerged from robber’s dens, crack houses and from under rocks as soon as darkness fell. Zamboanga seemed to have more than its share of such people.

But not all of the night people were evil, Bolan knew. Many were simply unfortunate.

The soldier pointed Latham into a left turn onto Lorenzo and more groups of shiftless teenaged boys appeared in front of the stores and other businesses lining both sides of the street. Angry black eyes set in berry-brown faces stared into the Cherokee as they passed. The Executioner could understand their anger. They had been born into a world of poverty and sorrow with little hope of ever escaping. But anger alone changed nothing. Anger put no food on the table. It purchased no medicine for the sick. It didn’t change a dirt-floored house into one with tile or carpet. And now, the loathing in the black teenage eyes that watched the Cherokee pass changed to fury, which Bolan knew would produce tomorrow’s terrorists if men like him didn’t work for change.

Latham had finally had enough silence. “What are we looking for?”

Bolan started to answer, then stopped as the Buick Century Custom they’d been following for the past several blocks pulled over and parked on the street a half block ahead. “That,” he told Latham, nodding toward the windshield. As the driver’s door opened, the Executioner’s eyes turned toward the sidewalk where yet another gang of teenagers leaned slothfully against the plate-glass window of a small café. As he watched, a dark-skinned man wearing a black-and-white checkered shirt stepped away from his cohorts and grinned at the car. The man was incredibly tall by Filipino standards—probably just under six feet. As he swaggered toward the Buick, the driver got out, walked to the sidewalk and handed the taller man a key ring.

“Pull in behind them,” the Executioner said.

Latham followed orders as Bolan studied the man who had just driven up. Actually, calling him a man was stretching the term if not a complete misnomer. He was well under five feet tall and looked to be around thirteen. The taller man took the keys and slapped him on the back with his free hand. The child who had driven the Buick beamed as if he’d just become the new president of the Philippines.

“Well, there’s a rough one to figure out,” Latham said as he halted the Cherokee ten feet behind the Buick.

Bolan chuckled as he opened his door. Car theft was as common as kidnapping on Mindanao with older boys often using the younger ones to actually perpetrate the crimes. Just as in the United States, the younger the criminal, the more likely he would get a light sentence or get off altogether, if caught. Now, as the Executioner stepped out and up onto the curb he saw the tall man, the driver, and half a dozen other Filipino youths turn his way.

Although smiles appeared on many of the faces, the young men didn’t look happy. Their expressions were more like what could be expected on the face of a wolf upon spying a particularly large sheep.

Bolan could hear low chatter among the men as he walked forward. Here and there, he heard a snicker as some of the younger ones pointed at him and spoke. Behind him, the Executioner heard Latham exit the Cherokee, the Texan’s sandals flapping on the pavement with each step he took.

“Normally I’d say stopping to chat with these guys wasn’t the smartest idea in the world,” came the Texas drawl behind the Executioner. “Of course, it’s all in your point of view, I guess. Compared to what we just finished doing, it pretty much pales by comparison.”

The voices were clear now but in a dialect unfamiliar to the Executioner. Stopping five feet from the man in the checkered shirt, Bolan turned to Latham as the Texan fell in at his side. “You understand them?” he asked.

Latham shook his head. “They’re Samal,” he said. “One of the indigenous Manobo tribes. Got their own dialect.”

“They speak Tagalog, too?” Bolan asked.

“I’d imagine,” Latham said. He pulled out his can of tobacco, opened it, snaked his tongue inside then stuffed the can back in his pocket. With a smile on his face, he looked at the young men in front of him and spit out a fast mouthful of the national language. Bolan caught only the word “Pilipino.”

The man in the checkered shirt smirked, shrugged and held out his hands, palms up. The rest of the Filipino gang-bangers laughed.

“I asked him to switch languages. He’s acting like he doesn’t understand me,” Latham said.

“But he does,” Bolan said.

“Hell, yes, he does. He’s just got to screw with us a little to save face in front of his boys.” He sighed quietly. “It’s all part of the game.” Pausing again, he turned slightly toward Bolan. “You do realize that they won’t be able to resist trying to rob a couple of Yanks like us, don’t you?”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” Bolan said.

“Yeah, well….” Latham chuckled and shook his head in disbelief. “Okay, what do you want me to tell them next?”

Bolan looked the tall leader in the eye and grinned. “Tell him we’d like to trade cars with him. The Cherokee for the Buick he just stole.”

“Oh, that’ll go over big, I’m sure.” Latham cut loose with another flurry of undecipherable words.

The man in the checkered shirt leaned to the side and looked at the bullet holes in the Cherokee. When he answered this time, he did so in Tagalog. Whatever he said brought riots of laughter from the others.

Bolan glanced to his side.

“It’s a little hard to translate directly,” Latham said. “But, loosely, he said the Cherokee has more holes in it than your father’s prophylactic must have had.”

The Executioner chuckled politely. But he was quickly growing weary of this whole game. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a large roll of paper money. “Tell him we’ll throw in a few extra pesos to cover the holes.”

The eyes of the tall leader fell on the money and his smile turned predatory again. Still staring at the Executioner’s hand, he spoke again, pointing to the alley behind him.

“Do I need to translate that?” Latham asked. “He wants to go—”

“He wants to do the deal in the alley.” Bolan shoved the money back into his pocket. “Tell him that’s fine.”

Latham spoke, then waved his hand toward the alley. The tall leader and the others fell in around Bolan and Latham, escorting them toward the dark opening between the buildings. The dialogue between the young men went back to the Samal dialect and with it came the return of the snickering. In the shadowy light from the overhead streetlight, Bolan could see that each and every one of them believed they had just met the two stupidest Americans who had ever been born. Now, they were leading the sheep to slaughter.

The Executioner walked calmly on as the tall man in the checkered shirt reached out with his left arm and took Bolan’s, much as one might do to help an old lady across the street. He seemed to have no perception whatsoever that he has herding not a sheep but a sheepdog.

Twenty feet into the alley, the group halted. Dim light filtered in from the sidewalk and high above them on the roof to Bolan’s right a spotlight brightened the barred-and-locked back door to the building. Still holding the Executioner’s arm with one hand, a flash of silver suddenly appeared in the gang leader’s other hand. What little light was available seemed to be drawn directly to the object, which sparkled brightly as it began to swing through the air accompanied by a series of clicks and snaps.

Bolan would have recognized the sounds even if he hadn’t seen the knife. Although it had originated in the Philippine Islands, the balisong had become a worldwide weapon and various versions were now manufactured all over the planet. He was about to reach out to grab the gang leader’s wrist when the man suddenly dropped his arm and stepped back.

The balisong began to dance through the air, making circles, squares and cutting figure eights. The man holding the knife stepped under the spotlight in front of the alley door. Amid a chorus of oohs and ahs of awe and delight from his young minions, he continued to open and close the wings of the butterfly knife.

“Want to just shoot ’em?” Latham whispered. “Of course it’d be sad to see so much worthless talent go to waste.”

Bolan ignored him, watching silently as the leader finally finished, clamped the handles together in his fist and holding the balisong threateningly out in front of him.

“Does this mean the show’s over?” Bolan asked.

He was a little surprised when the man in the checkered shirt nodded. “Unless you would like to become part of it,” he said in overly dramatic, heavily accented English. The wolverine grin had returned to his face and, standing beneath the spotlight, he actually looked more like an actor on stage than a man with a knife in the middle of a robbery.

“Excellent grammar,” Latham chimed in. “And here I was wasting all that time translating.”

“We will take the money and both cars,” said the man in the checkered shirt. “If you are lucky, we will let you two leave with your lives.” He opened and closed the balisong one final time for effect. “Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?”

“Oh, man,” Latham said. One hand shot up to his face to cover his eyes. “This is getting really embarrassing now.” He turned to Bolan. “Everybody in the Philippines loves movies, but they get them pretty late.”

