Devil's Horn Page 6

  Dear Jesus, Tremain gasped. Kam Chek's harsh laughter rang through his head as his vision swam, and blackness engulfed him. He felt mud, cold and slimy, against his face where he fell. He puked his guts out.

  My God, he cried inside in silence. What madness is this?

  They had been eating human flesh.

  For an entire month.

  Then horror was temporarily obliterated as Mike Tremain passed out.

  7

  Bolan was interrogating his handle, and he didn't like what he was hearing. Already Brennan had given him plenty of food for grim thought.

  After stops for refueling Skyhunter at a designated CIA-Mossad base outside Tel Aviv, and again at Calcutta, Bolan and Grimaldi were closing in on their objective, now having traveled more than halfway around the world since leaving New Jersey some twenty-five hours earlier. During this long flight, Bolan had pried the necessary information out of Brennan, had mentally outlined his plan of attack and had gauged his chances against the opposition.

  It was going to be a shaky crapshoot, he knew. A black-dice affair.

  Even though Brennan wasn't feeling like such a top dog anymore, the punk was still capable of gloating about the doomsday net his captors were flying into.

  "If you know anything about Auschwitz or Dachau and you don't want to end up in that kind of shit, you'd be smart to head home while you still can," the druglord taunted. "But you're a freakin' Pole, Bolan. And everybody knows you people ain't too bright."

  Bolan looked at this germ with ice in his eyes. A lesser man, he knew, might have felt the sting of Brennan's insults. A lesser man might have become enraged, stepped all over this creep like the worm he was. But a good thrashing, Bolan suspected, was probably just what Brennan wanted. It would make the guy feel like a martyr, sure. And that was a privilege Bolan would deny him to the last breath.

  As the drug czar ranted on about the dire fate awaiting his captors, Bolan pretended to ignore him. Bolan was busy, anyway, checking his armament, preparing himself for the death hunt that lay ahead. The M-60, cleaned and oiled, was now belted. The Executioner's dark green jungle fatigues were webbed and fitted with six frag grenades, garrote, commando knife, and the ever-present and formidable Beretta 93-R and .44 AutoMag. Little Lightning, filled with a 32-round clip, rested on the bench beside Bolan. In the lightweight aluminum weapons crate were two M-16 assault rifles fitted with M-203 grenade launchers and bayonets, an Uzi SMG, an MM-1 multiround projectile launcher and a LAWs rocket. After the final weapons inspection, Bolan began stuffing two rucksacks with the supplies the three of them would need for their journey to the Devil's Horn death camp once they hit the Thailand landing zone.

  "This ain't no ordinary Southeast Asian hellhole," Brennan rasped. He was seated on a bench opposite Bolan, wiggling his tightly roped hands in a vain attempt to get the blood circulating through his wrists and arms. "When I told ya it was a death camp that wasn't no lie. Ya listenin' to me, Polack?"

  "I hear you. And I'll tell you this — you get cute when we land, you'll end up rotting in the jungle. You'll be maggot food. I hope you're hearing that, loud and clear... maggot."

  Brennan snorted. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

  "I won't."

  Brennan spit on the floor, his false pride suddenly bringing out the savage in him. "You ain't so tough, Bolan. Sure, you might've busted up some of my people back in New York, but they were punks and nothing else."

  "Cut from the same garbage bag as you were?"

  "Huh? What do you think you're gonna do anyway? March right into that camp and start blowin' heads off? Shit. You rattled a few cages back home, but you're stepping onto a whole new turf now. That camp is like a fortress."

  "Every wall has its base."

  "Yeah, well, this friggin' wall's gonna come crumblin' down on your fat head! You're lookin' to take on sixty, maybe seventy guns, smart guy, maybe hundreds. Khmer Rouge. Pathet Lao. Warlords who have shaved more ass in a month than you'd ever bag on a hundred killing fields. I've seen this place, wise-ass. Your friggin' rep won't mean fuck-all to them."

  "Tell me about the CIA's involvement."

  Bolan looked Brennan dead in the eye now. The punk had mentioned CIA before, but Bolan hadn't pressed the issue then.

  "Hell, you're the big Vietnam hero, you should know that scene. The spooks all had their hands in the black market heroin during that losing cause. I guess they figured if they couldn't fight the gooks and lop a few heads, they might as well get what they could out of that action."

  "Speculation."

