NARCO BREAKDOWN

The drug syndicate running the heroin pipeline from the Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan crosses a line when it begins hijacking the narco-traffic markets controlled by Asia’s Triads. When the ensuing turf war claims lives on America’s streets, Mack Bolan prepares to do battle—without official sanction. The Executioner is willing to do or die to prevent a bloodbath on U.S. soil.

In a retaliatory strike, Bolan hits New York’s Chinatown, where a scorched earth message ignites fear and uncertainty. Exactly as planned. Now all he has to do is follow the panicked trail to the big predators across the ocean in France and Hong Kong. As his relentless pursuit puts a savage enemy on the defensive, the Executioner homes in for the kill. To cripple both factions, he must successfully play the rivals off each other. Victory means both cartels go down in flames.

The HE grenade blew the door off its hinges

As the triad overlord sprawled across a sofa, bleeding from a gash below his hairline, he fumbled in vain for the semiauto pistols he’d dropped when he was taken down. He stared up into Mack Bolan’s eyes.

“Who are you?”

“I’m your judgment,” Bolan replied, dropping the grenade launcher and whipping out his pistol, drilling the man with a 9 mm Parabellum round between his arched eyebrows. The overlord sagged and slid off the couch, leaving his final thoughts spread over the upholstery.

“Back out the way we came,” Bolan advised Bizhani, brushing past him on the short run toward the service stairs. He now had the Steyr AUG in hand, prepared to greet gunners waiting on the flights below.

Job done, and all that remained now was for the Executioner to get out of here. Alive.

China White

Don Pendleton

Justice should remove the bandage from her eyes long enough to distinguish between the vicious and the unfortunate.

—Robert Ingersoll, 1833–1899

My eyes are clear. I recognize the guilty. They have judged themselves.

—Mack Bolan

For Staff Sergeant Clinton Romesha, U.S. Army

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

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Confucius Plaza, New York City

Tommy Mu was starting to get nervous. He was due on Mott Street, at the Lucky Dragon, in ten minutes, and he wasn’t sure that he could make it. Being late was bad, particularly with the product he was carrying. It could mean punishment.

But getting killed along the way was worse.

He had been followed from the pickup, though he hadn’t seen the stalkers on his tail until his taxi had crossed Henry Street and rolled into Chinatown. He had begun to let his guard down, relaxing as he made it back to his home turf, and then he’d spotted it: a jet-black SUV he’d glimpsed before, while he was getting in the cab, and hadn’t thought to watch for on the ride downtown.

Stupid.

He should have paid closer attention, should have known there might be watchers, what with all the other crazy shit that had been going on the past few weeks. The SUV’s windshield was tinted just enough that Mu couldn’t make out who was trailing him, but he felt safe in ruling out the DEA. If they’d been on his case, they would have swooped in at the pickup, grabbing him with the product, his supplier with the cash he’d handed over. Get the whole damn ball of wax.

No. This was someone else.

Which only made it worse.

If he’d been busted, Mu could have called his lawyer, posted bail and started thinking about where to run and hide in lieu of facing trial. But these weren’t cops. And that meant, if they took him in, the odds of him coming back were nil. He might wind up in the East River, or he might just disappear.

Whatever. Dead was dead, and Mu wasn’t ready for it.

So he’d told the cabbie that he’d changed his mind about going to Mott Street. He had the hack stop at Confucius Square, where there were people all around, making a snatch more hazardous.

Back in the old days, Mu understood, New Yorkers might have stood and watched him be slaughtered on the street without lifting a hand or bothering to call for help. These days, post–9/11, things were different. Someone would definitely call the cops, and likely film the snatch squad on his or her cell phone at the same time. Now that he was back in Chinatown, someone might even recognize him and call Jimmy Wen.

Not that his boys could reach the scene in time.

The good news: Mu had his equalizer with him, just as always. He preferred the SIG SAUER Mosquito, light and fast, packing ten .22-caliber Long Rifle rounds, its muzzle threaded for attaching a suppressor if he had a special job to do. It wouldn’t knock a man down from a block away, but it would kill him, hell yeah, if you hit him in the right spots, and it didn’t have the shocking recoil of a larger caliber.

The question: would he have a chance to use it if the stalkers moved on him?

The plan: cross Bowery westbound and walk against Bayard Street’s one-way traffic, so the hunters couldn’t follow him. Make them drop down to Pell and try to keep up with him, wondering the whole time if they’d come this far to lose him altogether.

Psy-war, man, he thought. Just hope it works.

If not...

He made the move; dodged into traffic, barely checking left or right, and made it to the other side intact.

So far, so good.

* * *

“YOU’RE LOSING HIM,” Ahmad Taraki growled.

“What can I do?” Babur Kazimi asked him from the driver’s seat. “You see the one-way sign.”

“Turn that way!” Taraki shouted, then cursed with feeling.

He pointed south, toward Pell Street, one-way westbound. They could track their pigeon that way, farther into Chinatown, and pick him up on Mott Street when he tried to cross.

“You sure?” Daoud Rashad asked from the backseat. “He could go some other way or—”

Furious and nearly shouting now, Taraki told his driver, “Do as you are told!”

Kazimi made the turn, horns blaring at them, and Taraki gave them all the finger. He wished he could have sprayed them with the AK-105 he was carrying and shut them up forever. That would be a satisfying moment, but he couldn’t spare the time, much less risk drawing in police before his job was done.

Pell Street was half the length of Bayard and dead-ended into Mott. Taraki had a fair idea of where his boy was going, and their task would be to cut him off before he got there, thus avoiding any payback from his homeboys. It was meant to be a simple job, decisive, not a running firefight through the streets.

“Hurry!” he snapped at Kazimi. “If you let him get away, it’s your ass.”

“Two more minutes,” the driver answered. “But I can’t stop him from going someplace else.”

“Then pray he doesn’t, for your own sake,” Taraki said.

As if God gave a damn whether they caught the man or not.

But Wasef Kamran cared. And if Taraki failed him, there would certainly be hell to pay.

* * *

TOMMY MU FELT BETTER; thought he might have made it after all. Some of the people he passed on Bayard Street were likely wondering why he’d been running past them, jostling a couple here and there, but no one challenged him. They knew better, could recognize him by his haircut, clothes and haste as someone dangerous. They’d be thinking he wasn’t a person to mess with, and their instincts were correct.

Approaching Mott Street, he slowed to a walking pace, figuring the SUV could still be fighting traffic down on Pell. And if it wasn’t...well, he didn’t want to blunder into anything. The package underneath his arm was worth more than his life to Paul Mei-Lun.

Something to bear in mind.

Mu was cautious as he cleared the last few yards, keeping his right hand underneath his jacket, near the Stinger, ready for a quick draw if he needed it. It would be better for him if he ditched the hunters, rather than start a shooting match on his home turf, but he would do whatever was required to make it back alive.

Mott Street was his salvation, one-way traffic running north to south, so even if the SUV caught up with him, its driver couldn’t turn against the flow and follow him to the Lucky Dragon. He’d be safe then, with his brothers all around him, making the delivery. If he was not on time, at least he would be close and no one would have taken the package away from him.

Arriving at the corner, Mu felt sweet relief—until he saw the SUV parked at the corner to his left, downrange. He was about to flip them off, laugh in their faces, until he focused on the black car’s open windows and the weapons angling toward him from inside. Mu wasn’t sure if he should run or pull the Stinger, and before he had a chance to make his mind up it was already too late.

The bullets hit him like a pelting hailstorm, ripping through his stylish jacket, through his flesh, lifting him off his feet. The package underneath his arm burst open, powder rising in a cloud around him as he fell, no longer snow-white as it had been when he’d taken delivery. It was all red and clotted now, with Mu’s blood. Beyond him, farther down the street, the slugs struck others, killing, wounding.

Mu was dead before he hit the sidewalk.

The SUV turned south and vanished into traffic as the first screams rose in Chinatown. Sirens would take a little longer, and they’d be too late.

The war had already begun.

CHAPTER ONE

Manhattan Cruise Terminal

Waiting was the hard part, if you weren’t accustomed to it. Early on, Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, had acquired the gift of patience, something schooled into him by his military training and experience in war zones where a hasty move meant losing everything. It came as second nature to him now, a part of life and every mission that he undertook. He couldn’t always be proactive. Sometimes it came down to sit, and watch, and wait.

Like now.

The ferry from New Jersey was on time, no problem there, and he’d picked out the guys who had been sent to meet it. The two young males were Asian, Chinese American presumably, although they could be FOB for all he knew. Fresh off the boat that was, in common slang, although their journey from Hong Kong, Macau or points west on the Chinese mainland would have brought them to New York by air, or maybe overland from Canada.

No matter.

They were here to do a job, the same as he was. Not the same job, but the three of them were waiting for the same boat and the same guy, carrying a suitcase full of misery.

Bolan wasn’t concerned right now with how the heroin had reached the States from Southeast Asia. He would find that out in time, by one means or another, and pursue the powder trail. This day, right here and now, his job was to follow this shipment to its destination somewhere in the heart of Chinatown and to make sure it went no further.

Ten keys, maybe twelve, as pure as any lab could make it. Ready to be stepped on and distributed to addicts citywide at a tremendous profit for the men in charge. At last report, a kilo went for sixty thousand dollars, wholesale. Cut to 50 percent purity with powdered vitamin B or some other nontoxic substance, it doubled in volume and was then packaged into thirty thousand single-dose glassine envelopes for sale to street dealers at five bucks apiece. That was ninety thousand dollars profit to the cutters, while the dealers turned around and sold each dose for ten to fifteen bucks, somewhere between three hundred thousand and four hundred fifty thousand on the street.

Simple arithmetic. Ten kilos would be worth three million, minimum, in street sales; maybe four point five, with any luck. Who could resist a deal like that?

There would be risks, of course. City and state police, the DEA and FBI, all would be hungry for a major bust to raise their profiles, justify their budgets and convince a weary public that the war on drugs was still worth fighting in these days when the United States jailed more people than any other nation on the planet, at a cost some said was hurting the already-bruised economy.

And then there were the hijackers. Why spend six hundred thousand dollars on a suitcase full of smack if you could rip it off for nothing? Make a score like that, you clipped the rightful owner for the wholesale cost and cleared a cool three million, minus whatever it cost to cut the product. All you had to risk was life and limb.

The pickup team would be well armed, and so was Bolan. On the shotgun seat beside him in his gray Toyota Camry, a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun with a 100-round Beta C-Mag drum lay hidden in a canvas tote bag. Beneath his left arm hung his backup piece: a Glock 22 chambered in .40 caliber, with fifteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. In a crunch, Bolan could empty both guns in something like ten seconds, leaving devastation in his wake.

And he had something else the two young Wah Ching Triad soldiers couldn’t match: experience. He had been fighting for his life before the pair of them was out of grade school. He’d sent hundreds of mafiosi to their graves during his one-man war against the Cosa Nostra, by the FBI’s best estimate, and no one had been keeping score since he had pioneered the war on terrorism, operating on behalf of Uncle Sam.

All that since he had “died”—on paper, anyway—roughly a half mile from the spot where he was parked right now, in Central Park. Broad daylight, he’d been shot to hell, incinerated in front of a flock of witnesses.

Or so the story went.

And maybe it was true what people said. You couldn’t keep a good man down.

He saw the ferry coming now, making its slow and steady way across the broad East River. In the old days, Dutch Schultz and his ilk had dropped their adversaries into that gray water, their feet set in concrete. How many skeletons were down there, even now, their eyeless sockets gazing upward at the ferry as it passed?

Good riddance, Bolan thought. There’d always be a new crop lining up to fill the slots dead mobsters left behind.

As the ferry docked, he raised a pair of compact field glasses and focused on the gangway, waiting for his target to appear.

* * *

“WE SHOULD’VE SENT somebody with him,” John Lin said, watching the ferry as it nosed into the pier.

Smoking a cigarette beside him, Louis Chao said, “He was covered in New Jersey, all the way to boarding.”

“Still, after that shit with Tommy—”

“Nobody’s about to jump him on the ferry,” Chao said, interrupting him. “They can’t get off the boat until it docks, and there’d be cops all over, waiting for them.”

“Right. Sounds good, unless you’re dealing with a bunch of lunatics.”