Bolan had had enough of the whole Bruce-Lee-Dirty-Harry show. With one smooth movement he swept the tail of his chambray shirt back past the Desert Eagle, pulled the big .44 Magnum pistol from his belt and stepped forward. Using the heavy weapon as a club, he brought the barrel down across the wrist holding the balisong. A sharp, snapping, almost nauseating crack of bone filled the alleyway as the gleaming blade flew from the gang-banger’s hand to clatter onto the ground.

The Executioner jammed the bore of the big .44 into the man’s forehead. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that Latham had drawn his Browning. The red laser-dot moved back and forth from chest to chest as the Texan covered the rest of the gang.

Bolan turned to face the other men. “My turn on stage,” he said.

Somewhere along the way the wolfish smile had disappeared and now the man in the checkered shirt looked like a boa constrictor with an elephant caught in his throat. He nodded slowly.

“Nothing fancy on my part,” Bolan said. “Just give me the keys to the Buick. And move slowly. Very, very slowly.” He pressed the Desert Eagle into the man’s face a little harder to serve as an exclamation point at the end of the sentence.

The gangster got the message. His hand moved into the pocket of his dirty blue jeans with the speed of a stoned sloth. The key ring came out and he extended it timidly forward. Bolan took the keys with his free hand and dropped them into his pocket.

“Charlie, you got the keys to the Cherokee?”

He felt the Texan move in to his side. A second later Latham’s hand dropped the keys into the breast pocket of the black-and-white checkered shirt.

“A wise businessman once told me that the best deals are the ones where both parties walk away happy,” the Executioner said, still holding the .44 between the gang leader’s eyebrows. “So. Are you happy?”

The man in the checkered shirt nodded slowly. The barrel of the Desert Eagle moved up to the man’s hairline, down to the bridge of his nose, then up again.

“Good,” Bolan said. “I’m happy, too.” Quickly he stepped away from the leader and turned to the rest of the young men, waving them toward the wall as he and Latham backed out of the alley.

After transferring their possessions from the Cherokee, they were driving away from downtown Zamboanga with Bolan behind the wheel of the Buick Century Custom.

THE NIGHT HAD DARKENED even more by the time they returned to spot where they’d been attacked on the road. The Chevy and Ford still stood where they’d been left, the dead drivers appearing to be engaged in an across-the-road conversation. The moon had disappeared behind the clouds and Bolan drove on headlights alone.

Bolan let up on the accelerator, slowing the Buick as they entered the outskirts of Rio Hondo. Latham sat silently next to him as they drove past a long row of stilt houses built out from the shore over the water. According to intel, there were forty-six of the dwellings crammed so close together that they almost appeared to be one long structure. Candido Subing’s uncle—Mario Subing—lived in one of the rickety shanties near the center. While neither Stony Man Farm nor the CIA believed Mario was directly involved with the Tigers himself, the old man was perfectly willing to harbor his nephew. His was the twenty-first stilt house from the edge of town. Bolan counted the dilapidated dwellings as they passed.

Uncle Mario’s place looked no different than any of the other raised dwellings as it blurred into the rest of the long row in the Buick’s rearview mirror. The Executioner knew he’d have to count again when he returned later that night.

The rumor of the “big-time strike” in the U.S. floated through Bolan’s mind again. And again, he couldn’t see how such a small organization could pull off such an expensive enterprise. If there was such an operation in motion, the Tigers had to be linked up with some other group.

A half dozen elderly men in front of what appeared to be a café were the only ones who seemed to take notice of the Buick as they drove through the village. Bolan kept his eyes on the mosque to his left, finally turning off the asphalt highway and cutting back inland on a gravel road. Mentally he mapped the layout of the village for future reference, noting that behind the houses across the road from the stilt dwellings lay jungle and the most direct foot path between the mosque and Mario Subing’s place would be to cut through the thick leaves and vines. The jungle would also provide even better cover than the darkness for much of their approach. There might even be a spot inside the trees where they could set up surveillance.

The Executioner passed a small brown man and woman holding hands as they walked away from the mosque. They stared at the Buick, an unfamiliar car in the small settlement. That was the primary drawback to his plan—the car. Even if the Rio Hondans didn’t look inside the Buick and see the light-skinned men they were bound to take notice of any unknown vehicles that entered the village. The best plan was to find a parking place as close to the jungle as possible, then get out of the car and into the trees before they were spotted.

The Buick crunched over the gravel toward the towering sphere atop the mosque. If they were spotted, they’d do their best to pass themselves off as lost tourists. But that story was so thin it could have been anorexic. Latham had informed him that all of the tourist manuals and western government travel advisories discouraged visitors from visiting Rio Hondo during the day and just flat-out told them they’d be out of their minds to be in such an area after the sun went down. There was just too much crime. Visitors were encouraged to stick close to their lodgings from dusk until dawn.

Charlie Latham had to be thinking along the same lines because as the Executioner drove on he pulled the straw cowboy hat from his head and dropped it on the floor at his feet. Not knowing whether the mosque would be open when they arrived, they had nevertheless been aware of the fact that wearing shorts in the area would definitely be frowned on by Islamic leaders. So they had stopped along the road soon after acquiring the Buick and Latham now wore a faded pair of denim jeans he’d pulled out of the rear of the Cherokee. A well-worn pair of Nike running shoes had replaced his flipping and flopping sandals.

The gravel road led into a parking lot where several other vehicles already stood. Lights could be seen through the mosque windows. Bolan pulled the Buick quickly between two other cars, hoping they might serve as at least partial camouflage. Word that an unknown car was in Rio Hondo would travel fast enough. He didn’t see any sense in hurrying it up any faster than he had to.

The Executioner cut the engine and killed the headlights. He estimated them to be roughly half a mile from the stilt houses.

Through an open door leading into the mosque Bolan could see several men kneeling in prayer. As he and Latham quietly exited the car, he saw the men rise to their feet and begin talking with one another. That meant that they’d be leaving in a few more minutes, returning to the parking lot to get into their vehicles and go home for the night.

Which, in turn, meant Bolan and Latham needed to hit the jungle even faster than he’d thought.

Bolan opened the car door and closed it quietly behind him, Latham doing the same on his side. Crouching slightly, the two men jogged away from the mosque. The Executioner’s eyes swept left and right, but he saw no one looking back at him. As soon as they reached the trees they ducked inside, then turned to peer back out through the foliage.

The men who had been at their prayers were now leaving. Some of them took off on foot, others walked toward the parking lot. Two of the men stopped at the Buick, looking it up and down. Thought he was too far away to hear their words, the Executioner saw their lips moving and their arms waving up and down in animated conversation. He knew the news was about to spread throughout the village; how fast it went from house to house depended upon just how unique the sight of an unknown vehicle happened to be. But there was no reason to worry about that now. He would deal with whatever consequences the Buick brought when, and if, he encountered them.

Bolan motioned to Latham to follow, then took off through the jungle. The Texan had kept two rusty-but-shaving-sharp machetes in the Cherokee, which they now used to cut their way through the heavy growth toward the sea. Fifteen yards into the trees, they suddenly found themselves intersecting with a well-traveled footpath and halted in their tracks.

For a moment the Executioner considered taking the path, for it no doubt led in the direction he was headed. But the fact that it was obviously often used warned him away. He didn’t want to encounter any innocent Rio Hondans who might, regardless of their good intentions, tell the rest of the town that there were Yankees hiding in the leaves and vines.

Backing up, Bolan and Latham continued to cut their own route toward the highway.

The moon was still hidden in the sky when they finally reached the houses across the road from the stilt shacks. Peering through the leaves, Bolan could see the backsides of the crudely built sheds, chicken coops and shabby homes. Dropping their machetes, they darted from the jungle into the darkness, crouching as they made their way from building to building, stopping to check for curious eyes each time they reached new concealment.