  "Speculation, bull! Who do you think set up the Devil's Horn? A bunch of three-piece suits out of Chicago? Smarten up, Bolan. Even the guys who are supposed to wear the white hats are dirty. You ain't in fantasyland anymore, ya jerk."

  Bolan cocked a graveyard smile at Brennan. That renegade CIA operatives were involved in the Devil's Horn came as no surprise to the Executioner. Brognola had already briefed him that errant Company operatives were at the head of the Hydra, outlaw agents who had been suspected of peddling black market heroin during the Vietnam war. It wouldn't be the first time, he knew, that he'd come up against soldiers who'd jumped the fence to land in the dungheap on the other side.

  "That only means they aren't wearing white hats anymore, doesn't it?" Bolan cryptically replied.

  Brennan shook his head. "Y'know, I just don't understand guys like you. You got guts, some savvy, some muscle. You got some things going for you, and what do you do? You piss it all away for some ideal that's been dead since the age of chivalry."

  "You could never understand it in a million lifetimes, punk. But I understand you. And that's enough."

  "You're a dead man, Bolan," Brennan snarled. "Don't that mean anything to you? You're fighting a losing cause for some extinct half-baked notion. This is the eighties, pal, and people want the good life. They wanna live and they wanna live it up. Hear me? You ain't normal. You're a bloody, twisted-up abortion, asshole! And if you go up against the Horn, I'll be right there, pal, dancing all over your corpse. You listenin'?" he screamed.

  Bolan was listening, all right, but he wasn't about to give this human virus the time of day. No, the punk was right about one thing — he wasn't normal. Bolan often reflected on his life, on his War Everlasting, and had concluded that he was every bit the antithesis of normal. But what was a man, after all, if he did nothing except stand by and watch the world around him degenerate, crumble in the ashes of moral decay? Sure, it was easy, he thought, too damn easy to go along with the flow of the party crowd in life. Walk away from trouble. Turn your head and pretend your neighbor isn't suffering when the fight has broken his back, when he's too weak-willed to stand up and tackle the problems of life that every man, everywhere, has to face.

  In Bolan's mind, Brennan wasn't tough, or smart, or even safe in the world he'd created. The guy was dumb. The guy was weak. His sales pitch was to offer the troubled, the weak-willed, the indifferent, the disillusioned a line of coke. Take this, babe, and your troubles will be over. Bull. When a guy stopped fighting, when a guy gave in and let his weakness control him completely, then from there it was all just a downhill slide over the jagged edge of the devil's razor.

  Men are not born equal, Bolan believed, but they make themselves equal, or better, or worse, by what they do. By what they give. By what they take. He didn't expect a taker, a cannibal like Ronny Brennan, to understand that, and he wasn't about to explain it. The punk would just look at him as if he was some snot-nosed, mealymouthed TV preacher. In the end, a man was convincing only through his actions. Talk was cheap, damn right, and there were plenty of guys with diarrhea of the mouth.

  "Striker."

  Bolan turned his attention toward the cockpit. There was urgency in Grimaldi's voice. Alarm bells started to go off in Bolan's head. They were now deep in enemy territory, according to the coordinates Brennan had given them.

  Combat instincts alerted, the Executioner moved into the cockpit. Four thousand feet
below Skyhunter, the jungles of Thailand stretched out before them like an endless rolling green carpet. The sun had cleared the delta plain to the east, was warming up for the intense heat it would blaze down within hours over the ancient kingdom of Siam.

  Bolan took a seat next to Grimaldi. "What do you have?"

  "A situation, maybe. A flashpoint, definitely. Take a look at the radar screen."

  Flashpoint, Bolan knew, meant that radar was picking up a large number of bodies and vehicles. Bolan looked at the screen, which was lighting up like the Fourth of July. Trouble.

  "What's going on there?"

  "Lock on, Striker, I'll take her down for a look."

  Bolan manned the two gunsticks as Grimaldi plowed Skyhunter through a low cloud bank and angled the warbird's nose down. Within seconds Grimaldi cut the altitude to a thousand feet. Hard-eyed, combat senses on full alert, Bolan stared through the bullet-proof Plexiglas. Ahead, the delta plain petered out into a sprawling rice field.

  Then they saw it. A firebase.