“Hey, we’re the lunatics, remember?” Chao was smiling at him through a haze of smoke. “And payback’s gonna be a stone-cold bitch.”

“I don’t like all these cars around here,” Lin complained.

“We’re in a parking lot, for Christ’s sake. What did you expect?”

“I mean, they could be anywhere, you know? Just waiting.”

“Then you’d better keep your eyes peeled, Johnny Boy. Be ready for them.”

Lin was ready, even looking forward to it, with his Uzi cocked and locked, ready to rip if anyone looked sideways at the courier they’d come to meet. He was another Wah Ching brother, Martin Tang, who’d carried cash across the river bright and early, met his escorts on the Jersey side, and called home when the deal was done. Now he was on his way back with the skag, and it was Lin’s job to deliver both—the man and what he carried—to their boss in Chinatown.

So Lin was strapped, backing the Uzi with a sleek Beretta Px4 tucked underneath his belt, around in back, and for insurance, in an ankle holster, a little Colt Mustang .380. If none of that worked, he had a Balisong knife with a seven-inch blade in his pocket, sharp enough to shave with or to cut off some miserable lowlife’s head.

All that and Chao still had him outgunned. He’d brought a Bushmaster Adaptive Combat Rifle, made by Remington, and wore a double shoulder holster bearing a matched pair of Glock 33s, chambered for .357 SIG rounds. That still was not enough for his partner, though. He also carried a 4-shot COP .357 Magnum derringer, and just for luck, had put two M-67 fragmentation grenades in the glove compartment of their black Ford Focus.

They were ready for war, and as much as John Lin ached for payback, he hoped they could make it back to the Lucky Dragon without killing anyone along the way. Or getting killed themselves.

“I see him,” Chao said. “He’s just starting down the ramp.”

Tang was younger than Lin by six months or so, but had proved himself in action for the Wah Ching Triad. Nothing super-hideous, a little cutting and a drive-by, but he’d passed the test and this was graduation day. He might be nervous, but it wasn’t showing as he ambled down the ferry’s boarding ramp, keeping it casual among the tourists and commuters, careful not to jostle anybody with his suitcase full of powdered treasure.

It had come a long way from the Golden Triangle, halfway around the planet, to wind up in New York City, where it would keep several thousand junkies flying high and looking forward to their next fix, and the next one after that. Between times, they could rob their neighbors, prostitute themselves, do whatever it took to raise the cash for one more in an endless series of departures from reality. Lin knew the drill and didn’t care what kind of suffering the product ultimately caused, as long as he was paid his share to make it happen.

He was all about free enterprise.

Lin thought of Tommy Mu again and scanned the parking lot with restless eyes. He had a fair idea of who had taken Mu down, and no one he had spotted so far looked the part. They might have hired white boys to do the dirty work, of course, but as Lin understood it, Afghans weren’t averse to bloody hands.

It was something they had in common with the Wah Ching brotherhood.

Tang had disembarked, had seen their car and was moving toward it at a normal walking pace. The trick was not to stand out in a crowd, whether you had a package to deliver or were closing on a hit in broad daylight. Look normal, even boring. Fly under the radar.

“Hey, man, how’d it go?” Chao asked as the courier put his bag in the backseat and slid in next to it.

“No sweat,” Tang replied. “This end?”

“We’re cool,” Chao said.

Lin thought things were okay so far, but kept it to himself.

Two minutes later they were rolling south along 12th Avenue, which would become the Lincoln Highway once they crossed West 42nd Street. From there it was a straight run to the juncture where Canal Street paralleled the Holland Tunnel, and a left turn through Lower Manhattan on their way to Chinatown.

An easy trip, unless you were at war and being hunted.

Lin drove well, obeying all the laws, watching the traffic up ahead and flicking frequent glances at his rearview mirror, watching for a tail.

Eternal vigilance was the price of running an illegal business in New York.

* * *

BOLAN TRAILED THE Ford south at a cautious distance. Taking out the couriers was not part of his plan. He wanted them to lead him home, show him the drop and let him scout the neighborhood for angles of attack.

It wouldn’t be the simplest job he’d ever done. White faces were anomalies in Chinatown. Locals could spot the tourists, often coming by the Gray Line busload, trooping in and out of cheesy shops to drop their money. But a round-eye snooping on his own meant cop or worse, and he’d get nothing in the way of information from the members of that closed community. Start poking into corners on his own, and he could meet resistance well beyond a simple wall of silence.

Picking up the Jersey shipment was a coup of sorts. He’d had to squeeze a dealer for the intel, then make sure his source was in no shape to rat him out to the higher-ups. Call that the first kill on his latest visit to New York, but not the last. Before they found the dealer’s body, Bolan reckoned he’d be finished in Manhattan, likely on his way to some more distant battleground.

But he was taking care of first things first.

There was a war brewing in New York City, ready to explode between the Wah Ching Triad and a gang of interlopers from Afghanistan. Two syndicates financed primarily by the sale of heroin produced in their respective bailiwicks had come to blows, and the prognosis was for worse to come. In other circumstances Bolan would have been content to stand aside and let them kill each other, but the action had already claimed civilian lives and that was where he drew the line.

Police were on it, sure, along with Feds from several agencies. For all he knew, the Afghan angle might be setting off alarms at Homeland Security back in D.C. That made it doubly dicey, jumping into the middle of a war and dodging cops of all persuasions in the process. It was nothing that he hadn’t done before, but still a challenge.

One more chance to do or die.

The Ford was making good time, rolling south with Lincoln Highway turning into West Street once they got past Barrow. Bolan knew they’d likely take Canal Street, veering off southeastward from the river on its way to Chinatown, just south of Little Italy. He’d spent his share of time in that vicinity, as well, when he was hunting killers of a different complexion, but the local Mafia—whatever might be left of it—was safe from him today.

Next week...who knew?

Part of the deal this day was to watch out for other tails. A shipment on the road, ten keys at least, made an inviting target for the other side. The last thing Bolan wanted was to get caught in a cross fire or, worse yet, to see the delivery go up in smoke before he marked its final destination. Later, sure, he’d torch the smack himself, and everyone associated with it.

So he was watching when the midsize SUV with three male passengers became a fixture in his rearview. Bolan made it as a Chevy Trailblazer, as black as the Ford that he was following, hanging behind him in no rush to pass. It could be coincidence, since Bolan hadn’t seen the vehicle at the ferry terminal, but he already had that itchy feeling he’d learned to trust in situations where his life was riding on the line.

A tail, maybe. He bumped it up to definitely when the shotgun rider shifted in his seat and let the muzzle of a weapon rise above the dash for just an instant. It was there and gone but Bolan caught it, and he didn’t think it was a pogo stick, a fishing pole or the antenna on a satellite phone. Those were hunters in the SUV. The only question now: were they on Bolan’s tail or following the heroin?

He got his answer as they closed in on Canal Street where it split, divided by Canal Park’s wedge of greenery between the west-and eastbound lanes. The Chevy made its move then, swinging out to pass Bolan’s Toyota, speeding up to overtake the Ford. Some kind of hit was going down in front of him, and Bolan had to make a split-second decision.

Should he intervene or wait to see how good the Wah Ching gunners were at self-defense? How many innocent civilians on their way home from a job or shopping errand would be placed in danger if he sat it out—or if he jumped into the middle of the game?

Scowling, he pulled his MP5K from its canvas tote and stepped on the Camry’s accelerator, playing catch-up on a one-way ride to Hell.

* * *

“YOU WANT TO take them here?” Babur Kazimi asked.

“Not yet,” Ahmad Taraki answered. “Wait until we’re past the park and all the little kiddies, eh?”

“Closer to Chinatown,” Kazimi told him in a cautionary tone.

“Not that far,” Taraki replied. “Just be ready when I tell you.”

Turning to Daoud Rashad in the backseat, he said, “And you, too.”

“I was ready when we started,” Rashad answered.

Taraki had taken some heat on the last hit about the civilians who’d been in his way when they’d taken down the target, but that was a risk of street fighting. The goal had been achieved regardless, and a message had been sent. The Wah Ching Triad was on notice that their days of peddling heroin outside Chinatown were coming to an end. There was a new force to be reckoned with, and the gang would have to step aside or face extinction.

Taking down this shipment from New Jersey, after it had traveled halfway around the world from somewhere in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, would drive home the lesson while putting a cool three million dollars, give or take, into the coffers of Taraki’s crime Family. If he went back without the drugs, there would be no forgiveness from Wasef Kamran. In fact, it would be better if he did not return at all.

Kazimi made the left-hand turn onto Canal Street, rolling past the park. Taraki saw the children playing there, some adults walking dogs, oblivious to what was happening around them. They existed in a world as different and distant from his own as life on Jupiter, believing that their trivial concerns were all that mattered. Braces on the kiddies’ teeth, a raise at work, a plastic bag for dog crap in a purse or pocket when they took a stroll. The daily grind for wage slaves in the city.

But somewhere within the next half dozen blocks, before the Wah Ching couriers had crossed the borderline of Chinatown, Taraki meant to give the drones around him a surprise. A little glimpse of life in his world, where the struggle for survival meant exactly that. If someone got between Taraki and his target...well, they’d simply have to die.

Stopping the Ford was no great problem. Shoot the driver, shoot the engine, shoot the tires. The operative word was shoot. But at the same time, even knowing that the Ford was bound to crash, its occupants riddled with bullets, getting to the heroin remained Taraki’s top priority. He couldn’t let it burn, and he would get no thanks if he returned the suitcase shot to hell, blood soaking through the plastic bags inside it. He’d been ordered to deliver, and the shipment had to be intact.

Case closed.

“Remember what I told you,” he advised Rashad, half turning in his seat.

“Head shots. No problem.”

Rashad could shoot, no problem there. Back home he’d been a member of the Afghan National Army Commando Brigade, created by the U.S. and its Coalition allies to hunt members of the Taliban. Taraki didn’t know how many men Rashad had killed before the brass cashiered him, citing his excessive zeal in clearing rural villages, but no one ever questioned his ability or willingness to pull a trigger. Stopping him once he got started was another matter, thus the warning in advance to keep it clean and not indulge in sloppy overkill.

“No damage to the suitcase,” Taraki said, driving home his point.

“I know the difference between a suitcase and a man,” Rashad gruffly replied.

Taraki let it go. Making his backseat shooter angry, seconds prior to firing on the enemy, would be a foolish move.

Instead he turned back to Kazimi. “No collision with their car, remember,” he commanded.

“Paint chips. FBI lab. Yodel-yodel.”

Meaning yada-yada, Taraki thought, but correcting the driver was a waste of time and energy. He’d never come to grips with English slang, habitually garbling what he learned from television.

They were approaching Hudson Street and its intersection with Canal. A block beyond it lay another park, this one located on Taraki’s right. The neighborhood was called Tribeca—meaning, as Taraki understood it, “Triangle Below Canal Street”—sprawling out immediately west of Chinatown.

This was their last chance for a hit outside Wah Ching Triad turf.

Taraki cocked his AKS-74U carbine, the shortest and lightest Kalashnikov made. It measured nineteen inches with its skeletal stock folded to the left side, and weighed six pounds without its magazine containing thirty 5.45 mm rounds. Its automatic rate of fire was 700 rounds per minute, but he’d set the fire selector switch for semiauto, playing safe. A clean shot through the head was better than a spray of fire to shred the driver’s body while the Ford went racing like a rocket sled across the park.

But could he pull it off?

Taraki hit the button for his window, instantly rewarded with a rush of warm air in his face, and twisted in his seat, tracking the driver with the V-notch of his weapon’s open sights.

* * *

AS SOON AS Bolan saw the rifles jutting from the Chevy’s windows, he immediately had a choice to make. He could hang back and let it happen, let the trackers and his targets fight it out, then maybe waste the winners, or he could attempt to intervene.

For what?

No matter how it played, once shooting started, the Wah Ching gunners would not be leading him to their HQ in Chinatown. That move was foiled the second that the third car joined their little caravan and made its move to strike. Beyond that plan, he didn’t care if the young gangsters lived or died—would probably have wound up killing them himself, in time—but he did care about the innocents going about their business, motoring along Canal Street as it turned into a battle zone.