It took twenty minutes to reach the rear of a splintering outdoor toilet the Executioner estimated to be halfway down the row of stilt houses across the road. Peering around the edge of the foul-smelling outhouse, he stared between two houses in front of him. The clouds had moved and by the dim light of a quarter moon he could just make out the shadowy stilt structures on the other side of the highway.

The Executioner stared at the ramshackle structures. He had decided that the best course of action was to wait on Subing, then tail him back to the hostages when he left his uncle’s house. Of course there was no guarantee the terrorist leader would even show up this night and there was every chance in the world that as daybreak neared he and Latham would have to sneak back to their vehicle and find a place to hide out until tomorrow night. If that happened, he would give the plan one more night. And if Subing still failed to appear, he would interrogate the man’s uncle.

It wasn’t an idea the Executioner relished, Mario Subing was reported to be an old man. But when he weighed one man against the lives of the hostages and all of the other innocents the Liberty Tigers would kill if allowed to go unchecked, a little fright put into the heart of an octogenarian didn’t seem all that cruel.

Turning to Latham, he kept his voice low. “Stay here. There’s no sense in both of us going.”

“I don’t mind—”

The Executioner shook his head. “I know you don’t mind going. There’s just no sense in both of us taking the chance of being seen. Two men hiding in the dark are twice as likely to be spotted as one.”

Latham obviously didn’t like the idea of staying back, but he was smart enough to see the logic behind the Executioner’s order. He nodded in the darkness.

Bolan stole forward again, keeping low and thankful that they’d encountered none of the stray dogs he’d seen earlier. Barks and a few growls had sounded in the distance as they’d moved through the jungle but they had been the common sounds all dogs made at night, not the warning alerts wild canines sent their prey when they were on the hunt.

Reaching the side of the residence directly in front of the outhouse, the Executioner slid his back along the wall toward a window. Dim light flickered from the screenless, shutterless opening and when he reached it he dropped to his knees. Risking a quick glance over the windowsill, his eyes took in the candle flame dancing on the wooden table inside. Mosquito nets hung over moldy bare mattresses on the packed-earth floor. Six small children huddled in sleep on one of the threadbare beds. A man and a woman, looking far older than they could have possibly been if these children had come from their loins, sat listlessly at the table, staring silently off into space.

Bolan rose to his feet as soon as he’d passed the window and crept to the front corner of the house. Now the shoreline was more visible, and he saw that he was far past the center of the stilt village. Light—open candles and a few lanterns—glowed from some of the structures, glimmering off the water below. Others stilt houses stood in darkness, looking as dead as the faces of the man and woman the Executioner had just seen through the window.

Bolan started at the end and counted to twenty-one. A lantern hung from the porch of Mario Subing’s house and through the window behind it he could see what looked like the silhouette of a man.

Turning back to where he’d left Latham, the Executioner ducked past the window and hurried back to the outhouse. Silently he pointed in the direction from which he’d just come, waited until he saw Latham’s nod of acknowledgment, then crept back along the houses. A few seconds later he dropped to one knee again and looked out between the houses. Across the asphalt road he saw the same lantern. And the same silhouette still sat in the shadows at the window. But now Subing was looking outward into the darkness.

Waiting for his nephew? Maybe.

The Executioner turned back to Latham. “I’m going closer again,” he whispered. “There may be another way into the house we can’t see. Subing could slip in and out of the house and we’d never know.”

Latham shrugged. “And I suppose you want me to stay here again,” he said in a voice that made it clear he would prefer moving up with the Executioner.

“Right,” the Executioner whispered. “Cover our rear and flanks.” Without another word he turned away from the Texan and crept forward.

Another house; another side window in the same place. But this window was dark. The Executioner dropped to all fours anyway, staying below the line of sight in case anyone inside might still be awake and watching. But the deep snores that drifted through the opening told him that wasn’t the case. Passing the window, he stopped just short of the front of the house and dropped to one knee. Leaning against the splintered boards at his side, he settled in to study the stilt house across the road.

Not all of Rio Hondo was asleep yet and in the shadows and flickering lights of the mounted candles and lanterns the Executioner saw men, women and children moving back and forth between the structures that stood precariously above the water.

Three doors down from Mario’s, the Executioner watched the walkway dip, bounce and creak under the weight of several children as they played back and forth along the ramps. Their area was better lit than most of the poverty-level stilt houses with both candles and lanterns hanging from wires suspended from the roofs. Laugher and an occasional scream met the Executioner’s ears.

As soon as he was certain he’d not been seen, Bolan lowered himself into a sitting position, his back against the wall of the house. The snoring, punctuated by an occasional cough, continued to float through the window, reassuring him that the occupants had no knowledge of his presence a mere five feet or so from where they slept.

As he waited, Bolan’s mind drifted back to the men who had exited the mosque and stopped to examine the Buick. Depending on exactly who they were, how they reacted and what else they might have to do tonight, they’d either pass the car off lightly or start asking questions. Worst-case scenario would be that they smelled trouble and would begin scouring the village for whoever had parked it. And in a town this small—even in the dark—it wouldn’t take long for them to find Bolan and Latham.

The Executioner silently prayed that wouldn’t happen. He had no desire to injure innocent men who would think they were simply protecting their town from outsiders. But there was little he could do to forestall that situation at this point. If it happened, it happened. As he had always done, he would deal with any specific trouble that came up when it came up.

THE MAN IN THE NEW custom-tailored Italian suit caught a glimpse of himself as he opened the glass door of the restaurant. The suit looked good on him, he decided. Made him look slimmer. Not that slim was anything he put much stock in. The fact was, he had grown up as a poor hungry child and slim had been unavoidable. He considered the corpulence he had achieved during the past twenty years as a sign of his success, and he never intended to be hungry again.

The maître d’ in the black tuxedo greeted him as soon as he stepped inside. “Good evening, Mr. Mikelsson,” he said with the broad grin of a man who knew he would receive a large tip before the night ended.

“Good evening to you, Hugo,” Lars Mikelsson responded, following the maître d’.

As the man held his chair out for him, Mikelsson said, “I am expecting a few calls, Hugo. Please notify me immediately.” Silently he hoped the calls would come between courses. Better yet, not until he had finished eating altogether.

“Of course, Mr. Mikelsson,” Hugo replied, then hurried away.

Mikelsson had barely sipped the beer a waiter had automatically placed in front of him before Hugo reappeared. “Sir, your call is here.”

The fat man pushed himself laboriously up from the chair and followed Hugo through the tables to a short hallway, then into an office. Behind the desk sat the restaurant owner. He rose quickly to his feet without needing to be told, exiting the office with his employee. Mikelsson smiled to himself. The restaurant owner had been provided with a free, state-of-the-art, security system. It had been his payment for allowing the fat man to take certain calls in his office. And to ask no questions about them.

A red light was blinking on the telephone on the desk. The fat man in the new suit lifted the receiver and pressed the button next to it. “Yes?” he said into the phone.

“Nothing has changed, Mr. Mikelsson,” said the voice on the other end, which he immediately recognized. “The union didn’t accept the offer.”

A slow boil of anger started in Mikelsson’s belly. More and more, it seemed these days, his legitimate business enterprises such as the automobile and aircraft industries not only bored but irritated him. His mood wasn’t helped by the fact that he was hungry. “Then let them wait,” he said in carefully controlled words. “If they don’t care to build automobiles for what I pay them, let them stay home in their pathetic little hovels. We will see who goes bankrupt first, them or me.” Without waiting for an answer he slammed down the receiver. It rang again before Mikelsson could get up from his chair.

“Hello,” Mikelsson said, sounding irritated.

“Mikelsson.”

“Candido?”

“Yes,” the voice on the other end said in Arabic.

“I assume you are in Israel, and all is well?” Mikelsson asked bluntly in the same language.

“All is well,” Candido said. “Our martyr is ready to enter the synagogue.”

