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The pirates were not acting like pirates. They weren’t cutting their losses and running. They were coming on like feudal Japanese samurai bent on death before dishonor. In the light of the flare, Bolan could make out the fins of sharks churning the dark waters of the lagoon as they feasted upon the dozens of fallen.
Mei knelt before the hatch, half-gagging from the gas as she rammed a fresh magazine into her carbine with streaming, swollen eyes. She held her trigger on full-auto as she swept the pirates off the port side of the deck. Clellande’s weapon snarled in continuous fire as he put thirty rounds into a canoe full of steel-wielding cutthroats.
A pirate erupted out of the water at the bow and heaved himself up into the forward pulpit. Metal flashed and red fiber fluttered from the end as he threw a piece of glittering steel. Bolan and Clelland swung around, their weapons hammering the pirate in ruptured ruins to the black water below.
Bolan dropped to one knee. He struggled to bark out an order through the gas sizzling in his chest. “Hold your fire!”
Mei and Clellande knelt with their weapons ready.
“Scott! Anything off the bow?”
The man hacked and coughed. “Nothing moving! All targets down!”
“Marcie! Port?”
“No…hostiles all down,” she replied, struggling for air.
Bolan scanned to starboard and astern. Nothing moved. He rose to take in the bigger picture as the second flare drifted low toward the water. The wind was dispersing the gas. The yacht was littered with bodies from stem to stern. Head shots at point-blank range were not pretty business. Neither was buckshot raking canoes out of 40 mm tubes. The canoes drifted dead in the water. None of the occupants moved.
Bolan reloaded his pistols. “Marcie, secure the prisoner and get him below before he chokes to death. Scott, let’s clean up the deck and call for extraction. We keep two bodies for forensics, the rest go over the side.”
“Affirmative, Striker, I…” the big man stumbled slightly.
Bolan moved toward the bow. “Scott?”
“Nothing, just a scratch.” Clellande plucked a tuft of red fiber at the collar of his armored vest. “What the hell?”
Clellande went rigid as blood geysered between his fingers. “Jesus!”
Bolan lunged. “Leave it in!”
Clellande was already going into shock, and his first instinct was to get the intruding metal out of his neck. The shard fell to the deck with a clatter as Clellande fell facefirst onto the roof of the cabin.
“I need immediate medevac!” Bolan roared into his radio. “The big man is down!”
“Affirmative, Striker!” Price came back. “Choppers inbound.”
Boland rolled Clellande over. Blood was pouring out of him like a river that had jumped its banks. The soldier applied pressure to the wound. He grimaced as his fingers sank through the gruesome, multiple channels the blade had dug into him. “Marcie! Field dressing!”
“Scott!” Mei raced to help.
Bolan grimly applied pressure while she ripped open a field dressing. Bolan pressed the dressing into the wound, and it instantly bled through. He pressed down as Mei ripped open another. The dressing bled through again. “Give me another!”
“Scott!” Mei screamed as she ripped open another dressing. “Scott!”
Bolan sat back on his heels. Escotto Clellande was gone.
The Executioner stared at the deadly gleaming weapon on the deck. It was a strangely shaped piece of razor-sharp steel. It resembled a hawthorn leaf save that it was six inches long, slitted and had a tail of red fiber to stabilize it in flight.
It was about the ugliest implement the Executioner had ever seen.
He pressed his thumb into his throat mike. “Control, be advised the big man is KIA. Tell command we have a prisoner.” He shook his head bitterly. “We are ready for extraction.”
2
Manila Station, Philippines
Aaron Kurtzman’s face stared unhappily at Bolan from the computer monitor connected to the satellite link. He forced a smile. “You did real good, Striker. In the two months we figure these guys have been operating, no one who’s laid eyes on them has lived to tell about it. You took out a platoon of them and brought in a boatload of useful evidence.”
Bolan frowned. A good man had gone down. “Yeah.”
“You took a prisoner,” Kurtzman said. “That’s the biggest break we’ve had since the Farm got involved in this.”
Bolan considered the fight on the yacht and his young opponent. “I need more wattage.”
“What?”
“I juiced that kid for two and a half seconds before he ripped out the probes, Bear.” Bolan glanced at the weapon system on the table. “And that was after at least a full fifteen seconds of exposure to military strength CS.”
Kurtzman blinked. “Really?”
“I had to brain him like an ox to bring him down.” Bolan shrugged at the X26 slaved to the side of his carbine. “I need more wattage.”