He let the Camry drift, came up behind the Trailblazer and gave its right rear bumper just the slightest nudge, then backed away. It was enough to spoil the shooters’ aims, their first rounds jarred off-target, gouging shiny divots in the black Ford’s roof.

The Wah Ching driver gunned it, rapidly accelerating, while his backseat passenger—the one they’d picked up at the ferry terminal—rolled down his window, ready to return fire.

Bolan rolled down his window and reached across with his left hand to lift his submachine gun, even as he checked his rearview for patrol cars. They were clear so far, but every driver and pedestrian along Canal Street likely had a cell phone and was fumbling for it now, to punch up 9-1-1 and shout some garbled message about gunfire on the road.

No time to waste, then.

Bolan swung his MP5K out the window, bracing it against his wing mirror, and fired a 3-round burst into the SUV’s lift gate. The 9 mm Parabellum rounds shattered the tinted glass, one of them flying on to crack the windshield while another ripped the backseat dome light from its socket. Bolan knew the hunters had to be going crazy in there, wondering who had brought them under fire, just as the Wah Ching gunner who had brought the heroin from Jersey started popping at them with a semiauto pistol.

Bolan swung his stuttergun around to fire a burst across the Camry’s hood, stitching three holes across the Ford’s C-pillar inches from the triad gunner’s face and shooting arm. The young man lurched backward, out of sight, just as his wheelman tried to milk more speed out of the Ford’s 2.0-liter Duratec engine. A short burst from the Chevy’s shotgun rider ripped across the Ford’s trunk as it fled, while Bolan saw the backseat shooter leaning well out of the SUV to bring his Camry under fire.

He swerved back to the left-hand lane, putting himself behind the Trailblazer just as his adversary loosed a burst, his bullets wasted on thin air. Bolan responded with another three rounds through the lift gate’s yawning maw, putting them roughly where the SUV’s tail gunner ought to be. This time the Chevy veered off to starboard, running up behind the Focus in Canal Street’s right-hand lane, its left rear window gliding down to give the soldier in the rear another angle on his mark.

Bolan was faster, falling into line behind the Chevrolet and pumping three more rounds into it. When the SUV began to swerve, he guessed he might have winged the driver, but it straightened out again in seconds flat and Bolan had to duck a short burst rattling through the blank space where the lift gate used to be. Most of the bullets missed, but one punched through his windshield near the upper frame and sent his rearview mirror flying somewhere toward the seat behind him.

It became a duel then, Bolan swerving back and forth to keep the Chevy shooter guessing, ruining his aim, and all the while returning 3-round bursts that scarred the SUV’s tailgate, rattling around inside the passenger compartment. In the driver’s seat, wounded or not, the Chevy’s driver did whatever he could think of to evade incoming rounds, while still pursuing his intended targets in the Ford.

They’d nearly cleared the park when the Trailblazer swung around as if to pass the Wah Ching vehicle, then swerved hard right to slam the Ford along its driver’s side and force it off the pavement onto sloping grass. Tires churned brown tracks across the turf, lost traction, turned them into long sidewinding loops, the Chevy following the Ford and both cars spitting gunfire. Civilians scattered, ran for cover where some scattered trees provided it, or simply hit the ground and prayed.

It was not what he’d hoped for, but the Executioner had long since mastered adaptation in adversity. Without a second thought he braced himself and swung off-road, trailing the two combatant vehicles into the wedge-shaped park between Canal Street and Sixth Avenue.

CHAPTER TWO

Two Days Earlier

Winchester Regional Airport

Frederick County, Virginia

“I could have driven down,” Bolan said to Jack Grimaldi after their handshake on the tarmac.

“What, and miss the pleasure of my company?” Grimaldi replied, smiling.

“Point taken. Any idea what we’re looking at?”

Grimaldi shook his head, saying, “I got a call to show up here and prep the chopper. End of story.”

Sitting on the helipad in front of them, the chopper was a Fairchild Hiller FH-1100 four-seater, powered by a Rolls-Royce M-250 turboshaft engine. It was small, as helicopters went, just under twenty-eight feet long and nine feet high, with a maximum takeoff weight of 2,750 pounds. It cruised at 122 miles per hour, with a service ceiling of 14,200 feet and a range of 348 miles. It was enough to make the eighty-odd-mile trip to Stony Man Farm and back four times.

“I’ve done the checklist,” Grimaldi said, “if you want to get on board.”

Bolan secured his carry-on behind the copilot’s seat, then settled in and buckled up, donning the headphones that would be required for any kind of normal conversation once Grimaldi switched on the chopper’s engine. The soldier’s old friend was at his side a moment later, strapped into the pilot’s seat, scanning the perimeter and checking gauges, engaging the clutch switch, contacting the tower in preparation for liftoff. Once they were airborne, Bolan settled back and let himself appreciate the scenery.

Winchester was located in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, between the Appalachian Mountains and the Blue Ridge range. They would be following the path of Skyline Drive, a 105-mile road running the length of Shenandoah National Park, until they reached Stony Man Farm and set the chopper down some ten miles north of Waynseboro.

It would be safe to land because they were expected. Uninvited drop-ins didn’t happen at the Farm, the secret base of the nation’s top antiterrorist squads—at least not twice for any given trespasser. Tall fences posted with specific warnings kept the normal hikers out. Those who arrived with mischief on their minds—a rare occurrence—would be taken into custody for questioning, all depending on the circumstances. Any aircraft that attempted to land on the property without advance approval would be blasted from the sky by FIM-92 Stinger missiles or shredded in flight by M134 Miniguns spewing four thousand 7.62 mm NATO rounds per minute.

It was serious business if you were on the receiving end.

Bolan normally drove to the Farm, and often spent his downtime there if he was in-country between assignments, but this time he had been mopping up a little something in St. Louis when the summons came from Hal Brognola, routing him to Winchester, where Jack Grimaldi waited with the whirlybird. Brognola would be flying down from Washington—had likely reached the Farm ahead of them, in fact—with information on a rush job he had marked for handling by the Executioner.

It could be anything, as Bolan knew from long experience. He didn’t try to second-guess Brognola based on what was in the news from Asia, Africa, wherever. Crises-making headlines were normally covered by established law enforcement or intelligence agencies, while Stony Man tried to stay ahead of the curve, defusing situations that were working up to detonation or pursuing fugitives who had outwitted every other operative sent to bag them. Stony Man—and, by extension, Bolan—was the court of last resort, employed when following “The Book” had failed and nothing else would do except a hellfire visit from a fighting man who specialized in neutralizing human predators.

So it was going to be bad. He knew that going in, and focused on the woodland scenery below instead of trying to imagine just how bad it might turn out to be. Sufficient unto each day was the evil it contained.

Amen.

A line of white-tailed deer crossing Skyline Drive paused to glance up at the helicopter passing overhead before they bolted, seeking cover in the forest on the other side. Another half mile farther on, two motorcycles rode in tandem, northbound, trailing vapor from their tailpipes in the chilly morning air.

The flight from Winchester took forty minutes, give or take, approximately half the time it would have taken Bolan to drive down from Washington once he had cleared the capital itself. He liked the drive, relaxing in whatever vehicle he happened to be using at the moment, but if Brognola wanted Grimaldi on the new assignment that meant there would be more flying in their future, maybe international.

No problem.

He was up to date on his inoculations, kept himself informed on all the major hot spots of the world and could absorb whatever job-specific information might be necessary as he went along. Specifics varied, but his task remained essentially the same: apply force to some selected enemy or obstacle until said enemy or obstacle had been eliminated. Bolan rarely took prisoners, obeyed no rules beyond a code of conduct that was self-imposed and didn’t worry about finding evidence to build a case in court.

The jobs reserved for him had gone beyond that stage of civilized behavior. Bolan’s specialty was going for the jugular and hanging on until his enemies no longer had an ounce of fight or life left in them. Whether it was sniping from a mile away or fighting hand to hand, he was a master of his craft.

Thirty-seven minutes out, Grimaldi raised the Farm by radio and confirmed that they were cleared for touchdown at the heliport behind the rambling farmhouse that served as headquarters for the Stony Man teams. Once they were cleared, he veered away from Skyline Drive, flew over treetops and then swept across cultivated fields that marked the Farm itself.

It was a farm, in fact, producing crops in season, but the “farm hands” were selected from elite groups of the U.S. military, Special Forces, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs and the Marine Special Operations Regiment, as well as the occasional police officer or FBI agent. They worked a short rotation under oath-bound vows of secrecy, dressed in civilian garb but never without weapons close at hand. Those assigned to watch the gates were courteous but firm with wayward travelers. And if a prowler managed to intrude, well, courtesy was no longer an issue. On occasion these farm hands, also known as blacksuits, provided backup to Bolan.

The soldier saw the farmhouse now. It felt like coming home, but any sanctuary that he found at Stony Man was temporary. As Grimaldi hovered for his landing, Bolan wondered where his War Everlasting would take him next.

* * *

STEPPING FROM THE chopper in a whirl of rotor wash, Bolan saw Barbara Price, Aaron Kurtzman and Hal Brognola waiting for him on the far side of the helipad. The big Fed had begun to show his age, but kept in shape with a determined regimen he cheerfully despised. Price was drop-dead gorgeous; no change there. Kurtzman—“the Bear,” to friends—was in the wheelchair where a bullet to the spine had left him when Stony Man’s security was seriously breached.

They all knew Bolan too well for the standard handshake ritual, reduced in Brognola’s case to a nod as Jack Grimaldi joined them after shutting down the copter. “You made good time,” he observed.

“Tailwind,” Grimaldi offered with a crooked smile.

“Something to eat or...?”

“We might as well get to it,” Bolan said.

Brognola nodded and then led the way inside. They got a “Hey, guys!” from Akira Tokaido, the youngest member of the Farm’s cybernetic team, who passed them in a hallway, doing something with a tablet.

There was room for all five of them in the spacious elevator; it was a short ride to the basement. Kurtzman led them to the War Room, his wheelchair moving silently toward a door with a keypad. He keyed in a short sequence of numbers and gained entry.

Inside, a conference table with a dozen seats stood waiting. Brognola went for the single chair at the far end, where a 152-inch flat-screen TV was mounted on the wall behind and above him. Bolan took the chair to the big Fed’s left, facing Price across the table, with Grimaldi at his side. Kurtzman rolled to the table’s other end, where a keyboard controlled the room’s lights and the giant TV.

“We’ve got a problem in New York,” Brognola said by way of introduction. “There’s a drug war coming, and it has already claimed three civilian lives.”

Bolan decided not to ask why it was their problem instead of the DEA’s or the NYPD’s. Brognola liked to set the stage, and as he spoke, the giant screen behind him came alive with news footage of bodies on a sidewalk stained with blood, two uniformed policemen grappling with a Chinese man who tried to bull his way past them, tears streaming down his face.

“Mott Street,” Brognola said. “Manhattan’s Chinatown, two days ago. The target was a member of the Wah Ching Triad, who was carrying a key of heroin. In one shot there, you see some of it on the sidewalk.”

Bolan saw it, like a sugar dusting on the sidewalk mixed with blood. A pastry recipe from Hell.

“The shooters, we believe, are from an Afghan outfit that’s been growing since the DEA took down the Noorzai organization in 2008.”

Bolan knew the basics on Haji Bashir Noorzai, the widely touted, widely hated Asian counterpart of Medellín’s late Pablo Escobar. He’d battled Russian forces in the Reagan years and then served as mayor of Kandahar while selling weapons to the Taliban regime, then switched to aid the U.S. after 9/11, handing over tons of small arms and antiaircraft missiles to the CIA. Since then he’d made a fortune smuggling heroin, largely ignored—some said protected—by America’s intelligence community. Finally convicted in 2008, he had been sentenced to life imprisonment, leaving the remnants of his empire up for grabs.

“Who’s filling in for him?” Bolan asked.

“It’s a whole new crew,” Brognola said. “The man on top, we understand, is one Khalil Nazari.” Cue a string of mug shots, candid photos and a strip of video that showed a swarthy, mustached man emerging from a Humvee, flanked by bodyguards. “He’s forty-five years old and everything a drug lord ought to be. We all know what’s been going on with heroin since the invasion.”