Your martyr, not mine, you fool, Mikelsson thought. “Excellent. How far away are you?”

“Three blocks. You will be able to hear it,” Subing stated.

“How long will it be?”

“One, maybe two minutes at most.”

“Then I will wait,” Mikelsson said, his pulse beginning to race. “I like hearing them.” Seconds later he heard the explosion on the other end of the line.

“Did you hear it?” Subing asked excitedly.

“Yes.”

“I will call you as soon as I return, so you will know where I am.” Subing paused and the excitement returned to his voice. “In case everything is in place in America.”

“I have told you,” Mikelsson said, “the project in the United States is not yet ready. The ship will not even arrive until tomorrow.”

“I will be ready,” Subing said. “And, again, I will call you as soon as I return home.”

The fat man hung up the phone, struggled to his feet and started out of the office, toward the buffet line. He smiled. “Yes, call me, little brown man,” he said under his breath to himself. “But I will get word of your return to the Philippines and every other move you make, before you even reach a phone.”

CHAPTER THREE

“I’d forgotten how much fun the jungle could be in the middle of the day,” Charlie Latham said sarcastically. “Guess that’s why the siesta was invented.”

The Executioner glanced over his shoulder at the man behind him. They had been back on the jungle pathway for no more than five minutes but already sweat shot from every pore in their bodies to soak their clothes. Latham had produced a bandanna from somewhere on his person and tied it around his forehead as a sweatband. His straw cowboy hat now balanced atop the cloth high on his head, wobbling back and forth and threatening to topple off each time he took a swing with his machete.

The Executioner turned back, lashing out with his machete at a low-hanging vine before taking another step forward. He glanced at his watch to see that it was nearly 1300 hours.

They had fled into the jungle the night before to avoid being spotted by the residents of Rio Hondo. Once the Executioner felt they had gone deep enough that no one would follow their tracks, they had stopped to catch a few minutes’ sleep among the foliage. It was the first time the Executioner had closed his eyes since arriving on Mindanao and it wasn’t enough rest to bring him back into top form. But it was all he’d had, so it would have to do until another opportunity presented itself.

Upon awakening, he and Latham had found that the temperature has risen steadily. It now had to be somewhere between ninety and one hundred degrees with a humidity index that almost matched. They had returned to their parallel path, happy that only an occasional vine or limb had encroached upon them during the night. They walked quietly, swinging their machetes only when absolutely necessary, their ears cocked for anyone who might come down the regular shortcut from the mosque to the sea.

Considering the men who had so carefully looked over the Buick, Bolan suspected the men of the village were looking for whoever had left the car in the parking lot by now. At the very least, they would be curious.

The Executioner had just brought his arm back to slice through a thick green vine when he suddenly froze in place. Behind him, he heard Latham’s foot fall a final time. Bolan had no need to hold up a hand for silence—Latham sensed the need for it just as he had.

For a moment the only sounds around them were the buzzing of insects and the sudden flutter of bird wings between them and the older path. The Executioner glanced overhead through a hole in the jungle canopy to see a rare Philippine eagle—known as the haribon—sail out of sight. More birds took wing as the noise continued to drift through the foliage between them and the native’s shortcut.

As the sounds grew louder they became recognizable as voices, though the words could not be understood. The voices were low, muffled. They were the voices of men trying not to be heard, but not trying quite hard enough.

Bolan turned toward Latham.

The Texan silently mouthed the word Tagalog but shook his head, telling the Executioner he couldn’t make out the conversation, either.

Bolan stared through the foliage as the voices continued, growing increasingly louder. They sounded as if they hadn’t quite come parallel with the new path the two Americans had cut the day before. As they waited, the sound of feet trampling the underbrush began to accompany the voices. Then, as they apparently came abreast of Bolan and Latham, the words became more clear.

The Executioner turned back to Latham, but the Texan was holding up a hand for silence. He had twisted sideways, his other hand at the side of his face farthest from the native pathway. His index finger was stuck in his ear to block out all sound on that side. As the Executioner watched, the Texan nodded, frowning.

The words coming through the trees were discernable now and Bolan wished he could understand the language. What he did note, however, was one very distinct voice. One of the men spoke with a high, wheezing delivery as if he suffered from asthma or had some similar problem with his lungs.

Almost as soon as the voices had grown loud enough to hear, they began to decrease again. The men were moving past them now, slowly leaving audible range as they walked on toward the stilt houses and the sea. Their footsteps faded out first, then the words were gone again, too.

Latham looked at the Executioner. “They’re looking for us, all right,” he said. “Seems everybody in town wonders about the car.”

“Could you tell how many there were?” Bolan asked.

Latham shrugged. “Three. Maybe four. One guy has trouble breathing.”

“So I noticed,” the Executioner said. “What else did you pick up?”

“Somebody—I don’t think it was one of them—saw us drive into town yesterday.” Latham had been holding his machete over his head, preparing to swing it when the first sounds of the search party had reached their ears. Now, realizing he still had the big blade frozen in the air he lowered it to his side with a short chuckle.

“That all?”

“All I could make out. Keep in mind I was getting all this in bits and pieces and I’ve added a little conjecture of my own. The conversation had been going on a long time, and we just caught some part in the middle.”

The Executioner stared into the wall of green in front of him. Their situation was changing rapidly and his strategy would have to change with it. First, not only did they stand out among the natives of Mindanao, they were now being actively sought. Second, the Buick was burned. Even if the searchers had left no one to watch the car, and he and Latham could get to it without being seen, the vehicle was useless. It would be readily recognized regardless of where they went.

The Executioner took a deep breath and made a battlefield decision. They would hide out in the jungle the rest of the day, then stake out Mario Subing’s house one more night. He was now more determined than ever that if the terrorist leader didn’t show up, it would be time for another approach. But again, the only other avenue he could think of was to snatch Mario and take him some place for interrogation. He still didn’t like that idea one bit. It would no doubt involve at least some amount of pain on the old man’s part and even the thought of extricating information from an old man was repugnant to the Executioner.

“Well,” Latham whispered, cutting into the Executioner’s thought.

Bolan looked at him and saw the man staring at his forehead.

“As my mama used to say, ‘I can see the wheels a-turnin’ behind them frown wrinkles.’ When they quit, let me know what we’re going to do next, okay?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his can of chewing tobacco. This time, however, he reached in with his fingers, grabbed a pinch and stuck it under his lip.

The Executioner looked around him and saw that with a couple more machete chops he could open up a large enough area in which to lie down. His big blade flashed twice, then he dropped to his knees before rolling onto his side.

“I take it that means it’s nap time,” Latham said, cutting an area out for himself behind the Executioner. “Hope it’s a little longer this time.” He swung the machete forward side-armed, embedding it into the soft trunk of a tree and leaving it there.

Through half-closed eyelids, Bolan saw the man kneel, then lean forward on his stomach, bending his arm to use as a pillow on the side of his face. Moments later he was asleep.

AT FIRST Bolan thought he was dreaming. Then, as he suddenly snapped wide awake, he realized the voices were real. And at the same time, he realized they were the same voices he and Latham had heard from the jungle path earlier in the day.

He glanced at his watch. It had been less than two hours since they had dropped to the ground. He looked down at Latham, still sleeping peacefully. The Executioner considered wakening him, then just as quickly discarded the idea. Not only was there no sense in it, it could create a problem for what he was about to do.

Rising to a sitting position, Bolan pulled a small spiral notebook and pen from his pocket. Quickly he scribbled the words “Back soon. Stay here.” on the top page, then quietly tore it from the book. Working Latham’s machete out of the tree, he placed the note atop a bare patch of damp earth on the ground, then drove the tip of the machete through it to hold it in place.

A second later he disappeared into the trees toward the more traveled pathway.