“I find that hard to believe, Striker. The X26 is the latest in EMD technology. With the old M26, each of its eighteen pulses per second had to break through the resistance of the subject’s clothing and skin. Every jolt had to push its way in.” Kurtzman warmed up as the talk turned technical. “Now, the X26? It’s a brilliant piece of engineering. Rather than every pulse having to batter its way into the subject, it uses part of its charge to maintain the electrical opening. Holding the door open, so to speak. That lets nearly every single one of its pulses hit at full strength. It’s been tested on SWAT officers, Special Forces operators and trained martial artists. They all go down. You sure you had a good connection?”
“The kid was sixteen, half-naked, took both probes in the chest and he was still salty,” Bolan replied.
“Well, blood tests on the prisoner tested positive for some very powerful hashish, but even if he was high on PCP, the—”
“He was high on God, Bear.”
Kurtzman’s brow furrowed thoughtfully.
“Take two professional wrestlers,” Bolan suggested. “Lock them in a cell, and toss in the key. One’s high on drugs. One’s high on God. You tell me. Who’s walking out?”
Kurtzman answered immediately. The team from Stony Man Farm had dealt with fanatics before. “I’m betting on the guy with God on his side.”
“Right.” Bolan looked at Kurtzman pointedly. “And punky and his pals were high on both.”
Kurtzman conceded with a sigh. “I’ll tell the Cowboy you want more wattage.”
“Thank you.” Bolan considered his young opponent. “What information do we have on the prisoner?”
“We caught some luck there. Most of the bodies were unidentifiable, but your POW’s fingerprints were on file with the Philippine National Police. The young man’s name is Ali Mohammed Apilado, formerly Arturo Florio Apilado.”
Bolan raised an eyebrow. “He converted?”
“That’s right. Arturo was born on the southern island of Mindanao, but his parents were Christians. They were migrant field workers who moved to the city to get factory work in the textile mills. From the ages of twelve to fifteen, Arturo was involved in petty crime on the street. He was arrested for theft and assault and spent a year in jail. While he was inside, he converted to Islam and changed his name. When he was released, he disappeared without a trace. No one had seen him until he turned up on your yacht last night collecting for the Red Cross.”
“Interesting.”
Kurtzman snorted. “How so?”
An idea began forming in Bolan’s mind. Religious fanatics born and raised were bad enough. Converted fanatics were worse. The born again of all religions hurled themselves into their new purpose with utter devotion, whatever that purpose might be.
Including slaughtering innocents with suicidal abandon.
Bolan nodded as his thoughts continued. The flip side of that coin was that the converted, unlike those raised in their religions, were often just as susceptible to deprogramming.
The Bear watched the wheels turn behind Bolan’s eyes. “What are you thinking?”
“Where’s Arturo now?”
“Philippine Military Intelligence has him about two blocks from your position. They play rough, Striker. I don’t envy him. I suspect the beatings started this morning and haven’t stopped.”
“The kid’s tough.”
Kurtzman’s eyes narrowed. “Somehow I see the good cop-bad cop routine shaping up nicely.”
“Yeah, but I’m still a blue-eyed devil, and I need more than a successful interrogation.”
“What are you saying, Striker?”
“I’m saying someone needs to have a ‘Come to Jesus’ with that boy.”
Kurtzman snorted. “You mean a ‘Come to Mohammed,’ but I can have the CIA fly in a psychological warfare team from Langley and—”
Bolan cut in. “Send me Pol.”
Orani
THE SUN WAS SETTING behind Bolan and Marcie Mei. The restaurant was made up of four bamboo poles with a thatched roof. The kitchen consisted of three converted fuel drums that were sending barbecue smoke to the sky. The dining area was the beach. The couple sat outside at a table with the tide lapping at their bare feet and the legs of their table and chairs. They drank beer and ate spareribs smothered in ginger-plum sauce as the lights of Manila began winking on like stars across Manila Bay.
Bolan took a long pull on his San Miguel. Marcie gnawed on the bones of her meal as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. Her irrepressible smile flashed around the rib. “High metabolism.”
Bolan smiled. Marcie’s tiny frame was clad in a sarong and a bikini top. Plum sauce smeared her chin. She looked good enough to eat, bones and all.
Mei read Bolan’s look and her smile threatened to reach her ears.
Bolan took another swig, acknowledging that the chemistry was occurring, but kept his mind on business. “What have you found out on your end?”