More bad news. During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, regional warlords had financed their guerrilla war with opium, then kept it up with CIA support as they struggled to fill the power vacuum left by Soviet withdrawal in 1989. The Taliban had dabbled in drug trafficking, producing a bumper crop of 4,500 metric tons in 1999, then collaborated with the United Nations to suppress the trade, encouraged by a $43 million “eradication reward” from Washington in early 2001. Everything changed that September, and the warlords had returned with a vengeance, pushing opium and heroin production to the point that drugs accounted for 52 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP and an estimated 80 percent of the world’s smack supply. The Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan had eclipsed Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle in drug exports, and Bolan knew the triads weren’t exactly thrilled by that development.

In fact, it was enough to start a war.

And now, apparently, it had.

Brognola forged ahead, saying, “Nazari’s front man in New York, we’re pretty sure, is this guy.” Cue a younger thug on-screen. “Wasef Kamran, age thirty-one. Supposedly provided information on bin Laden to the Company, but nothing that panned out.”

“So they’re protecting him?” Grimaldi asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Brognola responded, “but I couldn’t rule it out, either.”

“Terrific.”

“On the triad side,” the big Fed said, pressing ahead, “their ‘dragon head’ or ‘mountain master,’ as they like to call him, is a character called Ma Lam Chan.” More video and still shots on the giant flat screen. “Home for him is Hong Kong, where it seems he’s reached some kind of an accommodation with the PRC authorities.”

Bolan translated in his head. The People’s Republic of China had reclaimed the teeming offshore island of Hong Kong in 1997, after something like 150 years of British colonial rule. Despite Washington’s fears that the Reds would wreak havoc on Hong Kong’s thriving capitalist economy, little had changed overall. The worst problems suffered so far had been unexpected outbreaks of disease, each claiming several hundred lives. Meanwhile, cash registers kept ringing and the drugs kept flowing to the West.

“Chan’s guy in New York—” pictures changed on the screen once more “— is Paul Mei-Lun. I’m never sure about his rank. He’d either be a ‘red pole,’ which is an enforcer, or a liaison officer, which they call a ‘straw sandal.’ Take your pick. Either way, he’s in charge on our end and he’s squared off against the Afghans.”

“Deport him,” Grimaldi suggested. “What’s the problem, if you know he’s dirty?”

“That’s the problem,” Brognola replied. “Somehow he came into Manhattan squeaky-clean, at least on paper. He has all the proper documents from Beijing’s end, and State saw no good reason to reject his entry visa. Now he’s here and all that DEA can say is that they’re working on a case against him. There’s nothing solid they can hang a warrant on.”

“Homeland Security?” Bolan suggested. “If the Reds have bent the rules somehow to smooth his way—”

“There’s still no proof of that. And while we’re working on it, Chinatown’s about to be ground zero in a war that’s making no allowance for civilians.”

“So, we’ll be putting out the fire,” Bolan observed.

“For starters,” Brognola agreed. “Beyond that, we should think about discouraging round two, three, four, whatever. Make them gun-shy, somehow. As for details...”

Bolan nodded, thinking that was where he came in.

* * *

THE SOLDIER’S “HOME” at Stony Man was modest; nothing but a bedroom with a private bath. There were a few books on a solitary shelf, mostly suggested reading from Kurtzman, a small TV with DVD player and a laptop with a DSL connection. When his downtime found him there, it was enough.

The only ghosts in residence were those that traveled with him—inescapable.

Bolan was working on the laptop now, absorbing details on his adversaries that had been archived for future reference. He started with the Wah Ching Triad, which had surfaced in the 1970s after a rift developed in its parent syndicate, the Sun Yee On. Ironically, that translated to New Righteousness and Peace Commercial and Industrial Guild, a mouthful of nonsense describing China’s largest triad “family” with some sixty thousand members worldwide. The Wah Ching faction had spun off on its own, as criminal gangs often did, and had survived the shakedown battles to establish an empire of sorts built on gambling and loan-sharking in Hong Kong and Macau, plus exports of heroin from the Golden Triangle to Canada, the States and Western Europe. Prior to the Afghan incursion on their turf, they’d fought a bloody war with soldiers from Mexico’s Juárez Cartel to keep a foothold in Texas.

In most respects, the Wah Ching was a traditional triad, with tattooed members who took the usual thirty-six vows prescribed since sometime in the eighteenth century. Their structure was familiar, from the Dragon Head down to the “Vanguard”—operations officer—and “White Paper Fan”—administrator—down to the oath-bound members known for some reason as “forty-niners,” and the uninitiated prospects called “blue lanterns.” Up and down the chain, each member of the crime family—an estimated six thousand in all—was pledged to sacrifice himself if need be, for the greater good.

Make that the greater evil.

Their Afghan rivals, on the other hand, had no such rigid structure or tradition spanning centuries. Theirs was a tribal sort of operation, where the man in charge had proved himself by ruthless violence, eliminating his competitors, making examples of them to the world at large. The man in charge, Khalil Nazari, rarely left Afghanistan. In fact, he rarely left his fortress compound in the desert west of Kandahar, where he lived under double guard by his own thugs and mercenaries from a private outfit also known for its extensive contracts with the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Call him untouchable...unless he could be lured out into the open somehow for an unexpected meeting with the Executioner.

It was something to think about, but in the meantime there was New York City, where Wasef Kamran ran the show for Nazari, moving in on Wah Ching territory with no apparent concern for collateral damage. If they’d just been killing one another, Bolan might have been content to let the bloodbath run its course, but that was not an option in a metro area with twenty million innocent bystanders.

The Farm’s computer files contained whatever information was available on the Wah Ching Triad and the Nazari syndicate from sources including the DEA, FBI, NYPD, Interpol, Britain’s MI-5, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Afghanistan’s State Intelligence Agency, the Khadamat-e Aetla’at-e Dawlati, or KHAD. Some of it was contradictory, and some was out of date, but the archives showed Bolan faces, some with home addresses, and gave him directions to known or suspected syndicate properties. There would be no shortage of targets, and the soldier guessed he would find others as he went along, by one means or another.

The key was focus, and accepting tough realities. He’d never stop the trafficking in drugs from Southeast Asia or the Golden Crescent, obviously. Wiping out the Wah Ching’s membership was clearly an impossibility, and taking down Nazari at his Afghan stronghold posed a list of difficulties that included forcing Bolan to contend with U.S. troops. When those ideas were taken off the table, what remained?

His brand of blitzkrieg, for a start, refined in battles with the Mafia, with criminal cartels and terrorists around the world. The opposition would be tough, determined, and they’d pull out all the stops to keep from losing any ground, but neither side had any practical experience with the phenomenon Hal Brognola once labeled the “Bolan Effect.” Long before some White House ghostwriter dreamed up the buzz words “shock and awe,” the Executioner had honed those methods to a razor’s edge and taught his enemies to spend their final hours in fear.

Unfortunately, humans being what they were, that was a lesson that required unending repetition. Each new wave of predators seemed to believe they were immune to repercussions for their actions. There were always new ones to replace the fallen, endlessly recycling common themes of plunder, savagery and exploitation. They were doomed by ignorance and arrogance to replicate the errors of their predecessors, until someone knocked them down with force sufficient enough to ensure they would never rise again.

Someone like Bolan, who would do the job because he could.

* * *

BOLAN WAS STRIPPING for a shower when a rapping on his door stopped him. Shirtless and half expecting Price, he moved to let her in and was surprised to find Grimaldi standing there.

“Bad time?” the pilot asked.

“Just washing up,” Bolan replied. “It can wait.” He stood aside for his friend, then shut the door and slipped his shirt back on, leaving it loose, unbuttoned.

“I was thinking we should talk about tomorrow,” Grimaldi said. “New York, that is.”

“Okay.”

“I’m thinking we can fly directly there,” Grimaldi said, “unless you need to stop somewhere beforehand.”

“That’ll work,” Bolan agreed. “I’ll borrow what I need out of the armory.”

“Newark’s the closest airport, if you want to call about a ride.”

“Will do. You want a car?”

Grimaldi thought about it, then shook his head. “I’ll stick to wings for now. If we need a second vehicle for anything, I’ll pick one up along the way.”

“I expect New York won’t be the end of it,” Bolan warned.

“That’s the feeling I get, too. While you’re redecorating Chinatown, I’ll make arrangement for a bird with greater range. The Feds have got some business jets they’ve confiscated. I can probably get one of them on loan.”

“Flying in style.”

“The only way to go. Depending on our final destination, there’s a chance I can finesse some kind of gunship.”

“We can wait and see on that. It might be overkill.”

“Just food for thought. I’d rather have some rockets and a twenty-millimeter I don’t need than wish I had ’em when they’re nowhere to be found.”

“You’ve got a point,” Bolan agreed.

“So, any thoughts on where to start?”

“Find an informant if I can, first thing,” Bolan replied. “If one side or the other has a shipment due, I’ll try to take it down and go from there. Play one against the other if it feels right. Rattle cages. Blow their houses down.”

“Same old, same old.”

“Hey, if it works—”

“Don’t fix it,” Grimaldi said, finishing the thought for Bolan. “Right. I hear you. Want to get a beer or three?”

“I thought I’d catch up on my sleep.”

“Okay. I might try that myself,” Grimaldi said. “A little change of pace. What time tomorrow?”

“Six?”

“I’m there.”

Alone once more, Bolan shrugged off his shirt and had one leg out of his jeans before the knocking was repeated. Opening the door again, he felt his frown turn upside-down.

“All clear?” Price asked.

“Good timing.”

“Not so good,” she said, brushing past Bolan. “Jack was waiting for the elevator. I almost ordered him to wipe the smirk off his face.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean—”

She cut him off, saying, “You didn’t have to dress all fancy for me.”

Bolan glanced down at his blue jeans. “These old things? Just something I threw on.”

“You want to take them off?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

“But listen, if Jack—”

“Let’s just pretend Jack wasn’t here.”

Their intimate relationship was not a secret, in the strictest sense. They didn’t advertise it; tried to be discreet within the limits posed by their surroundings and the strict security imposed at Stony Man. The rooms weren’t monitored, but there were CCTV cameras in the corridors, as well as on the grounds outside. No one would question what went on between Bolan and Price, or try to second-guess them. They were warriors seeking solace, and if something more should come of it...

But nothing would.

Their lives were fixed in place, at least as far as Bolan was concerned. While Price might feel she’d had enough of Stony Man one day, might pull the pin and look for something else to do in government or in the private sector, Bolan could not walk away into a new career where everything was rosy and the storm clouds never gathered overhead.

That life was lost to him, a distant, faded memory. His father’s faulty choices had evoked disaster and determined Bolan’s path, an irredeemable diversion from what might have been. He’d never own a house, with or without a picket fence. Would never watch a child or two grow up, go off to school, get married, settle into a career. So what? A soldier learned that it was folly missing things that were denied him, things he’d never had.

What Bolan had, instead, was Stony Man and Barbara Price. He had a small but solid group of comrades who would never let him down—unless, of course, the good of many should outweigh the needs of one. That was a risk he had accepted willingly and would abide by to the bitter end.

And in the meantime, Bolan had a chance to make a difference. He’d made a difference in countless lives, nearly too often to recall. Someday his luck would turn, and he was ready for that, too.

Like the lady said, a happy ending was a story left unfinished.

Nobody got out of life alive.

“Sorry?” Bolan was aware of Price saying something, but he’d missed it.

“I said that you look like you’re a thousand miles away.”

“Nope,” he assured her. “I’m right here. With you.”

“Prove it,” she replied, pulling the zipper on her jumpsuit down around waist level.

“I aim to please,” he said.

“And since you’re a marksman, hit me with your best shot.”

Time enough to put the war on hold for one night and remember in the morning what he would be fighting for.

“I was about to take a shower,” Bolan told her.

“I could scrub your back or something.”

“It’s a deal.”

They moved together toward the bathroom, shedding clothes and apprehensions on the way. Tomorrow was as distant as forever and would take care of itself.

CHAPTER THREE

Canal Street, Lower Manhattan

“Keep going, damn it! Don’t stop here!” Louis Chao snapped.

“No choice,” John Lin answered back. “We’ve got a flat, in case you couldn’t tell.”

“Drive on the rim!”

“Too late. We’re bogging down.”