Bolan moved quickly but quietly, his senses on full alert. He had seen the fatigue beginning to build in Charlie Latham even before their first nap the night before. But there was another reason he hadn’t brought the Texan along with him now. While Latham had proved to be smart, quick and deadly as a fighter, his jungle skills had been less than perfect. It was clear that what T.J. had said about the man was true—he had come to the Philippines for the martial arts training available, not the jungle. Latham had made far more noise than Bolan had liked during their earlier trip from the mosque to the stilt houses. It hadn’t mattered then; no one had been looking for them.

Now, it did matter. Someone was looking for them. And the Executioner wasn’t going to take the chance that a sudden cough or sneeze, or a footstep on a snapping dry branch might give them away.

The voices grew louder as Bolan neared the path. He slowed, staring at the ground before each step, taking shallow silent breaths, his ears cocked for any sign that he might have been heard. In addition to seeing and hearing, the Executioner took full advantage of his other senses, as well.

And most of all that sixth sense men such as he developed that some called instinct.

It took him close to five minutes to cover the fifty feet between where Latham slept and the jungle path. But when he reached the open area, he could still hear the voices as they made their way along the trail. Dropping down behind a cluster of tangled vegetation three feet from the path, the Executioner pulled the tiny microcassette recorder from his pants, plugged in the directional mike and extended it through the leaves as far as he dared.

The voices grew louder. But none of the words made sense to the Executioner. He lay perfectly still, the lactic acid building in his outstretched arm, pleading with his brain to let him lower it.

Through the thick undergrowth Bolan watched as four men—three armed with machetes, the third carrying a pinute bolo short sword—strolled toward him. Their ongoing conversation met his ears, including the wheezing words of a man with asthma. It was obvious the group was no longer making even a halfhearted attempt to keep their voices down, which they had made earlier in the day.

Bolan let a grin creep over his face. They had walked this pathway once and not come across the strangers. They were tired of the search now and assumed that if they hadn’t encountered anyone going toward the stilt houses, they wouldn’t encounter anyone on the way back, either.

All of which worked in the Executioner’s favor.

Bolan kept the mike pointed at the pathway as the men walked past. He continued to hold it in place until he could no longer hear their voices. Slowly he rose from his hiding spot, then stopped.

Should he follow the men on down the path back to the mosque? To get close enough on the path to record their words, he would have to take the chance of them spotting him. And if they did, they were likely to attack. The machetes and bolo had not been carried just for show.

No, the Executioner wouldn’t follow. He had no intention of getting into a position where he had to kill innocent men simply trying to protect their village from strangers they probably assumed were as bad as terrorists, if not terrorists themselves. Besides, the chance that he’d record some important bit of information he hadn’t already gotten on tape was small.

Bolan started back toward where he’d left Latham. He’d either gotten useful information or he hadn’t. The risk of trying for more outweighed the potential return.

He had taken only a few steps through the undergrowth when he stopped in his tracks. Another sound—foreign and loudly conspicuous to the jungle—suddenly boomed through the branches and vines. Moving faster now, the Executioner hurried back toward Latham. The men on the path were out of hearing range for the noises he made as he ran. But he wasn’t as sure about the long, booming, near ear-splitting cough-growls that broke the peace of the wilds.

The Executioner knew what the sounds were. And if the men searching for them heard it, they would recognize them, too.

Breaking out of the trees into the small clearing he and Latham had created a few hours earlier, Bolan saw the Texan on the ground. Latham had rolled from his stomach to his back in sleep, and now deafening snores thundered from his nose and mouth. Dropping to one knee next to the man, the Executioner grabbed his shoulder and shook him awake.

Latham returned to consciousness and his hand fell to the Browning in his belt.

Bolan held one finger to his lips and shook his head.

Latham caught on and relaxed.

The soldier let a good five minutes go by, listening, waiting to see if the search party had heard the Texan’s snoring. Finally satisfied that they had not, he rose and pulled Latham to his feet.

“What’s wrong?” the Texan whispered. He looked around, spotted the note stuck in the ground with the machete, then reached down and tore it from the blade.

“Old news,” the Executioner whispered. “I’m back.”

“Where’d you go?” Latham asked, yawning.

“The guys on the path came back. I went out to see if I could pick up more information.”

Coming fully awake now, Latham’s forehead wrinkled. “But you don’t speak the language.”

Bolan reached into his pocket and pulled out the recorder. “No,” he said, “but you do.”

“Aha,” Latham said, throwing his head back slightly. Then he frowned and said, “But what was the problem when you woke me up? How come we had to freeze for so long? They hear you or something?”

The Executioner suppressed a grin. “Or something,” he said.

“WELL, NOBODY ELSE ever accused me of snoring,” Latham said defensively as he and Bolan cut yet another new route through the jungle toward the stilt houses along the sea.

Bolan didn’t bother to answer. Night was falling quickly as it did in the jungle and the Executioner wanted to be within sight of the houses across the road from Mario Subing’s before their surroundings turned ink-black. As to Latham’s snoring, he had found it slightly amusing that this man—an accomplished fighter by anyone’s standard and a good enough woodsman if not the best—had grown immediately sensitive when he’d been told he not only snored but did so in a way that threatened to rip leaves off their vines.

The Executioner came to the edge of the jungle and peered through the foliage. Ahead, he could see the rear of one of the inland shanties across the road from the stilt houses. He held up a hand, both to halt Latham and to signal for silence, then sat among the thick green growth to wait on darkness.

Latham dropped to a squatting position next to him.

Bolan rested his hand on his outstretched leg and felt the tiny microcassette recorder inside his front pocket. Latham had listened to the recording as they’d waited for the hot afternoon to become evening. But they had gained precious little information they hadn’t already had. The Texan had, however, said that one thing was clear: it wasn’t just the fact that they’d been seen driving into town that had alerted the villagers to potential trouble. They’d been tipped off by someone ahead of time that two men might be coming to the village and that they were trouble.

That, in itself, was worth the chance the Executioner had taken with the recorder. It also jibed with his suspicion that the men they had fought on the road the day before hadn’t been random kidnappers. Someone knew he was on Mindanao, and that someone had alerted the Tigers.

Leaning back against the trunk of a tree, Bolan closed his eyes. He had also learned another valuable bit of intel by hiding near the path as the local men had passed—how they were armed. Although they would mistakenly view the Executioner as their enemy, he wasn’t. And he had no wish to kill or even injure them. But if he had to deal with them somehow, he had been relived to see that their primary weapons appeared to be blades rather than firearms.

Latham, having dropped to the ground across from him, now crossed his legs on the ground. “You think they know who we are?” he asked Bolan in a low voice. “The locals, I mean.”

“Probably not exactly who we are,” Bolan whispered. “But if they were tipped off, then somebody knows that somebody new—from America—is looking for the hostages.” He glanced overhead, squinting through the treetops into the quickly diminishing sunlight. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “At least I’m sure they don’t know exactly who I am.” He looked over at the other man now. “Exactly how well are you known on the island?”

Latham shrugged. “Around the gyms and martial-arts training halls folks know me as the ‘big American.’ I guess I kind of stand out.”

“You didn’t tell anybody about me coming, did you?”

“Of course not,” Latham said. He rubbed the beard stubble on his face again. “I’m still wondering what happened to the CIA guy, too. If word’s out on us, it may be on him, too. You suppose he’s dead?”

Bolan shrugged. There was no way to know.

Latham pulled out his tobacco can. “They’ll have men watching old Mario’s house tonight,” he said. “You can bet on it. We’re going to have to be even more careful than we were last night.”

“Or less careful.”

Latham had been about to open the tobacco can but now he stopped and looked up at the Executioner. “Huh?”

Bolan didn’t answer. For the past half hour, as they’d made their way back through the jungle toward the stilt houses, an idea had been forming in his head. It hadn’t quite yet crystallized, but already it was beginning to look as though it had a better chance of succeeding than simply setting up on Mario Subing’s house again.