For once, Mei actually stopped smiling. “Nothing good. You noticed that when those guys thought they had us with our pants down they laid their guns aside and went with the cleavers?”
“Yeah, I noticed that.”
Mei wiped her hands and stared at them reflectively. “I’m Catholic, myself, but I’ve had to impersonate a Muslim many times in the field. I’ve read the Koran. I know it pretty well.”
“And?”
“The Prophet Mohammed makes many exhortations to his followers. One goes, ‘Oh, True Believers, wage war against such of the infidels as are near you.’”
Bolan nodded. “I’ve heard it.”
“I’m sure, but that one was heard a lot in the preceding centuries here in the Philippines. Usually right alongside this one. ‘When ye encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads until ye have made a great slaughter among them.’”
Bolan sighed. It sounded a lot like what was happening in the Asian shipping lanes, and he’d been thinking along the same lines, himself. “You’re talking about the juramentado.”
Mei nodded.
Bolan had done some research of his own. By some accounts ‘running juramentado’ had begun on the Philippine Island of Jolo during Spanish occupation in the 1800s. It was a religious rite among the Philippine Muslims, bound with the act of waging jihad, or Holy War, against the Christian invaders. Young Moro men would seek permission from the Sultan to run juramentado and swear oaths upon the Koran. They would then whip themselves into religious frenzy and attack Christians, singly or in groups, with bladed weapons. They fought with absolute disregard for death, killing until they, themselves, were killed. They believed with total conviction that their bravery and sacrifice would win them great renown and reward in the afterlife, with the added benefit that every Christian they killed followed them to Paradise as their personal slave.
The Moros had used the act of running juramentado against the Spanish colonizers, the American occupiers and the Japanese invaders throughout the region.
“You think these guys fit the bill?” Bolan asked.
“If they weren’t running juramentado, they were sure as hell running a damn close copy. The white turbans are a historical match, and they’d all shaved their bodies and cut their hair short. That was supposed to make them appear more pleasing to God.” Mei held up a file. “What’s most interesting was the physical prep work.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was hard to notice while we were fighting and breathing our own CS, but each of the pirates was wearing a tight waist-supporting band, like a weightlifter’s belt, and had woven hemp cords tied around their elbows and knees. The CIA forensics team believes the waistband would obviously help someone who’d been wounded in the torso to keep fighting. The arm and leg bindings they’re not so sure about, call it acupressure or something. Every one of them had also tightly bound their genitals with cords. That raised some eyebrows, but you and I saw the effect the other night. If we didn’t blow out their hearts or blow off their heads, those guys kept coming. You add hash and fanatical conviction…” Mei trailed off grimly.
“Any other religious corroboration?”
“They were all wearing religious charms that supposedly ward off the blows of the enemy.”
Bolan leaned back in his chair and let the water trickle around his feet. “So they’re textbook juramentado.”
“Well, technically speaking, you run juramentado, it’s an activity, not a person. In the Moro dialect, what they actually call themselves is mag-sabils.”
Bolan almost didn’t want to know. “Which means?”
“Those Who Endure the Pangs of Death.”
“Swell.” Bolan finished his beer. “I can buy a revivalist juramentado movement here in the Sulu Archipelago. It’s where the pastime was founded, but we’ve had similar attacks from New Guinea to the west coast of Thailand.”
“That is disturbing,” Mei agreed.
“What about your contacts in Philippine Intelligence?”
“They haven’t found much. Whatever this movement is, it’s highly secretive. It’s hard to get operatives into the Muslim movements. Trust me, I’ve done it, and it isn’t easy. Most of the power and wealth in the Philippines is concentrated in the hands of the Catholic majority in the big cities of the north. The Muslims tend to be rural, and most live in the southern islands.
Philippine Military Intelligence was built on the U.S. model, but the Philippine military was still based on patronage and loyalty to individual generals, and most of its assets were in the north. The military was clannish, and interservice cooperation was dismal, at best. For the most part, intelligence gathering consisted almost entirely of bribing informants or sending special operations commandos to shoot up suspicious villages and torture suspects. Neither tactic was ideal against fanatic terror cells.
Bolan stared out across the bay. “I need to get inside.”
Mei rested her chin in her hands. “That, Blue-eyes, is something I’d like to see.”
Bolan had to admit to himself it would be a challenge. “So we have nothing else on this end?”