Those words were barely out before Chao felt the sharp edge of their left front wheel plow into grass and sod. The Focus shuddered, wallowed in the trough it was digging, then stalled as Lin kept bearing down on the accelerator.

“Stop! You’re flooding it!”

The engine coughed and died then, leaving Lin to pound his fist against the steering wheel, cursing in Cantonese.

“Stop it!” Chao snapped at him. “They’re coming! Everybody out!”

The car would be a death trap if the Afghans caught them in it and they couldn’t drive away. Chao didn’t plan on being caught inside with bullets ripping through the windows and the flimsy bodywork into his body. He’d already cocked the Bushmaster and held it ready as he rolled out of the car, crouching behind it with his door open, where it could serve him as a partial shield from either side. It wasn’t much, but better than if he was caught out in the open by his adversaries.

Martin Tang was last out of the Ford, clutching a pistol that seemed woefully inadequate under the circumstances. He was empty-handed, otherwise, and Chao snarled at him, “Get the bag!”

“But—”

“Get it! We’re not leaving it behind!”

Tang did as he was told, leaning inside the Ford to grab the suitcase filled with heroin and drag it out behind him. As he did so, Chao could hear the SUV approaching, fat tires ripping furrows in the grass someone had spent a fortune tending, and the men inside it had resumed their firing at the Ford. He wondered for a fleeting instant who the other man had been, glimpsed briefly in a car behind the Chevy Trailblazer and firing at it, then at Chao’s car. A policeman? Would he join the fight without the usual flashing lights and siren?

There was no more time to think about it then, as the Trailblazer passed their small sedan, two automatic weapons spitting deadly fire, their bullets hammering the Ford along its driver’s side. Chao cursed them and returned fire with his Bushmaster, the first time he’d been able to retaliate so far. He was pleased to see his bullets stitch a line of bright holes on the chase car’s left rear fender, even if they didn’t reach the men inside.

Lin was out and firing with his Uzi, ripping off what seemed like half a magazine in one long burst. Chao hoped that he had spares, firing like that, but didn’t take the time to chastise Lin for wasting ammunition. Time was better spent aiming his own shots more precisely, if he could, instead of yelling at his Wah Ching brothers in the middle of a firefight.

Do or die, he thought. If they went home without the heroin, no explanation he could fabricate would placate Paul Mei-Lun. Death from a bullet would be preferable to whatever Mei-Lun devised as punishment for losing merchandise worth three cool million. Bearing that in mind, Chao braced himself and tracked the Chevy as it turned, preparing for another strafing run, this time on his side of the crippled Ford.

“Watch out!” he warned the others, just in case their nerves had blinded them somehow. He saw Lin crouching with the Uzi held in front of him, while Tang was trying to crawl underneath the Focus, making little progress with its chassis low against the ground.

“Martin! Come out and fight!”

Tang obeyed, but seemed as if he were about to weep, a pitiful display that shamed him and his Wah Ching brothers. If they had not needed him just then, Chao thought he might have shot the whining little coward.

Chao dropped to one knee, shouldered the Bushmaster’s stock, and hoped that the sedan’s door would prevent the first few rounds from striking him. He craved a chance to kill one of his enemies, at least, before he died. Just one would be enough to prove that he had fought with courage, done his best, and he could face his triad ancestors without a trace of shame.

* * *

BOLAN COULD FEEL the Camry start to slide on the grass and turned his steering wheel into the skid, easing his foot off the gas pedal. The chase was ending, since a lucky shot had flayed one of the Ford’s front tires, and plowing over soft ground had it bogging down. The Chevy SUV was slowing, too, its front-seat shooter popping off rounds toward the Focus, while his partner in the backseat tried to keep an eye on Bolan’s progress.

The Executioner made it harder for him, cranking through a U-turn that maneuvered him away from the location where the Ford had stalled and left his Camry with its nose pointed uphill, back toward Canal Street. That way, if it started taking hits, the bullets ought to spend their force inside his trunk, or in the backseat, without doing any damage to the rental’s engine. He’d be able to evacuate the scene, at least—if he was still alive and fit to drive.

That was by no means certain, with the automatic fire already hammering the park, no more than thirty yards from where he took the battle EVA. Pursuing the Trailblazer any further would have made the fight a demolition derby, likely leaving him afoot when the police arrived to spoil the party. And since being jailed was not on Bolan’s list of things to do that afternoon, he opted for audacity to shift the odds a bit.

Audacity, and maybe just a little bit of luck.

The MP5K wasn’t heavy. Truth be told, it weighed about the same as the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle autoloader Bolan often carried as a backup piece. Add roughly a half pound for the Beta C-Mag and it still came in below six pounds, lightened a fraction of an ounce with every 3-round burst unleashed. He wasn’t firing at the moment, though. The soldier was covering ground instead, closing the gap between himself and six men trying hard to kill one another in the middle of the park.

The Executioner came at the Trailblazer from its blind side, more or less, half crouching as he sprinted across the sloping turf. The shooter in the backseat tried to get an angle on him, squeezing off a burst to get the range, but rushed it so that half his bullets struck the inside of the tailgate, peppering the grass while Bolan ducked and rolled aside.

He squeezed off two short bursts in answer to that fire and saw his target flinch from the incoming rounds. Wounded? It was impossible to say, but when the Afghan fired again, his rounds tore through the Chevy’s roof, a reflexive act accompanied by what Bolan assumed to be a shout of profanity.

Closer. The SUV’s tailgate and left rear quarter panel were his cover now. They wouldn’t stop a rifle bullet, but they kept the shooters in the Trailblazer from spotting him until he showed himself—which, as he saw it, couldn’t be put off for any more convenient time.

Nine blocks from the Fifth Precinct and he was running out of time.

Bolan reached up, holding his SMG one-handed, and unloaded through the Chevy’s left rear tinted window, spraying the interior with Parabellum rounds and shattered glass. A cry from somewhere near at hand told him he’d scored at least one hit before the SUV lurched forward, roaring off to make another sweep around the Ford sedan.

Leaving Mack Bolan totally exposed.

* * *

“DAOUD? DAOUD!”

Ahmad Taraki, bleeding from his scalp where shards of glass had stung him, swiveled in his seat when Daoud Rashad refused to answer him. The reason for his silence was revealed immediately. Fresh blood spattered the backseat of the SUV; Rashad was sprawled across that seat with half his face and skull sheared off.

Taraki still had no idea who had attacked them from behind, but he could see the bastard now, as Kazimi took them on another run around the crippled triad vehicle. The stranger was a white man, not Chinese, and he had fired on both cars during the pursuit along Canal Street, which made no sense in Taraki’s mind.

The answer: kill the attacker now before he harmed them further.

But the three Chinese were firing at Taraki and Kazimi was swerving enough to spoil Taraki’s aim as he tried to return fire on the drive-by. His magazine ran dry after unloading half a dozen rounds, but he was satisfied to see one of the triad gunners stagger, clutching at his chest before he fell. Taraki fumbled to reload the rifle, cursing his clumsy fingers, and then his driver had them lined up to charge directly at the white man who had killed Rashad.

“Run over him!” Taraki ordered. “Smash him into pulp!”

“I’m trying!” Kazimi snapped.

Their unknown adversary stood his ground, waiting, some kind of machine pistol held steady in his hands. Taraki snarled a curse and started firing through the Chevy’s windshield, scarring it with spiderwebs before a chunk of glass the size of his own head broke free and slithered off the hood, clearing his field of fire. By then his enemy was firing back, not panicked as might be expected, but squeezing off precision bursts.

Kazimi croaked out a dying gasp as he slumped back in the driver’s seat, his hands sliding off the steering wheel and down into his blood-drenched lap. His foot was still on the accelerator as he slid down in the seat, the SUV still charging forward, though it had begun to drift off course. Taraki grabbed the wheel and tried to bring the vehicle back on target, toward the man he meant to kill, but when he tore his eyes away from Kazimi’s corpse, his enemy had leaped aside, out of the Chevy’s path.

Taraki cranked the wheel sharply, swerving to the right. He guessed it was too little and too late, but what else could he do? Firing the Bushmaster with one hand, steering with the other while a dead man held the SUV at cruising speed, he tried to salvage something out of the disaster that had overtaken him.

Too late.

Another burst of submachine gun fire blew through the Chevy’s shattered windshield, ripping through Taraki’s left shoulder and arm with stunning force. He might have squealed in pain—couldn’t be certain of it with the roaring in his head—then he was slumping to his right, against his door, as the Trailblazer tipped and rolled onto its side. Kazimi, never a fan of seat belts when he was alive, slithered across the console, settling with his mutilated face jammed underneath Taraki’s chin.

“Get off me.” Taraki’s voice grated, but he had no strength left with which to shove his former driver away, much less crawl out from under him. His left arm was a useless dangling piece of meat, his right pinned underneath his own weight and the corpse’s, still clutching the Bushmaster but now incapable of lifting it.

He heard footsteps approaching; knew that it could only be an enemy, but didn’t know whether it was the white man who had wounded him or one of the Wah Ching gunners. Cursing and weeping in frustration, straining with whatever strength he still possessed to raise his gun, Taraki listened to the grim approach of death.

At the last moment, with an effort that exhausted him, Taraki craned his neck to peer out through the windshield, focusing on feet and legs outside. He struggled impotently to free his weapon, mouthing curses as the man dropped to one knee and peered inside the toppled SUV. It was the stranger, naturally, frowning at him as he raised his submachine gun toward Taraki’s face.

Before the world went black.

* * *

A BULLET SIZZLED past Mack Bolan’s ear and panged into the capsized SUV, leaving a shiny divot in the roof where paint had flaked away. He ducked and rolled, putting the blunt nose of the Trailblazer between himself and the Wah Ching thugs who’d missed a chance to take him down.

Stalemate?

He couldn’t let it go at that, with precious seconds slipping through his fingers. Sirens would be coming at him any time now, closing off Bolan’s escape route from the battle that he’d never meant to fight in this location, with civilians in the way. He glanced around as best he could, saw no one raising cell phones yet to record the action as it happened, but the idea added one more level of concern.

His face on YouTube? Not a great idea.

Of course, it wasn’t his face. Not the one he had been born with, anyway. No one would look at him and think Mack Bolan? Someone told me he was dead! Still, going viral to the world at large would definitely cramp his style, and might require yet another session with the surgeon who had given him his battle mask.

No, thanks.

Before he made another move against the Wah Ching gangsters, Bolan pulled a roll of silky black material out of his left trouser pocket and slipped it over his head. It was a balaclava, black nylon and ultra-thin, that fit him like a second skin, with a “ninja” oval opening for eyes alone, masking the rest of Bolan’s face. Now he was ready for his close-up, if it came to that, switching out the MP5K’s nearly empty magazine for a fresh one, bracing for his move.

First step: to take the triad hardmen by surprise within the limits of his present circumstance. They had to have seen where he had gone to ground, so Bolan crept along behind the Trailblazer until he reached its rear end, pausing there just long enough scout the landscape cautiously and choose his angle of attack. Behind him, twenty yards or so from where he crouched, the Camry waited for him, still had access to Canal Street if he finished his business soon enough and wasn’t cut off by police.

Too many ifs.

The way to do it, he decided, was a plain, straightforward rush, with cover fire as needed on the relatively short run to his destination. Short was relative, of course. Ten feet could feel like miles when a person was under hostile fire. The first step could turn out to be his last. Still, Bolan had to make the effort, or his intervention in the fight had been for nothing, a colossal—maybe catastrophic—waste of time.

The best scenario would be a short dash, unopposed, to reach the Ford and— Then what? Killing at close quarters was an ugly business, where the outcome could go either way. One slip and he was done. There’d be no do-over, no second chance to get it right. End game.

But if he got it right...

His plan had changed, against his will, when the Afghans stepped in and made the hunt a firefight. Now, instead of following the Wah Ching thugs to their leader, Bolan had another end in mind, requiring him to face them and relieve them of the cargo they’d transported from New Jersey. Ten or twelve kilos of heroin that would become his lever for upsetting Paul Mei-Lun’s enclave in Chinatown, with any luck.

And what about Wasef Kamran?

Bolan planned to take it one step at a time. Survive this challenge, then move on.

