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“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 (#ulink_a30decb5-88d7-5d84-b276-dd8af9264ef3)
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
