Blood Tide Read online

  Bolan turned away. The exposure was too great. If he was going to go for the radio, he would have to kill all the guards. He didn’t have the time to stalk them individually, and if Bolan were running the operation he would keep the hidden island incommunicado.

  Bolan crept to the gate and disappeared into the night.

  He had a long swim ahead of him.

  18

  Bolan dragged himself out of the surf. He’d taken too long. The tides had turned during the late hours of the night and churned the strait between the two islands into a caldron. Swells had risen up around Bolan, enfolding him like a matador’s cape, and then fallen out from under him. He’d been forced to claw his way out of those sinkholes of the sea. The battle had sapped his energy, destroying his rhythm, and invariably his efforts took him off course. He’d spent one-third of the swim making corrections rather than forward progress. The mud he’d used for camouflage had sluiced off in the sea and had taken the insulating goat grease with it. Bolan was chilled to the bone and two hours behind schedule.

  Dawn was rising behind him.

  Bolan jogged around the island. The sun had not quite risen, so the village lay in a purple gloom. He reached the village as orange light began to spear across the tops of the trees. Bolan crept from fishing boat to fishing boat as he made for the hut.

  The village was coming awake. The roosters were crowing and strutting between the inland huts. In moments, the timer on the village boom box would go off and the Call to Prayer would echo in haunting song against the backdrop of the morning surf. All would come from their huts, unroll their prayer rugs and face Mecca.

  Jusuf, Raul, Chien and Pedoy came walking out of the trees.

  They were not looking his way, but it was a matter of split seconds and Bolan was naked and armed. The Executioner hurled his roll of clothing. The knife and pistol within gave the bundle weight, and it flew in a perfect spiral onto the porch of his hut.

  Bolan threw himself into the sea with a splash.

  He kicked outward underwater for a few moments. In his fatigue, he had forgotten to remove the compass tied around his neck. Bolan closed his hand around the brass compass and snapped the leather cord. He abandoned the piece to the sea and rose in the waist-high surf.

  Jusuf and the others had walked down to the beach to investigate the noise. They stared as Bolan shook water from his hair and beard.

  Bolan nodded at them wearily.

  Jusuf observed him critically. “You look tired.”

  Bolan looked up toward the hut and grinned. “I’m exhausted.”

  Pedoy and Raul laughed. Even Jusuf smirked. “You should go up and dress. It is almost time for morning prayer.”

  “Yes, Jusuf,” Bolan said and clambered up the ladder to his hut.

  “Suja will be back tonight. There are bets about whether there shall be anything left of you tomorrow,” Raul said, laughing.

  Bolan shook his head as the locker room jokes began to fly. He kicked his bundle into the hut and flopped down on the sleeping mat.

  “You’re late.” Mei rolled over and draped an arm across his chest. “How’re the lepers?”

  “They’ve got terminal radiation poisoning.”

  “Jesus…” Mei sat up. “Are you sure?”

  “They have every symptom.” Bolan shook his head as he thought about the dying wretches in the hut. “They’ve been exposed to radioactive material without proper shielding or decontamination procedures.”

  “How?”

  “By the way they were gurgling and coughing, I’d say they’d breathed radioactive dust into their lungs,” Bolan said.

  “Radioactive dust? I still don’t see how.”

  “My bet is they were handling reactor rods. I doubt they’d have the proper tools to open the rod casings, so they probably had to cut them open. Openly handling the rods would be lethal, but if the rods were spent they’d be shedding radioactive particles, as well, and shedding more as the casings were hacked open. Breathing in the dust sped up the process.”

  Mei grew very quiet. “You’re saying they were manufacturing dirty bombs.”

  “They were doing the grunt work,” Bolan said. “If you’re packing nuclear material among explosives, you want the rods out of their casings so they blast apart completely and the radioactive material spreads and can contaminate as wide an area as possible. But I bet those men had no idea what they were working with, and no one bothered to tell them.”

  “Martyrs to the cause,” Mei said.

  “Jihadists these days don’t seem to have many qualms about martyring people without their consent.”

  “But where? Where the hell did the Mahdi get nuclear reactor rods? I mean, his men are dangerous, but they’re yahoos, hopped up on hash and swinging machetes. If they had assaulted a nuclear facility, the whole world would know about it, and for that matter, I doubt they would have the connections to buy the stuff.”