A final peek around the Chevy’s tailgate and he was just in time to see one of the Wah Ching gunners rise and fire a short burst from an automatic rifle toward the SUV’s front end. Trying to pin him down so they could make a run for it, perhaps? The last thing Bolan needed now was a pursuit on foot along Canal Street, running from the park and toward the Fifth Precinct.

A distant siren got him up and moving toward the triad vehicle, clutching his little SMG and hoping that his time had not run out.

* * *

“WHO IS THAT crazy bastard?” Martin Tang asked.

“It doesn’t matter who he is,” Louis Chao replied. “We need to get the hell away from here before we’ve got pigs crawling up our asses.”

“What’s the plan?” John Lin demanded. “Are we just gonna walk away from here?”

“Unless you get the damn car running,” Chao snarled back at him.

“He’ll pick us off, first move we make,” Tang said.

“You mean he’ll try to,” Chao replied, and rose to fire a short burst from his Bushmaster as punctuation, stitching holes across the broad hood of the Afghans’ SUV. “That lets us have another chance to drop him.”

Chao didn’t have a clue about the round-eyed stranger’s motive or identity, was grateful that he’d taken out the triad goon, but that didn’t solve his problem. They were half a mile or something from the cop house, sirens in the air now, and he couldn’t lose the suitcase full of heroin. Not if he wanted to survive the day.

“Get ready,” he commanded. “Switch your mags out if you’re running low. There’s no time for it once we start to run.”

“Run where?” Lin challenged him.

“Just run. We get a block or so away from here, split up and make it harder for whoever’s following. I’ll see you at the Lucky Dragon.”

Neither Lin nor Tang replied to that, both staring at him as if Chao had lost his mind. Maybe he had, in fact, but he was dead certain of one thing: staying where they were right now was not an option.

“Ready?”

Tang bobbed his head while Lin glowered and muttered to himself.

Maybe the plan was freaking stupid, but it was the best Chao could devise. He had a final thought, leaning in toward Tang and snatching the heavy suitcase from him.

“I’ll take this,” Chao said, not giving Tang a choice.

“Suits me.”

The bag would slow him a bit, no question, but he couldn’t trust it to their younger Wah Ching brother with a madman breathing down their necks and cops converging on the battleground. Whatever happened to the skag, it would be Chao’s neck on the chopping block with Paul Mei-Lun. He might as well die running with it, as to show up empty-handed at the Lucky Dragon, pleading ignorance of where the dope had gone.

“Okay,” Chao said. “Remember now—”

He never had a chance to finish as running footsteps made him turn and then all hell broke loose. The round-eye was upon them, spraying death among them from his compact submachine gun. Chao gasped as the bullets struck him, punched him over backward, glimpsing Lin in a fighting stance, then falling through a cloud of crimson mist. Chao couldn’t see what had become of Tang and didn’t care.

He’d failed his brothers and the Wah Ching Family. Whatever lay in store for him, if there was anything at all beyond this life, at least he wouldn’t have to answer for his last snafu to Paul Mei-Lun.

The attacker stood above him now, face covered, bending to lift the suitcase Chao had tried to rescue, all in vain. Chao tried to curse him, nearly managed it, but felt his final breath escape as a gurgling whistle from his punctured lungs before he closed his eyes.

* * *

BOLAN HEFTED THE BAG—ten kilos by the feel of it—and turned back toward his waiting rental car. He sprinted past the Ford, beyond the SUV slumped on its side, and reached the Camry as the sirens sounded louder in his ears. He opened the driver’s door and pitched the suitcase right across into the footwell of the shotgun seat. Sliding in behind the wheel, the soldier dropped his MP5K on the empty seat beside him, leaving on the balaclava while he gunned the Camry’s engine into growling life and powered out of there.

Careful!

He had to hurry, but could not afford undue attention as he picked an escape route. Pulling out into the two-way traffic on Canal Street, Bolan had a choice to make immediately. Turning to his right, he could proceed directly toward the Fifth Precinct, the source of the sirens closing in on him even now, then turn north on Sixth Avenue, running one-way, or keep on for another block to West Broadway, another one-way street bearing him north. Beyond that, he’d be rolling past the cops and into Chinatown, a move that he was not prepared to make just yet.

A left turn on Canal would take him back to Varick Street and one-way traffic heading south into Lower Manhattan, renamed after eight long blocks to become West Broadway. If he passed that, his next choice would be Hudson Street northbound, or on from there to Lincoln Highway where his tracking of the Wah Ching hardmen had begun. That route would take him north or south along the Hudson River, with a choice of side streets offered either way.

Bolan turned left.

He didn’t make a big deal of it, didn’t screech his tires with a dramatic peel-out from the scene. If someone memorized his license plate or snapped a photo of it on a cell phone, well, so be it. He would have to ditch the Camry anyhow, and soon, then find another set of wheels to keep him mobile in New York. He’d bought insurance on the rental, so the vendor wouldn’t take a hit from any damage suffered in the fight, and Bolan’s fingerprints had been expunged from every file that Hal Brognola could access from his office in D.C.—which meant all files, across the board. The cyber team at Stony Man had taken care of the rest.

The danger he faced now was that of being overtaken by police before Bolan could slip away and lose himself among the Big Apple’s eight million people and two million automobiles. He didn’t need much of a lead, maybe a mile or so, and he could likely pull it off.

Two blocks from where he’d killed six men, Bolan ditched the balaclava and turned right on Hudson Street, slowing to match the flow of traffic moving northward. The map in his head told him that Hudson would become Ninth Street when he had cleared the next two dozen blocks, past Greenwich Village, and then continue toward Times Square and the Theater District. Somewhere along that two-mile drive he’d find a place to ditch the Camry and proceed on foot until he caught a cab and went from there.

Next stop: a different auto rental agency, where he’d present a driver’s license and Platinum Visa in the name of Matthew Cooper, home address a mail drop in Richmond, Virginia, that forwarded bills and whatever to Stony Man Farm. There’d be no problem picking up another ride, and he’d be on his way.

Easy.

After that, however, things would once again get complicated in a hurry.

Bolan’s plan had been diverted by the battle on Canal Street, but it wasn’t scuttled. In fact, he thought Plan B might serve him better than the scheme he’d started out with. Now that he’d acquired a load of smack worth some three million dollars, he could try a new game, not restricted to the Wah Ching base in Chinatown.

Divide and conquer, right. He’d played that hand before, with good results, and Bolan couldn’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t work this time. At least, not yet.

New wheels, then phone calls. He would reach out to the Wah Ching Triad first, since he’d relieved them of their merchandise, then he would float an offer to Wasef Kamran. Neither would ever lay hands on the suitcase full of poison, but they wouldn’t know that going in.

Hope springs eternal, even among savages.

They would believe that every person drawing breath came with a price tag, ready to abandon principle if someone offered them a payday large enough to salve their qualms of conscience. Moral ambiguity was absolutely necessary for survival of a criminal cartel. It was the mobster’s stock in trade. Neither would be familiar with a man like Bolan, who regarded the performance of his duty as an end unto itself.

A rude awakening was coming to his enemies, but if he played his cards right, none of them would live to profit from the lesson.

And when they were gone, the Executioner would deal with those who’d sent them to New York.

CHAPTER FOUR

Chinatown, Manhattan

Paul Mei-Lun poured himself a second glass of rice baiju and slugged the liquor down, waiting to feel its heat spread from his throat into his belly. He hoped that it would calm him soon and damp the waves of anger that were threatening to prompt some foolish action he would certainly regret.

Details of the attack were vague, confused, but Mei-Lun knew the basics. He had lost three men and ten kilos of heroin, while suffering another grievous insult at the hands of foul barbarians. With Tommy Mu, that made four deaths within a week, eleven kilos lost. He did not want to think about what Ma Lam Chan would say—what he might do—on learning of the latest losses.

It was Mei-Lun’s job to put things right. He owed it to the Wah Ching brotherhood and to himself, since the responsibility had to ultimately fall on him. His problem now was where to start.

Of course, Wasef Kamran and his gorillas were responsible for Tommy Mu, but someone else had interceded in the second incident. Police had found the Afghans dead, along with Mei-Lun’s men, and witnesses described a seventh man wearing a mask and firing at both sides in the fight. He had been seen escaping with a suitcase—Mei-Lun’s suitcase—in a car already found abandoned on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, close to Central Park. Mei-Lun knew the car was rented, but he had not yet obtained the name of the killer who’d hired it.

When he did...

His thoughts stopped there. The gunman clearly was a trained professional. There was no reason to suppose that he would use his real name on a rental contract or that Mei-Lun would be able to locate him once he had the alias in hand. His task was to determine why a stranger, a professional, would leap into the middle of a firefight, tackle six armed men and kill them all.

The easy answer: for the heroin. But that was too easy.

To pull it off, the killer had to have known about the shipment, where it would be coming from and when it would arrive. He had to have followed Mei-Lun’s people from the ferry terminal. Without the Afghans intervening, Mei-Lun reckoned that the gunman would have trailed them to the Lucky Dragon where he sat right now, the empty liquor glass in front of him. But Kamran’s men had intervened, and even when the shooting started it was not enough to put the other gunman off. He’d gone ahead to fight six men and kill them all, then make off with the heroin.

Acting on whose behalf?

Mei-Lun’s thoughts turned immediately to the New York Mafia. His headquarters on Mott Street stood a short three blocks from Little Italy, where rivals spawned in Sicily despised him, seething enviously over his prosperity. There had been clashes in the past between his soldiers and the goombahs of La Cosa Nostra, but no overt violence had flared among them for a year or more. It would be out of character for them, he thought, to send a single soldier on a mission of such gravity.

But if they had...

Beside the baiju bottle, Mei-Lun’s cell phone buzzed and vibrated. He scooped it up and read the message: Number Blocked. Frowning, Mei-Lun pressed a button to accept the call and asked, “Who’s this?”

Instead of answering, a voice he didn’t recognize said, “Rumor has it that you lost a piece of luggage earlier today.”

The frown turned to a scowl, but Mei-Lun kept his voice in neutral. “Luggage?”

“I suppose you’re more concerned about the contents than the bag,” his caller said.

Cell phones were dangerous, their airborne messages fair game under the law for anyone who intercepted them. “Sorry,” Mei-Lun replied. “Wrong number.”

“Okay, then,” Mack Bolan said. “I’ll speak to Mr. Chan directly, shall I?” He rattled off the Dragon Head’s unpublished number in Hong Kong without missing a beat, as if from memory.

A trick? Undoubtedly. But if the stranger knew that much and Mei-Lun brushed him off, he might indeed call Ma Lam Chan. And that could be the end of Paul Mei-Lun.

“Perhaps I was mistaken,” Mei-Lun said. “If so, I would be willing to discuss it.”

“Small talk doesn’t interest me,” the caller told him. “I’ve got merchandise to sell.”

“I see.” There’d been no mention of the heroin, nothing that would incriminate Mei-Lun so far. “What figure did you have in mind?”

“Wholesale, I understand it runs around six hundred thousand. Call it half a mil and we’re in business.”

Mei-Lun wished that he could reach out through the cell phone, grasp the caller’s throat and strangle him, but he restrained himself, controlled his voice. “That is within the realm of possibility,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll call you back with details for the drop.”

And he was gone.

Flushing, Queens, New York

KHODA HAFIZ, an Afghan social club and quasi-covert headquarters of Wasef Kamran’s organization, stood near the corner of Franklin Avenue and Colden Street, in a neighborhood occupied mostly by South Asian immigrants. Some old-time residents called the neighborhood Little Afghanistan, while others dubbed it Little India. Kamran, these past four years, had simply called it home.

The club’s name translated in English to “May God protect you,” but He had not smiled on Wasef Kamran lately, and it angered the mobster.

The loss of three good men plus failure to secure the Wah Ching shipment he had sent them to collect had Kamran simmering with rage, augmented by frustration since he had no one to punish for that failure. With no outlet for his fury—and despite the strictures of his faith—Kamran had pacified himself to some extent with a small glass of homemade liquor that included alcohol, hash oil, sugar, nutmeg, a bit of cinnamon and cloves.

It had begun to work, soothing his nerves enough that Kamran thought he was prepared to face the second-worst part of his day: reporting his losses to Khalil Nazari in Kabul. He knew approximately how that call would go, and Kamran knew his only saving grace was that the conversation would occur long-distance rather than in person, where Nazari could slit his throat.