With all the heat on them at the moment, Latham was right. The men of Rio Hondo would indeed be watching for them to make an appearance at the stilt houses. And while there had been no guarantee that Candido Subing would show up on any given night, there was practically a guarantee that he would not visit his uncle on this particular evening. The word was obviously out.

The Executioner finally looked at the Texan. “Let’s just see how things go.”

Latham still looked confused, but nodded as he packed his lower lip with the finely ground tobacco from the can.

The Executioner’s eyes skirted the heavily wooded area around them. Ten feet back into the jungle, he saw what he was looking for—a long branch, low to the ground, jutting out from the trunk of a tree. Rising slowly, he walked to the tree, raised his machete over his head and sliced the green limb away with one cut. With the branch on the ground now, he chopped both ends until he had a sturdy, relatively straight, three-foot stick roughly two inches in diameter.

Latham had watched silently, but as the Executioner turned he saw a light bulb flash on in the Texan’s head. Latham smiled as he, too, rose to his feet, found a suitable limb and made his own short club. Both men sat.

Thirty minutes later the sun had finally gone down and Bolan and Latham found themselves in a darkness known only in the jungle.

The Executioner laid out his new plan.

“EVEN IF WE GET to the house without getting killed, you really think the old man is going to talk?” Latham whispered through the darkness to the man sitting across from him on the jungle floor.

The big shadowy form shrugged. “All I know is that everyone on Mindanao seems to know we’re here. That means Candido Subing knows it, too, so he’s not going to show up at Uncle Mario’s again until we’re out of the picture.” He waited a second, then said, “If you think you have a better idea, I’m willing to listen to it.”

Latham shook his head, then realized the movement might not be seen in the darkness. “Nope,” he whispered. “Nothing better.” He stared at the shadowy silhouette across from him. Latham knew the darkness would hide his eyes as he scrutinized Cooper with a mixture of respect and wonder. Slowly he shook his head. As a Delta Force soldier he had seen his share of action, but he had never worked with anyone even close to being like Cooper. His old friend T. J. Hawkins had told him this guy was the best, but that might well prove to be the understatement of Latham’s lifetime.

The Texan pulled the straw hat from his head, then removed the bandanna he’d tied beneath it. The tobacco in his mouth had lost its flavor and he let it drop from his lip. Slowly and silently, he grasped the bandanna in both hands and wrung out the sweat. It was still damp when he retied it around his forehead and covered it once more with his hat.

Staring into the blackness, Latham knew they would be going soon, and he knew just as well that they would be attacked by armed villagers. Again, he looked at the man across from him, knowing Cooper couldn’t see his stare. But this time he wondered if Cooper might not still know he was being scrutinized; might not simply feel it with whatever it was that made him so different. The guy did seem to have “powers far beyond those of mortal man” to quote the intros to the old “Superman” reruns he and Hawk had watched on TV when they were kids.

Latham chuckled silently. No, this guy wasn’t Superman. He was flesh and blood, but he was something more, too. As a Texas schoolboy Latham had studied state history, and he was reminded now of a quotation that had stuck in his mind since those days. The words had been uttered enthusiastically by the English essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle speaking of James Bowie: “‘By Hercules! The man was greater than Caesar or Cromwell—well—nay, nearly equal to Odin or Thor. The Texans ought to build him an altar!’”

Latham’s gaze fell to the ground, but he continued to watch Cooper in his peripheral vision. Many altars in the form of statues and other memorials had been built for James Bowie in Texas, but Latham suspected that regardless of how deserving this man calling himself “Cooper” might be, he would never receive such honors. The wars the man fought were in the shadows. Clandestine. And Charlie Latham knew the man would never get credit for all he did for the world. At the same time he realized that, the Texan also realized that Cooper wouldn’t care. He had probably never even given personal glory a passing thought.

“You ready?” he heard his companion whisper.

In the darkness he could see the improvised baston—a Filipino fighting stick—dangling from the end of the man’s arm. Cooper’s machete hung from the other hand and, though he couldn’t see it in the darkness, Latham knew that it was held backward so that the blunt edge would be the striking side.

“I’m ready,” Latham said. With his own stick in his left hand, he flipped his machete around, too. But a last moment of doubt made him say, “You still serious about this no guns thing?”

Bolan nodded. “Keep the firepower ready, just in case. But it’s a last resort. Remember, these men think we’re here to hurt them and their families. They aren’t doing anything you or I wouldn’t do.”

“You realize we’d get better odds playing blackjack at the crookedest casino in Vegas, don’t you?” Latham asked.

The tall silhouette nodded again, but said nothing.

Which, to Charlie Latham, said it all. Yes, they’d probably die trying to do what they were about to try to do. But it was the right thing to do, so they’d do it.

Bolan stepped past Latham into the open area behind the inland houses, leading the Texan to the back of a crudely constructed storage building behind one of the houses. Both men dropped to a knee to reevaluate the situation. They knew the villagers were out there somewhere. Watching. Waiting. Knowing they would come. Who knew what lies they had been told about what the Americans wanted to do to them and their families? But it didn’t matter; the end result was the same. They erroneously viewed them as enemies and they would do their best to kill them both.

Scurrying out from behind the storage shed, the two Americans halted against the windowless back wall of the dilapidated dwelling directly across the roadway from Mario Subing’s home. Bolan peered around the corner, looked back and nodded.

Latham took a deep breath then let it out. Cooper hoped to cross the street and mount the steps of the stilt house, unseen if possible, then interrogate Subing’s uncle. With everyone looking for them already, Latham figured the chances of pulling that off were about a thousand to one. The fact was, had it been anyone else working with him, the Texan would have just flat refused to even try it.

Latham sighed. Of course the big man had a backup plan—for what it was worth. If they were spotted, they would do their best to snatch the old man and whisk him away somewhere before talking to him. To Latham, that, too, sounded like a terrific strategy for getting oneself killed and, again, he knew that if anyone whom he respected even half an ounce less than he did Matt Cooper had come up with the plan, he’d have told the idiot to go screw himself.

But Cooper had already proved he could pull off the “crazy” things in life. The worse the odds were against them, the better he seemed to perform. And now, Latham realized as they started around the side of the house, the big man would get a chance to prove himself again.

For they weren’t even halfway to the front of the house when three of the village men stepped out with swords.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bolan saw the glint of steel in the moonlight as the man rounded the corner from the front of the house. As the blade rose over the Rio Hondan’s head, he recognized the forked pommel and “crocodile” guard that characterized the Filipino sword known as the “kampilan.”

Forty-four inches of razor-edged death came flashing toward the Executioner’s head. He swung the machete across his body and steel met steel with a screech that sounded like a car wreck in the still night. The kampilan slid down the flat side of the machete and away from Bolan’s body. Using the tree-limb baston he had fashioned earlier, he smashed the attacker in the side of the head.

The villager slid to the ground, unconscious.

Two more Rio Hondans stood immediately behind the first and Bolan stepped to the side to allow Latham room to fight. The larger of the two attackers stood to the left and Bolan took him, noting that the man had dressed in traditional Filipino fighting gear for the night’s assault. A strip of red cloth—reminiscent of the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II—was tied around his forehead. Small but wiry arms extended from the vest he wore over his otherwise bare chest and in the man’s hands were a pair of matching, leaf-shaped barongs.

The two-handed swordsman was skilled with his weapons and now he came at the Executioner with a double attack. Both short swords snapped over his head, then descended at forty-five-degree angles from opposite directions toward the sides of Bolan’s neck.

The Executioner brought his machete up on one side, the baston on the other. The ping of steel against steel and the thud of steel against wood sounded simultaneously as he blocked both barongs. Taking a half step into the man in the vest, Bolan jammed the end of his stick between the eyes. By the time the villager hit the ground, his eyes had fluttered closed.