  “Five miles across the strait, there’s twenty guys doing everything except glowing in the dark.” Bolan’s jaw set. “I have to get to a communication out.”

  “I’ve been over every inch of the camp in the last week doing women’s work. If there’s a radio, cell phone or computer in the village, I haven’t seen it.”

  “Jusuf has one,” Bolan said. “Either a radio or a cell phone he keeps on his person. I can’t swear to it, but I believe Chien Tien has a transmitter of some kind hidden on the island. The PRC wouldn’t send in infiltrators incommunicado. Not their style.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “If the Mahdi is building dirty bombs, then we’re running out of time.”

  “Yeah, and…?”

  “And I’m going to have to take either Jusuf’s or Chien’s com gear and get a message out.”

  “That should be interesting.”

  “Hitting Jusuf would raise too many questions.” Bolan unrolled his clothing and hid the Tokarev automatic pistol and the bayonet as he considered the task at hand. “Chien’s our best bet.”

  “You pulled that win over Yaqoob right out of your ass. What are you going to do to get over on Chien?”

  Bolan heard the sound of the call. “Pray.”

  BOLAN WATCHED CHIEN. The Executioner had finished his morning markmanship lesson. During the past week, he’d been training the Mahdi’s chosen men in ones and twos. Bolan lay in the hammock he’d strung in the shade beneath his hut. A wide straw hat was pulled down low over his eyes.

  From beneath the rim Bolan watched Chien’s every move in camp.

  Chien rose from where he was talking with Raul and began walking inland. Bolan rolled out of his hammock and took an oblique path through the village to follow. Chien walked between a pair of huts and disappeared. Bolan walked on unconcernedly to where Mei sat in a circle of women weaving and mending baskets. She smiled up at Bolan. Her eyes flicked toward the trees.

  Bolan moved inland.

  He followed the path that bisected the island. Bolan had spent some time in camp noting the pattern of Chien’s sandals. In the soft ground and patchy sand of the path, his tracks weren’t hard to discern. Bolan drew his pistol as he found the spot where Chien had diverged from the path and gone into the jungle.

  The Executioner began stalking his prey, following the footprints, occasional crushed plant or broken stem. At the same time, he looked for trip wires or obviously set telltales. One hundred yards in, he stopped and crouched at the fringe of a tiny clearing.

  Chien Tien squatted on his heels at the base of a palm tree. He had unearthed an aluminum case and appeared to be plugging it into the tree. Bolan looked closer and saw the squiggle of a line of dried sap running up the tree. The Executioner nodded. Someone would have to know exactly what they were looking for to recognize the line as the disguised antenna wire of a satellite link. Bolan suspected the dish was fixed facing the sky at the top of the tree among the fronds. He moved around behind Chien and silently emerged from the trees. Bolan didn’t speak Mandarin, but he
knew some phrases and he strung together a sentence with a decent accent.

  “Good morning, Officer Tien.”

  Chien’s shoulders hunched in surprise. Bolan spoke in English. “Stand up, slowly.” Chien slowly stood and turned with his hands up.

  “You?” He looked at Bolan in genuine surprise.

  “Lose the blade.” The Tokarev automatic pistol had no safety, and the hammer was already cocked. Chien looked down the muzzle a moment. He very slowly drew the heavy Chinese dagger from his sash with two fingers and tossed it into the bushes.

  “And the gun.”

  Chien didn’t bother to protest. Again with two fingers, he reached into his tunic and withdrew a small automatic pistol whose barrel was shrouded with a sound suppressor. He tossed the pistol in the sand by Bolan’s toes, then kept his hands raised.

  “I need your transmitter,” Bolan said bluntly.

  “You killed Yaqoob,” Chien said.

  “I offered to cooperate with him. He said he had orders to kill anyone who discovered him.”

  Bolan swiftly gave Chien the bare bones of the encounter, not omitting Yaqoob’s offer of bamboo shoots being rammed in personal places. Chien nodded. “I do not doubt your story, and under normal circumstances my orders would be the same.”

  Bolan’s pistol never wavered. “Normal circumstances?”