Killing the bearer of bad news was still in fashion with some Afghan warlords, a tradition hard to shake. Kamran had done the same himself, a time or two. Why fix what was not broken, after all?

He thought about another glass of liquor, then decided it would be too much. He wished to sound composed and in control, not high and babbling incoherently. If he appeared unstable, or Nazari surmised that he had lost control, his fate might well be sealed.

No further stalling, then.

Kamran picked up his encrypted sat-phone and was just about to speed-dial Kabul, when the smartphone beside his elbow chirped its ringtone, playing the first three bars of Farhad Darya’s “In a Foreign Land.” Kamran set down the larger instrument and checked the smartphone for a number. He found it blocked and answered anyway, against his better judgment.

“What?”

“Your people missed today,” a strange voice said, raising the short hairs on his nape.

“Wrong number,” Kamran snarled, and was about to cut the link when his caller said, “That’s what I heard from Paul Mei-Lun.”

“Oh, yes?”

“He wants to buy back the suitcase. I’m wondering if you’re prepared to beat his price.”

Kamran considered what he’d heard so far. Police were fond of stings in the United States, but this seemed far too subtle and innocuous. With no mention of contraband per se, he could discuss the generalities with no fear of indictment or arrest.

“What was his price?” Kamran inquired.

“Five hundred thousand.”

“That’s a lot of money for a suitcase.”

“Or the property inside it.”

He ran the calculation quickly through his mind. Buying the heroin cost more than stealing it, but even so, he had a chance to make a killing here—and not only financially. If he could meet this caller and determine if he was responsible for dropping Kamran’s men...

“I can improve on that by...shall we say ten percent?”

“Fifteen sounds better,” said the caller.

That was more than Kamran wished to pay, but still some twenty-five thousand less than Paul Mei-Lun would have shelled out for the merchandise. Call it $2.4 million and change in clear profit—and the drugs might cost him nothing, if the hijacker was dumb enough to bring them on his own, without backup.

“Where shall we meet, and when?” Kamran inquired.

“I’ll let you know,” the caller said, then broke the link.

Central Park, Manhattan

BOLAN HAD SOME time to kill while he decided on a meeting place—he was determined not to start the party until after nightfall. Seated on a stone bench within sight of where his former life had ended and the new one had begun, he ate a hero sandwich and perused a guidebook to the city that was once again his battleground, if only for a little while.

Phase one of his campaign would end this night and he’d move on, assuming he survived. He could have skipped the New York interlude, left it to normal law-enforcement agencies, but shutting down Wasef Kamran and Paul Mei-Lun was part of Bolan’s larger plan. It was step one in rattling some larger cages, putting more impressive predators on the defensive, kicking off a psy-war that would keep them guessing, sweating, while he homed in on another kill.

New York was one end of a global pipeline pumping heroin into the States. On second thought, make that two pipelines. One reached across the Middle East, Europe and the Atlantic, from Afghanistan. The other ran across the vast Pacific, from its starting point in Southeast Asia, to deliver poison on the West Coast, and from there across the continent. The only way to cripple both, however briefly, was to play off the existing competition between drug lords, bring it to a head, and take the top men down in flames.

Manhattan was a test case; Bolan’s master plan conducted on a smaller scale to see how well it played. And so far, even with the shooting match outside Chinatown, it seemed to be on track.

Next up, he needed someplace where the warring tribes could meet without endangering large numbers of civilians, someplace midway between Flushing and Chinatown, a spot with combat stretch, where he could set his trap and lie in wait for whoever showed up. Three million dollars’ worth of heroin made Bolan confident that both sides would attempt to grab the prize.

The second map he studied did the trick. Roosevelt Island, two miles long and three hundred yards wide, lay in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. At various times in its 377-year history, it had supported a prison, a lunatic asylum and a smallpox hospital. The mostly unoccupied northern tip of the island boasted Lighthouse Park and the historic Blackwell Island Light. Access points included East 66th Street passing under the river from Manhattan, the Roosevelt Island Bridge serving Queens. Once on the island proper, a person could drive around or take the tram to see the sights.

Bolan would be arriving from the west, using the tunnel, after he’d made sure no one was tailing him. From there he’d take the island’s West Road all the way, until it terminated, some three hundred yards from Blackwell Island Light, which put him in the kill zone. He would start at dusk and be in place before he made the calls directing Kamran and Mei-Lun to the appointed drop site, neither one expecting that the other would be there.

One question still remained in Bolan’s mind: would either of the top men show in person? He believed the odds were good, particularly if he made delivery contingent on their turning up to make the payoff. Naturally, they’d come with heavy backup, hoping to eliminate the stranger who was vexing them and claim the heroin without paying a dime. Bolan was counting on both sides to try their best at cheating him. He needed soldiers on the ground to help him with the mopping up.

And if he missed Kamran, Mei-Lun or both...well, he could take a little extra time to visit them before he moved on to the second phase of his campaign. Why not?

Anything worth doing was worth doing well.

Chinatown

“ROOSEVELT ISLAND?” Paul Mei-Lun pronounced the name as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. “What’s on Roosevelt Island?”

“Your shipment,” Bolan replied. “It waits for you till half past midnight, then goes looking for another buyer.”

“That would be a big mistake.”

“I’ll risk it if you don’t show up.”

“I said I’d be there, didn’t I? The park, out by the lighthouse, right?”

“That’s it,” the caller said. “If you decide to change your mind, the bag goes to Kamran.”

“Hey, now—”

But he was talking to dead air.

Standing beside him, almost at his elbow, Kevin Lo asked, “Well? What did he say?”

“Midnight, Roosevelt Island. At the lighthouse park.”

“This whole thing smells.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“It has to be some kind of setup.”

“Obviously. But it’s not the pigs,” Mei-Lun declared. “No mention of the H at all, so far. I show up and they bust me, I can always claim somebody called about my uncle’s missing suitcase.”

“Okay. It’s the Afghans, then.”

“Three of their men got wasted, right along with ours. If they already had the bag, why call me?”

That stumped Lo, but he still was not satisfied. “So what’s the angle, then? This can’t be straight.”

“His angle doesn’t matter,” Mei-Lun answered. “Only ours. He wants to dance, we call the tune.”

“We go in hard?”

“As hard as diamonds, brother.” Mei-Lun checked his Movado Swiss Automatic SE Extreme watch and smiled. “The meet’s at midnight. That gives us four hours to get there. I want a dozen of our best men here in half an hour, dressed to kill.”

“No problem,” Lo assured him. “You’re still going with us?”

“Kevin, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Get moving now and set it up.”

Lo bobbed his head and left the office, cell phone already in hand. Mei-Lun considered changing his command to make it twenty soldiers, rather than a dozen, but that felt like overcompensating. From the early eyewitness reports, one guy had done the killing on Canal Street by himself, and he would likely come alone to claim his payoff for the stolen heroin. But if he showed up with a friend or two, so what? Mei-Lun would have his soldiers waiting at the drop well in advance of midnight, primed to waste this fool on sight.

No, scratch that. They would have to chat a little with him first, to make sure that he’d brought the merchandise. Killing the bastard without getting back the skag would be a waste of time—and it would leave Mei-Lun at risk from Ma Lam Chan when he admitted to the loss.

A sudden thought disturbed him. What if Chan already knew about the heist? He almost certainly had eyes and ears inside Mei-Lun’s Manhattan cadre, someone who would tip him off to any problems Mei-Lun tried to cover up. If word had reached the Dragon Head at home, would he reach out to Paul Mei-Lun, or simply send a team of his enforcers to correct the situation, meting out the punishment Chan deemed appropriate?

Mei-Lun peered at his watch again, counting the hours since the slaughter on Canal Street, guessing how long it would take to have a team airborne from Hong Kong to the States. As he remembered it, the flight to San Francisco took approximately fifteen hours, then they’d face another seven hours in the air, if they were fortunate enough to catch a nonstop flight from Frisco to LaGuardia or JFK. If they were airborne now, Mei-Lun shouldn’t expect to see them nosing around Chinatown until sometime tomorrow afternoon.

No sweat.

He’d have the problem solved by then, the merchandise in hand, and they could tell Chan that he’d taken care of business without any interference from the East. And if that didn’t satisfy the Dragon Head, perhaps they ought to meet and talk about it, face-to-face.

Maybe, Mei-Lun decided, it was time for him to think about advancement in the Family.

Flushing, Queens

“THIS MAKES NO SENSE, WASEF,” Ghulam Munadi said.

Wasef Kamran shrugged in response. “This man stole heroin we planned to steal, and now he wants to sell it. What confuses you?”

“First, that he knows the number where to reach you.”

“Anyone can find a number nowadays,” Kamran replied. “The internet is free to all, and this man has skills.”

“Too many skills,” Munadi countered. “He is some kind of policeman. I’m convinced of it.”

“Some kind? What kind? He asks for money to return an item that was stolen. There is nothing to incriminate us, eh?”

“Until we claim the bag. Then they arrest us.”

“Think, Ghulam! Would the police kill six men in the public eye, then steal the drugs just to arrest us?” Kamran did not wait for his lieutenant to reply. “Of course not! If this person is a cop, he’s more like us. Trying to save a little for retirement, eh?”

“And what if it’s a trap?” Munadi asked.

“I can assure you that it is. We seem to take the bait, then close the noose around his neck. With fifteen men, what can he do?”

Munadi frowned. “I don’t like going to this island.”

“Tell me what you do like, Ghulam. It’s a shorter list, I’m sure.”

“What I would like is to forget this business. Since we can’t do that, I’d like you to remain here under tight security until the bag has been retrieved and this is settled.”

“Stay at home and miss the show this bastard has planned for me especially? I wouldn’t think of it.”

“You’ll wear the Kevlar, though?”

“Of course. I’m not an idiot,” Kamran replied.

He would be armed, as well, with his usual sidearm for a start, a Heckler & Koch P30 chambered in .40 S&W, with a 13-round magazine. To back it up, another favorite: the Spectre M4 submachine gun with its casket magazine containing fifty 9 mm Parabellum rounds, less than fourteen inches long with its metal stock folded above the receiver. With the Spectre he could lay down 800 rounds per minute, killing anyone or anything that stood between him and his goal.

Including this killer who believed that he could dupe Kamran somehow, perhaps make off with Kamran’s hard-earned money, and the heroin besides.

“Good luck with that,” he muttered to himself.

“What did you say?” Munadi asked.

“Nothing. Go and make sure the men are ready. We should leave soon.”

“But it’s only—”

“Yes, I know the time. I want to be there, waiting, when our friend arrives. Let us surprise him, eh?”

“As you wish it, Wasef.”

He was looking forward to the meeting with this stranger who had robbed him—or, in truth, who’d robbed the Chinese Kamran had meant to rob. He felt a sneaking kind of admiration for such courage and audacity, but it required a harsh response to salvage Kamran’s reputation as a man whose enemies enjoyed short, miserable lives.

This one, whoever he might be, would have been wiser to go hunting somewhere else, perhaps rob the Jamaicans or Dominicans, maybe the damned Armenians. He was about to learn a lesson that Afghanis had been teaching Westerners since 1839. Kamran’s people could not be vanquished in their homeland—not by England, Russia or America—and now they were expanding into every corner of the planet to assert themselves and claim their proper share of wealth.

This night, Roosevelt Island. This time next year, perhaps Manhattan. And beyond that...who could say? It was a whole new world, beyond Khalil Nazari’s wildest dreams from Kabul, where the old ways mired him down. Perhaps a younger, stronger man was needed to command that new domain and bend it to his will.

Job one: collect the heroin without dispensing any cash to the audacious thief. Then, having proved himself, Wasef Kamran could think about tomorrow and the great things he was going to accomplish.

All he had to do was make it through the night alive.

Roosevelt Island

BOLAN PARKED HIS latest rental car, a Honda CR-V, in the visitor’s lot at Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital, and made his way to the roof of the X-shaped facility’s northwestern wing. From there he had a view across treetops to Lighthouse Park, where his intended targets would be showing up, at least in theory, sometime in the next three hours.