Glancing to his side, the Executioner saw that Latham had engaged his man and now blocked the wavy blade of a kris. Perhaps the most common of all the edged weapons of the Philippines, the twisting, snakelike double-edged blade could produce devastating wounds either cutting or thrusting. It was the latter tactic the villager chose now, and as Bolan moved on toward the front of the house he watched the Rio Hondan shove the serpentine weapon straight forward from his shoulder.

Latham stepped to the side and deftly guided the thrust past his body with his machete. His homemade baston came around in an arc to strike the villager on the temple.

The Executioner had just reached the front of the house when a Rio Hondan wearing what had originally been a white T-shirt stepped into his path from hiding. Countless washings in the brown waters of Mindanao streams had turned the shirt a dingy beige and the neck had been stretched out so far one side fell over his shoulder. The man carried a bolo knife in his right hand and he now brought it around in a sidearm assault.

Bolan blocked with the baston, stepped in and slapped the flat side of the machete against the man’s cheek. A loud pop broke the night but did little more than stun the villager. The soldier knew that the force of the blow had been distributed over too large an area to do serious injury and had hoped the pain would provide compliance. Unfortunately it seemed only to infuriate the man further and he brought the bolo back to strike again.

The Executioner brought his baston down and around, arcing it upward into his adversary’s ribs. He pulled the machete back again, altered his grip slightly, then struck again with the thinner backside of the blade.

The blow caught the man on the side of the neck, shocking the artery running up to his brain and cutting off the oxygen. The villager fell like a steer under a slaughterhouse hammer.

For a split second the front yard, the roadway and the area around the stilt houses seemed deserted. Then what might have been the hordes of Genghis Khan seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Bolan sprinted across the yard toward the road, downing another man wearing a headband with his baston, one more with the blunt edge of the machete. A huge panabas—a cross between a sword and ax—flashed through the air toward his head. The weapon was too heavy to block with either baston or machete, so the Executioner brought them both up together. An almost paralyzing electric shock ran from his weapons down his forearms as the panabas made contact. It stopped in midair, the attacker feeling the shock even more than the Executioner. He showed his surprise with the whites of his widened eyes.

Bolan recovered first. Lifting his stick up over his head, he brought it down hard onto the man’s collarbone. A sickening snap met his ears as wood splintered bone. The panabas, and the man who had wielded it, tumbled forward to the ground.

The Executioner saw Latham trading blows with an unusually large Filipino armed with a pair of golok swords. Used for centuries by the Moros for jungle warfare, the man who now flailed with them had been trained well. He had taken the offensive, swinging hard and fast with both blades, giving the appearance of twin airplane propellers flashing through the air. Latham blocked, then blocked again. Then again and again and again. But he was a half beat behind the man, which kept him on the defense, unable to launch a counterattack.

Bolan knew that blocking only was the road to an early death. Latham was good. But no matter how good a man was, sooner or later, he missed a block.

Stepping in to the side, the Executioner brought the blunt edge of the machete around in an arc against the back of the big Filipino’s neck. The Rio Hondan dropped to his knees, then fell forward onto his face, unconscious. Latham’s chest heaved in and out with exertion, but he had the strength to bring his machete up to his forehead in a smiling salute to the Executioner.

Bolan turned back to the road and another villager stepped in to face him. For a split second the man looked as if he held a Fourth of July sparkler in each hand. Then, as the flashing steel took better shape, the Executioner again recognized a matched pair of bright stainless steel balisongs. The villager appeared even more skilled in their use than the punk in Zamboanga from whom Bolan had appropriated the Buick.

Spreading and closing the wings of the butterfly knives, then spreading and closing them again, the Rio Hondan made the twin blades dance a graceful ballet through the air. And as they danced they also sang, clicking, clacking and whirring in the night and sending shafts of moonlight reflecting off their surfaces in a colorful prism of death. But the balisong expert made one fatal mistake. He took too much time showing off.

The Executioner stepped in and swung the baston overhead like a tennis racket, cracking it down first on the man’s right wrist, then on his left. Both balisongs dropped to the ground. The man’s lower lip dropped open almost that far in surprise. Bolan’s third strike with the baston left the man lying on top of his fallen knives.

In the middle of the asphalt roadway now, the soldier was halted by three men. Each carried a klewang and each held the straight, single-edge blade with the widened point up and ready. But they had seen the unconscious men in the Executioner’s wake and it had curbed some of their enthusiasm for battle. Each hesitated to be the next to hit the ground.

Bolan took advantage of their indecisiveness to initiate his own attack. Faking an overhand strike with the baston, he waited until the man’s klewang came up to block, then cut the feint short, drawing it slightly back toward him before jabbing the blunt end into the man’s face. The Executioner heard the crack of bone as the villager’s nose broke. A half second later he brought the blunt edge of the machete straight up between the man’s legs.

The villager had grunted with the broken nose. Now he screeched from the groin strike. As he bent in agony, the Executioner struck downward with the butt end of the stick, which extended below his fist. The short stub of wood cracked into the back of the man’s skull. A punyo—the Filipinos called the technique—worked just as well on them as for them, ending the attacker’s sounds of torment and sending him to sleep on the asphalt of the highway.

Turning his attention to the side, Bolan noticed that Latham had stepped up even with him to engage one of the two remaining attackers. As the Executioner feinted again with his baston, he saw the Texan crack his man across the jaw with the backside of his machete. Although it didn’t break the skin, the long, thin striking area left an ugly red stripe across the top of the crumbled bone.

The third man had watched the men on both sides of him fall to the strangers and the sight brought out a desperate panic. With a shriek of terror, he abandoned all training he might have had and began to swing his klewang wildly back and forth.

Bolan had only to time the swings, then step in as the blade went past him. In one smooth motion he trapped the sword with his machete and, with the other hand, brought the baston down at a forty-five-degree angle against the frightened man’s temple.

Although he could still hear townsmen running toward him in the darkness, there was no immediate threat. The Executioner took advantage of the break in the action to sprint across the asphalt to the sandy shore beneath the stilt houses. Behind him, he could hear Latham’s feet beating the sand as he followed. “I’m…with you,” the Texan panted.

The Executioner took the steps of Subing’s house three at a time, the machete in one hand, the crudely fashioned baston in the other. Each time his foot hit the rotting wood the stairs screamed in agony, threatening to collapse beneath him. Halfway up the steps he saw a small dark figure step out of the house onto the porch.

Mario Subing aimed the pistol in his hands down the steps at the Executioner.

BOTH RACHAEL PARKS and her husband, John, believed strongly in prayer. Before accepting the mission assignment to the Philippines, they’d had a special time set aside each night when they prayed together. The both also did their best to offer up short individual appeals and supplications to God throughout the day. But there had been so much work to be done as soon as they’d arrived on Mindanao that too often they collapsed into bed at night and suddenly realized they hadn’t spoken a word to the Lord all day.

“Yeah, but isn’t there a proverb that says God loves busy hands?” Rachael remembered her husband saying one night when she’d pointed out that they’d forgotten to pray.

“Yes,” she remembered saying back. “But there’s a whole bunch of scripture that says He likes to talk to us, too.” They had both laughed. Then they’d both prayed, because neither one of them were the type who fooled themselves into thinking a rapid-fire thank-you-God-for-another-day-and-enough-to-eat-amen was a real prayer.

Well, Rachael thought as she closed her eyes behind the hood, I’ve got plenty of time to make up for lost prayers now. The fact was that prayer, meditation and thinking was about all she or her husband had been able to do during the past several months.

Rachel shifted her mud-encrusted, water-soaked jeans beneath her and felt the chapped skin on the back of her thighs. Yes, for perhaps the first time in her life, she had all the time she wanted to pray. And though she had taken advantage of it, offering up prayers about her church, her husband, the other hostages, her family and herself, for some reason the words she found herself silently forming with her lips, over and over again, had nothing to do with her present situation. In fact, the words she caught herself saying most often were not even original on her part—they had been spoken by Jesus more than two thousand years earlier while he hung on the cross.

Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do.