  “Yaqoob is dead. We suspect something much bigger than piracy is going on. I have befriended Jusuf to a degree and like you have been put in positions of responsibility, but neither he nor the Mahdi have revealed their secret to me. I am working alone now. It will take time for my government to insert another agent, and I fear time is running out.”

  Bolan eyed Chien warily. “You’d be willing to cooperate?”

  “Perhaps, conditionally.” The Chinese agent looked grim. “Do you know what is going on?”

  The Executioner decided to gamble. “The Mahdi is making dirty bombs.”

  He told Chien the story of his late-night swim and the radiation victims he found at the leper colony.

  The Chinese agent’s eyes slowly widened. “This is worse than we had feared.”

  “If we’re going to trust each other—” Bolan made a small, meaningful gesture with his pistol “—you’re going to have to give me something back. What do you know?”

  “It is what I suspect.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A month ago, my country lost a freighter in the Malacca Strait. The ship was en route to Pakistan. The cargo manifest said that the freighter was carrying engine and airframe parts for fighter jets the Pakistanis buy from my country.”

  Bolan’s own worst fears were being realized. “But it was loaded with reactor rods for the Pakistani nuclear reactor program.”

  “The rods were uranium 235,” Chien confirmed. “Weapons grade.”

  Bolan frowned. “The Mahdi wouldn’t have the technological wherewithal to make a thermonuclear weapon, but with a boatload of uranium rods and enough high explosive, he could reduce sections of major cities into irradiated ghost towns and leave ten of thousands of people to die the same way the hapless men across the strait are dying.”

  “As you can understand, this could quite possibly be a source of great embarrassment to my government,” Chien responded. “The freighter was lost near the mouth of the Andaman Sea off of the Dreadnought Bank. Naturally, we sent a submarine to investigate, and it confirmed the hulk of the freighter was at the bottom of the sea. It was also highly radioactive and sunk nearly fourteen hundred feet below the surface. Salvage was deemed unfeasible, and letting it become public knowledge was politically unacceptable. The hulk was left to lay until a time it could be disposed of properly.”

  Bolan continued for him. “Only the ship didn’t sink. It was taken by the Mahdi’s pirates. They realized what they had and knew your government would come gunning for whoever had stolen it. So they unloaded most of the reactor rods, leaving a few broken containers for the Geiger counters to detect and scuttled the freighter. Your government keeps it quiet out of self interest, and the Mahdi gets his cleansing fire.”

  “Rustam Megawatti had ties to my government,” Chien said. “He was getting unwelcome competition. My original mission was to infiltrate the Mahdi’s organization, determine if it had ties to Islamic Jihad, and then vector in strikes to destroy them.” Chien shook his head unhappily. “However, given what you have told me, my mission is now much more urgent.”

  “I need to use your transmitter,” Bolan repeated.

  “I am prepared to negotiate.”

  “No negotiation.” Bolan put his front sight on the Chinese agent’s chest. “I’m using it, right now. Get out of the way.”

  Chien tensed and then made a visible effort to relax. “Very well. I cannot stop you, but I beg of you. When you are done, let me contact my government.”

  Bolan considered the deal.

  Chien spread his hands imploringly. “If you do this, then I will cooperate with you. Jusuf still does not trust you, but I have his ear. Neither of us knows where the Mahdi is or the location of the uranium. I believe it is most likely the Mahdi will load the uranium into boats filled with explosives and sail them into major Pacific ports. He has enough uranium to strike multiple targets and has undoubtedly kept many of the boats and ships his pirates have taken. It may take coordinated, multinational military action to locate and seize his weapons before he can sail them into their targets and detonate them.”

  Bolan kept his pistol on Chien. “You get one phone call after I make mine. Everything after that we play by ear.”

  “Agreed. You will need the codes to access the scrambler.”

  Bolan nodded. “Show me.”

  Chien bent toward the transmitter unit and suddenly snapped his wrist back at Bolan, who jerked his head aside. He felt the burn as glittering coins flew past his face, one of them slicing open his cheek. They were Razor Coins, one of the secret “sleeve weapons” of Chinese kung fu. They were a surprise weapon, not so much lethal but designed to take an opponent off balance.