Waiting was a sniper’s specialty. Bolan likely could not have counted all the times he’d lain in wait for enemies in heat and cold, under a drenching rain, while insects crawled over his skin and hummed around his ears. He’d learned to lie in perfect stillness, barely breathing, while a target took its own sweet time about appearing, stepping finally into the crosshairs of his telescopic sight and dying there, struck down from half a mile or more away, with no idea how death had come so suddenly, without a hint of warning.

He was ready now, with his weapon of choice for this phase of the hunt, an M-110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System manufactured by Knight’s Armament in Florida. The rifle measured 46.5 inches with its buttstock extended and a suppressor attached, tipping the scales at just over fifteen pounds with a 20-round magazine full of 7.62 mm NATO rounds. Its AN/PVS-10 night sight would let him place accurate shots out to 875 yards, nearly nine times the range he would be firing from this night. It should be like shooting fish in a barrel.

But these fish might be shooting back.

His plan was simple: place the Afghans and Wah Ching hardmen into proximity, both looking for the same thing, then cut loose and see what happened next. A well-placed shot or two might do the trick, but if the opposition needed any more help, Bolan had a stack of extra magazines on hand and was prepared to use as many as the job required.

Scorched earth, all the way.

He didn’t need to rattle either side for information, since the next stop on his tour had been determined in advance. Khalil Nazari’s opium was processed into bricks of morphine near the poppy fields he cultivated in Afghanistan. Bolan knew approximately where the morphine bricks were sent for their conversion into heroin. The details he did not as yet possess would be available when he arrived on-site, secured by one means or another to complete the next link in the chain.

This night he would be shutting down the pipeline in Manhattan. Not for good; no one could claim permanent victory in any war against a human craving for release. But Bolan could remove the major players in this one dark corner of the world. Maybe incite some other scavengers to take each other off the board while they were grappling to fill the power vacuum that resulted.

Doing what he could with what he had.

His field of fire was open from the hospital’s six-story rooftop to the Blackwell Island Light, four hundred feet northeast of where he sat cradling the rifle, waiting. Once the action started, Bolan’s enemies could break in one of three directions: toward the light, away from him; to cars parked on the left or right, against the river’s edge; or back toward Bolan, seeking refuge among trees that formed a kind of horseshoe shape at his end of the park. Whichever way they ran, it would be under fire from Bolan and from adversaries on the other side, who’d come expecting to go home with ten kilos of heroin.

How many would go home at all?

Bolan never indulged in overconfidence. He trained and practiced, planned and double-checked his plans, then trusted to his own experience and skill. That recipe had kept him in the game so far, but he did not deceive himself into believing that his luck would hold forever. No one had that guarantee, and least of all a fighting man who put himself in harm’s way constantly.

His greatest apprehension at the moment was that Paul Mei-Lun or Wasef Kamran might decide to stay at home, let their gorillas keep the date and see what came of it. If he missed one or both of them this night, he’d have to stick around New York until the job was done, giving his adversaries at the next stop more time to prepare themselves.

For all the good that it would do them.

Even with the news of his Manhattan blitz, they wouldn’t know with whom they were dealing.

They would not be prepared to meet the Executioner.

CHAPTER FIVE

Lighthouse Park, Roosevelt Island

“Remember, everyone,” Paul Mei-Lun said. “No shooting till we see the bag. It’s all for nothing if we go back empty-handed.”

The shooters riding with him in the Hummer H2 all nodded like a bunch of bobbleheads. In Mei-Lun’s hand, a walkie-talkie crackled and a voice came to him from the second vehicle, trailing behind his, with the other Wah Ching soldiers he’d selected for the showdown.

“Got it, boss.”

They were armed to the teeth and stopping for no one, including police. There could be no explaining the weapons they carried, and Mei-Lun knew he was running a risk with the Hummers. CNN had told him they were ticketed by traffic cops five times as often as most other vehicles, and Mei-Lun himself had enough citations to believe it.

But anyone who tried to flag them down this night, Mei-Lun vowed, was shit out of luck.

Truth be told, he was amped for a killing. The skag heist, the loss of four men in a week... It was all bearing down on him, making him look bad, stretching his nerves like piano wire. He needed an outlet, and whether they got back the suitcase or not, someone was bound to die on the island.

Mei-Lun could personally guarantee it.

Once they’d cleared the tunnel from Manhattan—always claustrophobic for him, though he tried to hide it—they got onto Main Street near the tram station and barreled northward, past the interchange for 36th Avenue and the Roosevelt Island Bridge to Queens, rolling on until Main Street turned into East Road. A giant hospital bulked up beside them on the left, and they slowed down, continuing along the narrow road that led out toward the lighthouse on the island’s northern headland.

Looking at a map before he’d left the Lucky Dragon, Mei-Lun thought that Roosevelt Island looked like a giant condom afloat in the river, right down to what Trojan ads called the “reservoir tip.” He’d started laughing, and his soldiers couldn’t understand it, but he hadn’t bothered to explain. Better if they believed that he was laughing in the face of death than spotting crazy shapes on a road map.

Mei-Lun double-checked the QBZ-95 assault rifle he’d chosen for their little safari. It was the latest thing from China, a bullpup design chambered for the 5.8 mm DBP87 cartridge. Smuggled from his homeland in bulk, the QBZ-95 was selective-fire, feeding from a 30-round box magazine with a cyclic rate of 650 rounds per minute in full-auto mode. The 5-grain full-metal-jacket rounds traveled at 2,900 feet per second and delivered 1,477 foot-pounds of energy on impact, their streamlined shape and steel core designed for increased range and penetration.

Not that he’d be needing any kind of long-range skills this night. The meeting ground, according to his phallic map, was no more than one hundred yards across, its only cover the arc of shade trees screening the hospital’s north-facing windows from the glare of the lighthouse. Their target, whoever he was, should be clearly visible and easy to kill when the time came.

As soon as he showed them the bag filled with sweet China white.

“We’re almost there,” his driver said, and Mei-Lun grunted in reply. He had already seen the lighthouse standing tall against the skyline, sweeping the dark water with its beam to help the barges find their way. The Hummer’s headlights weren’t much competition, but they showed Mei-Lun the sweep of grass where this night’s action would play out.

“We’re early,” someone muttered from the backseat.

“As intended,” Mei-Lun said.

Then he addressed his wheel man. “Stop here. Kill the lights.”

A moment later they were sitting in the near dark with the Hummer’s engine ticking. From the back, again, one of his soldiers said, “Nobody here.”

Mei-Lun palmed the walkie-talkie, giving it to all of them at once. “Get out and take your places. Anybody fires before I give the word, he’s dead.”

* * *

BOLAN TRACKED THE Hummers through his AN/PVS-10 nightscope until they parked and Wah Ching soldiers started climbing out, all clutching long guns. Bolan counted off a dozen targets armed with automatic rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, picked out Paul Mei-Lun among them, then went back to watching for the other team.

The triad boss had played it smart, coming an hour early to the meet and staking out his men to cover both approaches, east and west of Lighthouse Park. It was a sound move, sensible, maybe the best that he could manage without formal military training or a sniper’s long view toward the waiting game. He had the park well covered, but he obviously hadn’t given any thought to checking out the nearby hospital.

Too public and too risky. Now, too late.

Before he’d come out to the island, Bolan had detoured past a vacant lot off FDR Drive, near the Queensboro Bridge, and dumped the stolen heroin, torching it with a can of lighter fluid he’d picked up in transit. The smack was up in smoke, long gone, but still working to Bolan’s benefit, drawing his targets into rifle range.

And now he saw more headlights sweeping toward the park, coming along West Road. A Lincoln Town Car led the new arrivals, followed by a matched pair of Volkswagen Phaetons. They rolled past the hospital’s northwestern wing, slowing as they closed in on the park and the lighthouse beyond. The Lincoln coasted to a halt beyond the tree line, and the Phaetons followed suit.

He waited, watching through the nightscope while doors opened on the luxury sedans and more men bearing weapons stepped onto the pavement, fanning out in a defensive formation. Bolan had no trouble picking out Wasef Kamran, the Lincoln’s shotgun rider, carrying a Spectre M4 SMG. The men arrayed around him were all similarly armed, mostly with variations of the tried and true Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Bolan counted fifteen Afghans below him, giving them a three-man edge over the Wah Ching team. He saw lips moving, couldn’t tell what they were saying, but he registered surprise on Kamran’s face when Paul Mei-Lun stepped from the shadows to reveal himself.

A frozen moment passed, then Kamran shouted something to his rival, probably a question, possibly a challenge. Mei-Lun shouted something back and stood his ground, confusion written on his face and shifting into anger as he registered betrayal, trying to decide who was responsible.

Bolan focused his night sight on the soldier standing just to Wasef Kamran’s right, placing his crosshairs on the hardman’s dull face two hundred feet in front of him. The range was virtually point-blank for his M-110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System—easy pickings—as he sent 175 grains of sudden death hurtling downrange toward impact at 2,570 feet per second.

The target’s skull exploded, its mangled contents splashing Wasef Kamran’s face and thousand-dollar suit. Kamran recoiled, raising an arm too late to keep the muck out of his eyes and mouth, looking dazed as he shouted something to his other men.

It was the signal they’d been waiting for: to open fire and turn the quiet park into a little slice of hell on earth.

* * *

WASEF KAMRAN COULD NOT believe his eyes when Paul Mei-Lun stepped from the shadows, cradling some kind of spacey-looking weapon in his arms. The Afghan mobster felt his gut churn, knew damn well the stranger he’d arranged the meet with had not been Chinese—but had Mei-Lun arranged the call? It seemed impossible, since he had lost the heroin that afternoon.

“What are you doing here?” Kamran called across the dark expanse of grass.

After a split-second delay, Mei-Lun yelled back at him, “I’m here on business. Why are you here?”

Kamran was considering an answer when it happened. To his right, Amir Sadaty’s head burst open with a sodden ripping sound, as if someone had struck a melon with an ax. Its contents flew in all directions, warm blood spraying Kamran’s shoulder, face and hair. He lurched away before the man collapsed, his legs folding under him, and snapped an order at his other soldiers.

“Fire!”

Along the skirmish line, they all cut loose in unison, their muzzle-flashes lighting up the park. Kamran saw Mei-Lun go down but couldn’t tell if he was hit or merely seeking cover from the storm of bullets hurtling toward him. Kamran wiped the blood out of his right eye with a sleeve, then fired a short burst of his own toward where he’d last seen Mei-Lun standing.

And, of course, the Wah Ching leader had not come alone. In answer to the fire from Kamran’s men, at least a dozen guns were sniping at his party now, their slugs buzzing around him like a swarm of mosquitoes on steroids, all thirsty for blood. He saw another of his soldiers fall, clutching a hip and firing back one-handed as he dropped.

“Behind the cars!” Kamran cried out for those who weren’t already ducking under cover. “Everybody! Quickly!”

Bullets struck the Lincoln Town Car and the two Volkswagens, taking out their windows, hammering their doors and fenders with the noise of a demonic hailstorm. Kamran rolled across the Lincoln’s trunk and landed on his knees, cursing the pain that lanced through them from impact with the pavement.

What were the goddamned triad goons doing here? More to the point, where was his heroin?

Kamran pushed up into a crouch and waddled toward the front end of the Lincoln, where a couple of his men were trading shots with Mei-Lun’s soldiers. They would have to torch the cars when they were finished here, assuming they could even drive away, and file a theft report with the police. But first, they had to finish killing off the Wah Ching gunners who had pinned them down.

And all before someone inside the hospital summoned police.

Kamran had nearly reached his soldiers when the closer of them suddenly pitched over sideways, knocking down the soldier to his left. Kamran had seen the blood spurt from his throat, an inch or two below his right ear, nearly shearing off his head, and knew the angle was all wrong.

He pressed closer against the car, then turned back to face the hospital. The shot had come from that direction, somehow. From the trees or someplace higher up? With all the gunfire ringing in his ears, he could not single out a given shot, but it occurred to him that Mei-Lun had boxed them in to cut off their retreat.

Mei-Lun or someone else.

Once more, he heard the unknown caller’s mocking voice, directing him and giving orders, setting up the meet. A man with the audacity to kill six soldiers and escape with ten kilos of heroin, perhaps? Did that explain the Wah Ching presence at their rendezvous? Were both sides simply chessmen in his deadly game?

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