Rachael opened her eyes beneath the hood. For weeks after their capture she had hated the terrorists who had taken them hostage. Then she had realized her hatred wasn’t hurting the men who held them captive one bit. But it was eating her alive. So she had prayed that God would remove the hatred from her soul and give her the strength to endure whatever happened. Then she had gone another step and prayed that the Lord would forgive Candido Subing and the other Tigers and that they would find salvation through Jesus Christ.

Rachael smiled as she remembered the sequence of events after the first such prayer. She’d said, “Amen” then felt obligated to add. “P.S. Lord, help me to someday mean it when I ask you I forgive them. Because right now I’d kind of like to see them rot away in Hell for all eternity.”

No, Rachael thought as she sat in the mud as she had day after day after day, her hatred hadn’t disappeared all at once. But somewhere along the line she had forgiven her captors. And now when she prayed for Candido Subing and the others she truly did mean it from the heart.

Rachael looked down and smiled. She still had things to be thankful for. Small things maybe, but gifts nonetheless. For one thing, she could tell it was daytime. The drawstring at her throat hadn’t been tightened all the way and she could see the light on her chest. Lord, I thank you for the light, she said silently, and the new prayer made her realize how many of God’s wonders she overlooked each day. God could make something good out of anything, no matter how evil its original intent might be at the hands of man. And one of the good things that had come out of their captivity was just that—she no longer took such things as the sun going up and coming down for granted.

There was some kind of rustling on the other side of the barn and Rachael’s ears perked. A quick image of Jim Worden flew through her mind. In less than a heartbeat her mind’s eye relived the horrifying death she had witnessed. She saw Jim kneeling on the ground, facing her and the others. He was smiling—he said something—she couldn’t remember what at the moment—then Candido Subing raised his sword and Jim’s head fell from his body. Seconds later his body fell forward while his head fell to the side. There was blood everywhere, but Jim was still smiling.

Rachael suddenly realized that she was crying just as she had when the horrible death had actually occurred.

Rachael bit her lip with her teeth but the tears still flowed down her cheeks. Did Jim’s brutal death serve some higher purpose that she couldn’t understand? Rachael felt herself begin to tremble. She felt as if she might be on the verge of a breakdown. First the tears. Now she was shaking. She was about to scream when she felt the hand on her shoulder.

As suddenly as it had come, the trembling stopped, her eyes dried up and she felt the love of God within her once more. The Lord had given her the sign she’d asked for through her husband. John, sitting next to her, had somehow worked a hand free and now it squeezed her shoulder reassuringly.

Rachael leaned her head to the side, resting her cheek against the back of her husband’s hand. It was God at work. God answering their prayers. God giving her a blessing.

Rachael’s cheek still rested on the hand when she heard the rickety wooden door on the other side of the barn slide open. She recognized the voice of Candido Subing shouting orders to his men. She held her breath and knew the other missionaries were doing the same. Although it had been apparent since the beginning that Subing was the leader, he was rarely here in this hiding place. But when he did show up, things happened. And while all of those things had been bad so far, Rachael knew that Subing would also be the one to tell them if they were about to be released.

Boots sloshed through the mud toward the five missionaries. Rachael heard a sigh and then a moan as hoods were lifted off faces. When the sack was jerked from her head she turned in time to see Reynaldo Taboada pull the hood from John. She was glad it was Reynaldo. He seemed different than the others, not as mean. He never mistreated them for the fun of it like some of the guards did and there seemed something almost sad about the man.

“Thank you,” Rachael whispered to John as soon as the terrorist had turned away.

“For what?” John asked, his face looking puzzled.

Before she could thank him for the hand on her shoulder Subing stepped forward to face his hostages. He was obviously about to speak to them; the last time he had done so had ended with the murder of Jim Worden. Rachael’s eyes scanned the area behind him for any sign of video equipment. She saw none and that gave her hope that the horror might not be repeated.

Subing cleared his throat. “I understand,” he said, “that in America there is a game in which someone says, ‘I have both some good news and some bad.’ First, I will give you the good news. America has sent new agents—CIA, I am sure—to look for you.” He cackled sardonically, then spit into the mud. “Now. For the bad news. They will not find you. And the worst news of all for some of you…” He let his voice trail off to build tension. “Is that to make their hunt more difficult, I am going to separate you into three groups.”

Rachael felt a chill go down her spine as she and her husband looked at each other, then back at Subing. Three groups. Five of them left. That would surely mean two hostages in two groups, one in the third. Surely, Subing would allow them to stay together. Even a man as misguided as he had to retain some compassion hidden deep within his soul.

The men of the Liberty Tigers trudged through the mud. Two of them grabbed Roger Ewton and dragged him toward the door. Two more lifted Kim Tate from where she sat next to Rachael, and then another two Tigers grabbed her and hauled her to her feet. Rachael suddenly realized that separating her from her husband was exactly what Subing planned to do.

“John!” Rachael screamed out, and heard him cry back, “Rachael! No!”

John tried to struggle to his feet, but a muddy boot kicked him in the face and he fell back to the ground. Rachael’s husband rose again, this time getting as high as his knees before one of the men hit him with the wooden end of his gun in the side of the head.

The rough hands grasped Rachael’s shoulders and pushed her toward the door. When she tried to turn back someone punched her in the stomach and she felt the air rush from her lungs. As she started to fall she cast a look over her shoulder and saw John trying to get up yet again, but with his ankles still bound and his hands tied to his waist it was futile.

Gasping for air, Rachael was dragged out of the barn into the bright sunlight. As soon as she caught her breath again she began to struggle. But her efforts were as ineffective as John’s had been. The terrorists pulled, pushed and carried her toward two trucks parked just outside. Rachael doubled her efforts to strike the men with her elbows and even snapped her teeth at an arm that got too close.

“John!” she cried one final time as she was lifted into one of the trucks next to Kim Tate, and then the hood was pulled back down over her eyes.

It was only then, as she sat impotently listening to the truck engine start and feeling the wheels beneath her begin to roll, that the miraculousness of the sign God had given her earlier suddenly struck her. She had just watched John try three times to get to his feet and come after her. Three times he had been unable to do so, or to defend himself against the boots and rifle butts of the terrorists because his hands were still tied to his waist. Which meant he had not worked a hand free earlier as she’d thought, and it couldn’t have been his hand comforting her by squeezing her shoulder.

But a hand had been there, warm and loving, just the same.

THE REVOLVER in the elderly man’s hand looked like an ancient Spanish Star. The rifling, Bolan suspected, had been burned out before the Executioner was born. Or perhaps the old man at the top of the steps was simply a poor shot. Whatever the reason, although he was less than ten feet away, when the man Bolan assumed was Mario Subing pulled the trigger, the shot missed.

The antique wheel gun exploded almost in the Executioner’s face. But the shot struck to his side, splintering the already rotten wood of the handrail above the steps and causing it to collapse in pieces over the staircase.

Bolan hadn’t slowed at the sight of the revolver and now ducked his head as he continued to charge up the steps. Before the wrinkled, white-haired man on the landing could pull the trigger again, he thrust his head under the gun and into the man’s chest.

The Executioner’s force drove both men back through the doorway into the one-room stilt house; they dropped to the floor in a jumble of arms and legs. But old as he might be, frail as he might look, Mario Subing still managed to hold on to the gun as Bolan came down on top of him. And even after the Executioner had clamped the fingers of one hand so tight around his wrist that the dry old bone threatened to snap, he strained to maneuver the barrel back around at the big American.

Bolan didn’t want to break Mario Subing’s arm and he didn’t want the old man to break it himself as he struggled. Relaxing his grip, he reached out with his other hand and caught the double-action revolver. Sliding his fingers behind the hammer, he clamped it to the frame to keep it from being cocked then ripped it from the aged fingers.

Mario Subing shrieked out a long stream of what the Executioner had to guess were choice Tagalog expletives.

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