  The compound was a whirlpool of frenzied activity, as the enemy scrambled into position. Soldiers were hopping over sandbags to man the big guns. Still more soldiers poured out of Quonset huts, fanning out in all directions, seeking cover behind walls of drums or securing deeper cover in the outlying bush of the jungle.

  Bolan sized up the enemy. He could tell they weren't regular Thai infantry. Thai military uniforms were patterned after those of the United States military, and lower-ranking enlisted personnel wore uniforms resembling those worn by their French counterparts. But the soldiers at this outpost were wearing the dark green jungle fatigues of Khmer Rouge and Pathet Lao guerrillas.

  The outpost had done everything but raise the hammer-and-sickle flag, Bolan thought.

  "Looks like we've found something," Grimaldi said, tight-lipped. "What do you want to do?"

  "Fly over once. If we draw fire, bank her and come back for the knockout punch."

  "Roger."

  Then, as Skyhunter shrieked over the compound, Bolan saw the multibarreled cannons open up. Smoke and fire flashed from the ground, melding into a twisted maze of belching flames. Thunder clapped above Skyhunter, time-delayed shrapnel bombs blazing into a giant boiling ball of firelead at ten o'clock one hundred yards above the cockpit. Bolan made a quick survey of the enemy numbers below as Skyhunter streaked past the danger zone and soared toward the jungle tree line. He figured about sixty guys with automatic weapons were opening fire on the warbird. So large a force at an outpost, Bolan reasoned, meant they had something important to protect.

  The peal of the big guns boomed behind Skyhunter. The warbird shuddered from the rolling concussive blasts.

  "What the fuck's goin' on up there, for Chrissakes?" Brennan screamed.

  Bolan and Grimaldi ignored Brennan.

  Grimaldi sent Skyhunter into a bank, rolling her over, heading back to the enemy garrison. "This is war," the ace pilot growled, his voice trembling slightly from fear and excitement.

  The Executioner and his longtime comrade opened fire on the garrison at two thousand yards. Grimaldi plunged Skyhunter nose down into a steep dive, frag shells peppering the air far above the shrieking plane. The warbird raced toward the doomsday numbers, miniguns blazing, rocket pods belching deadly payloads. Bolan knew that this almost ground-level strafe was the safest possible attack run. Grimaldi brought the warbird out of its dive, searing over the enemy at three hundred knots. It would take a mighty lucky hit to knock Skyhunter out of action, Bolan knew, but luck is a tricky bitch. The fortunes of war favor no man.

  Skyhunter's first strafe pounded the garrison with hellfire and a wall of lead that swept over the enemy like a tidal wave. Though the scene blurred below Bolan, he managed to see some of the devastation. Bodies jigged, like dancing bloody sieves, corkscrewed to the ground. Explosions uprooted thatched huts with jagged flaming tongues. Crushed debris seemed to float on a sea of flame for a split second, before gushing skyward in one roiling volcanic spray. One 2.75-inch rocket pulverized a deuce-and-a-half truck, warped wreckage scissoring through limbs like a chainsaw through balsa wood.

  "Let's take it all out," Bolan ordered. "It looks like an outpost, and I don't want our friends upriver alerted by a quick radio SOS."

  "You're the captain," Grimaldi answered, pulling back on the stick, painting an azure sky across the Plexiglas as Skyhunter shot up toward the heavens.

  Then, within seconds, the warbird was back on its kill course. Bolan could see racing flames lapping up another transport truck, then the fire wall ripped apart the deuce-and-a-half. Chaos had gripped the enemy garrison. Bodies were strewed across the compound and some guys were running pell-mell for the jungle, having come to the realization that the battle was about to be lost to the airborne attacker.

  Despite the flight of some of the troops, the big enemy guns were still chugging out the heavy firepower. In response, Grimaldi, who was aware of the fickle nature of Lady Luck, launched a TOW missile. A millisecond later, one firebase was vaporized, mangled corpses cartwheeling away from one of the two sandbagged arenas.

  Thunder then cannoned dangerously close to Skyhunter's cockpit. As the cabin shimmied and shook, Bolan and Grimaldi triggered their gunsticks. Typhoons of 7.62 mm lead blew over the fleeing soldiers. Long lines of coughing dirt were laid down throughout that shattered enemy retreat, the heavy slugs stitching up backs, punching open skulls, cutting legs out from beneath the running men.