  They worked like a charm, and Chien was fast. Incredibly fast.

  Chien’s foot blurred into a kick. There was no cocking of the knee or setup. The kick just ripped straight-legged upward in one of Shaolin kung fu’s “shadowless kicks.” It was a technique that took years to master. Only Bolan’s own battle-honed reflexes made him snap his head aside and prevented his jaw from being shattered. He still staggered and saw stars as Chien’s foot clouted him on the side of the head. In the same heartbeat, Chien’s hand chopped into Bolan’s forearm before he could pull the trigger. The Executioner’s hand spasmed open as his ulnar nerve was crushed and the force of the blow slapped the pistol from his grip. Chien’s forearm uppercutted beneath Bolan’s jaw in a forearm shiver that lifted the Executioner onto his toes.

  Fingers sank into the pressure points of Bolan’s already traumatized forearm like an iron claw. Chien’s thumb thrust pulverizingly into the inside of the Executioner’s elbow, and lightning shot along the nerves from his shoulder to his fingertips. Chien spun and knelt, and Bolan was inexorably drawn with him like the last man out in a game of crack-the-whip.

  The Executioner’s feet left the ground as he was thrown.

  Chien did not release him to go flying into the trees. He retained Bolan’s arm in his brutal hold. The big American made no move to resist. It would only serve to get his arm broken or dislocated when he hit. Instead he relaxed and went with the throw. He cartwheeled through the air over Chien’s shoulder. The breath blasted out of Bolan’s body as he slammed into the sand with bone-jarring force. Nevertheless, he’d managed to draw the AK-47 bayonet from behind his back before he hit.

  Chien’s free hand opened into a double-spearhand strike aimed at Bolan’s eyes.

  Bolan thrust the bayonet up defensively and the clip-point blade punched through Chien’s palm and diverted the blow. Blood blossomed in a spray as the soldier ripped the knife free. Chien’s iron grip on his other
arm loosened, and Bolan attacked, slashing Chien’s forearm open to the bone.

  The enemy agent released his grip.

  Bolan slashed at Chien’s throat, but he was on his back and slashing backward. Chien jerked back and took a shallow cut across his chest. Bolan hooked his blade behind his adversary’s knee to hamstring him.

  Chien back-flipped clear of the blow.

  Bolan heaved himself to his feet. He held his blade low before him in a knife-fighter’s crouch.

  Chien ignored Bolan and examined his injuries. He flexed his impaled left hand and grunted as it obeyed and made a fist. He wiggled the fingers of his right. The cut on his forearm was deep and bleeding, but no nerves had been cut. The Chinese agent’s arms bent and his hands curled into claws as he dropped into a classic Praying Mantis fighting stance.

  Bolan locked eyes with the agent over the point of his bayonet. “What the hell, Chien?”

  “The Mahdi shall have his cleansing fire.” Chien’s eyes blazed. “The Infidel shall be struck down. As shall you be.”

  Bolan looked into Chien’s eyes and saw the fervor of the juramentado shining. Bolan’s stomach sank. There would be no negotiation. Chien had infiltrated the Mahdi’s movement, and he had gone native.

  Chien was a double agent for the Mahdi.

  “You were feeding Yaqoob false information, keeping him alive to keep track of PRC movements.” Bolan stalled for time to let Chien bleed. “You’re sending false reports to Beijing.”

  “Yaqoob was a traitor to the faith and paid for it, struck down by an unbeliever. The old men in Beijing shall be made to pay for what they have done to the faithful in the western provinces.” A horrible smile crossed Chien’s face. “Hong Kong shall be their forfeit.”

  Bolan knew Hong Kong, one of the major financial and manufacturing centers of the planet, had nearly seven million people crammed into the city proper.

  One couldn’t ask for a better target for a dirty bomb.

  “But first, Sydney, Honolulu, San Francisco…” The smile of the true believer shone on Chien’s face. “And you, Makeen.”

  Bolan backed up as Chien advanced on him. His right arm hung useless at his side. It would take long precious seconds before Chien lost enough blood to affect his fighting ability, and in that time the Chinese agent could do serious damage. Bolan shifted his grip on his bayonet slightly. A knife throw was a fool’s gambit. Worse still for Bolan was a left-handed throw.