  Then fate took a hand to alter the apparently inevitable outcome of the firefight. Relentless shelling from the remaining multibarreled cannon on the ground struck paydirt.

  Along with a tremendous peal of thunder, a sudden explosive shock jarred Skyhunter, almost toppling Bolan and Grimaldi from their seats.

  Grimaldi cursed, fighting the control stick, which was pulling to the right. The warbird, too, dipped to the right and threatened to roll over.

  "They hit the right aileron!" Grimaldi shouted. "We're going down!"

  Skyhunter shot away from the clouds of smoke and fire on both sides, the sound of rolling thunder trailing after it. As Grimaldi struggled with the controls, the plane cleared the line of trees. The control panel began to beep its danger signals.

  "The engine's running hot, Striker!" Grimaldi cried. "We're going to stall out! We're going down!"

  The rice paddy rushed up to meet the cockpit.

  8

  "Strap yourself in, Mack. We're making an unscheduled landing." Grimaldi chuckled grimly.

  Bolan didn't have to be told to buckle up, hell no. The warbird's engines had stalled. Grimaldi was fighting the sluggishly bucking push stick in a desperate attempt to keep the tail rudder straight.

  "You're gonna get me killed, you assholes, I knew you would!" Ronny Brennan whined from the cabin.

  "Some guys just have no sense of humor," Grimaldi growled, tight-lipped.

  But there was nothing funny about their predicament, Bolan knew. Skyhunter skimmed the paddy, bouncing like a bucking bronco in its own furious slipstream. As they sailed over a water buffalo and several workers, Grimaldi cleared the paddy and aimed the screaming warbird toward a narrow dirt road that cut through the jungle. Then Skyhunter's wheels hit dirt. Bolan and Grimaldi were jolted in their seats by the impact, almost as if dynamite had exploded beneath the plane. The tree line blurred past the cockpit, teak leaves and vines whiplashing the Plexiglas, scraping the fuselage with a grating sound.

  Brennan's face hit the floorboard with a sickening crunch. Blood spurted from his pulped nose. He screamed in pain and terror.

  A flock of birds flew screeching from the jungle trees as Skyhunter tore up the surface of the dirt lane.

  Touchdown!

  Skyhunter jounced along the road, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred yards. Dust plumed behind the skittering Lear jet.

  Then, as if severed by some invisible giant steel wolf trap, the right wingtip was sheared off. Like a rhino dying at the end of its charge toward big game hu
nters, Skyhunter burrowed its nose into the road. The warbird's momentum flipped it over, and the entire right wing was clipped off with a rending scream as it crunched into the ground. Sparks shot from the instrument panel into Grimaldi's face as Skyhunter thudded down on its roof. When Bolan and Grimaldi unbuckled their seat belts they dropped headfirst against the cockpit ceiling. Seconds after they slid into the upside-down cabin, flames ignited in the cockpit.

  In Skyhunter's cabin Bolan found Brennan lying on his back and groaning. The druglord looked up at Bolan with hate-filled eyes. Blood from a deep gash above his right eyebrow masked Brennan's face, running slick over the many other lumps and cuts his swarthy mug had sustained since he met the Executioner.

  With the cockpit afire, there was no time to waste. Bolan dug a clawed hand into Brennan's shoulder, kicked out the mangled remains of the cabin door, then grabbed Brennan by the shoulder.

  "You rotten bastard! Watch what you're..."

  Bolan manhandled Brennan through the doorway, gave the punk a stiff boot in the ass to send him reeling into a cloud of dust. Quickly Bolan and Grimaldi gathered up the rucksacks and armament strewed around the cabin, then leaped from the doomed plane.

  Bolan checked the road to the rice paddy as he unleathered Big Thunder. He knew the guerrillas would not give up so easily. Indeed, he expected the survivors to gather for a huntdown of the invaders.

  And he did not have to wait long before the reinforcements showed. A second later the sound of grinding engines, angry shouts, and the crunch of stalks crushed underfoot reached Bolan's ears.

  The Executioner grabbed one of the straps on the crate of arms, giving Grimaldi a much-needed hand. Then he kicked Brennan in the ass again, driving him toward the jungle.

  "Get moving," Bolan snarled, "and keep your mouth shut."

  "Fuck you," replied the drug czar. But he knew as well as his captors did that the warbird's gas tanks would explode any second, and he needed no more encouragement to put as much space as possible between himself and the impending conflagration.