Don Pendleton: Interception

The Croat-based triad had carved out a niche serving as underworld enforcers for hire, providing security to drug and weapons shipments as well as occasionally providing shooters for criminal acts throughout the region. Its primary income came from the kidnapping and trafficking of underage girls to fill the prison brothels of India. They were child-rapists and slavers, and the Executioner had come for them.

Bolan crept out of a deep shadow. The guard stood with his back unprotected, facing the lights of the city across the bay. His hands were filled and busy as he worked a lighter to light a cigarette, leaving the submachine gun dangling loose.

The Executioner moved smoothly in a choreographed ballet of violence. His hands were parallel to each other, the knuckles of his middle fingers almost touching as he gripped the wooden dowels of the garrote. The length of piano wire between them formed an oblong loop, and he slipped it like a noose over the man’s head. He jerked his hands back and apart, snapping the loop closed, and the wire bit into his quarry’s neck with merciless efficiency.

The man gagged as his larynx was crushed. Blood rushed out as the thin wire bit deep. The blunt hammer of Bolan’s knee connected hard with the man’s kidney and he folded like a lawn chair, dropping to his knees. As the man went down, Bolan’s jerked back on the garrote like a tourist hauling in a Marlin into a fishing boat off Mazatlán. Blood spilled out like water from a cracked-open fire hydrant and the man blacked out.

His arms fell limply, and Bolan put the knobby tread of his boot against the sentry’s back and pushed against the tension of the wire, finishing the job. He dropped the handles and let the body slump over. The blood was obsidian in the faint moonlight, and it stained the man’s cigarette then snuffed it out with a slight hiss.

Pulling a sturdy diver knife from his combat harness, Bolan crossed the roof to where a skylight broke the surface in a Plexiglas bubble. He knelt and began working, as expertly as any cat burglar.

TWO MEN were in the room. One was almost naked, and both looked at Karen Rasmussen with a vulture’s bleak appetite. She was tied to a straight-backed chair by a white hemp rope in intricate and stylized knotting and patterns of bonding, clothed in only her underwear. She was unaware of it, but Rasmussen had been bound according to ancient Hojojutsu techniques. The binding was considered an erotic S&M art form in Japan, and when this episode was done that was where Philippine national Abdullah Sungkar hoped to unload at least a hundred thousand U.S. dollars’ worth of the DVD.

The teenage girl stared at him with terror in her eyes, and Sungkar looked to his camcorder to make sure it was on. The look was worth cash when the pedophile online network began their critiques and reviews. His tongue, pink and small, quickly darted out to moisten his lips.

Behind him the actor named Sulu was zipping his leather mask into place. Karen Rasmussen was the daughter of the American embassy official in charge of development of agriculture and commerce projects. Sungkar, a field captain in the Mountain and Snake Society, had been paid by a representative of Russian syndicates to kidnap the young woman then rape and torture her. And to film it, so copies could be sent out to the press as an example of America’s powerlessness. It was not a request that made sense to Sungkar, as it didn’t seem to advance the business interests of the Russian.

Indeed such brutal tactics had already been tried and rejected by the umbrella terror organization al-Qaeda, but the money spent the same as far as Sungkar was concerned. Whatever plan Victor Bout had, that was up to him. Sungkar took pay for his play, and that was all that mattered to him.

Sulu stepped into the camcorder’s picture, already aroused. The sight of the man caused the girl to try to scream around her ball-gag. Spittle flew. Sungkar felt a tightening in his own crotch.

Karen Rasmussen threw herself against her restraints, but the triad captain had learned his knots from a master, and escape was hopeless. Giggling like a little girl from behind a black leather mask, Sulu stalked toward the teenager.

MACK BOLAN UNFOLDED from the skylight like a great malignant spider. He hung for a moment, poised as the twisted scene below him played out. He was dressed head to toe in black from his customary combat blacksuit to his balaclava hood. He held the diver knife in his left hand and rappelled easily with his right.

The distance was ten feet, maybe eleven. He laid the blade flat against his leg and let go. He dropped, as silent as a stone falling down a well. He hit the floorboards of the warehouse’s second story and rolled along his right side like a paratrooper on an airborne drop. He came smoothly to his feet out of the shadow cast by the harsh commercial production filming lights used to illuminate the scene.

The mask-wearing rapist with the swirling, full-body tattoos screamed out loud and tried to swing a clumsy overhand blow at the intruding shadow. Bolan came up out of his roll inside the man’s reach and the diver knife flashed in the wattage of the film lamps. Three times it plunged into the rapist’s body, and blood thudded like rain drops on the dusty wooden slats of the floor.

The first stab punched through Sulu’s solar plexus and pierced his diaphragm, stealing the porn star’s air before he could draw breath for another scream. The second thrust took him under the rib cage and sliced up to bury an inch of stainless steel into the thudding drum of the man’s pounding heart. The third strike punched through the cartilage of his throat and cracked his C-3 vertebrae.

Bolan yanked his knife free as Sulu’s corpse tumbled backward like an animal in a slaughterhouse kill-chute. He sprang forward after Sungkar, who had managed to raise a half shout as he scrambled for a silver .40-caliber pistol lying under his folded jacket on an extra chair.

The Executioner slapped at his chest with his right hand, his palm finding the custom handle of his silenced machine pistol. Sungkar threw back his jacket to dig for his weapon, not bothering to scream because he knew his bodyguards would never reach him in time anyway. His fingers found the cold, comforting weight of the handgun and wrapped around the handle.

The big American’s sound suppressor hacked out a triple pneumatic cough.

Sungkar straightened like a man electrocuted as the 9 mm Parabellum rounds slammed into his body just under his right shoulder blade. His body shuddered with the impact, and he arched backward at an unnatural angle not unlike a reverse comma. Bolan’s second triburst lifted the top of the hired killer’s skull up off his face and splashed his brains across the warehouse. The man stumbled forward and struck the floor.

The Executioner rose from his crouch.

KAREN RASMUSSEN looked over at the long table next to the camcorder. There was a power drill, dental instruments and some bloodstained carpenter tools. In the middle of the implements a black candle burned next to a bottle of Ouzo. Abdullah Sungkar had told her in loving detail exactly what he was going to do with each and every single item, speaking slowly so that each word was captured in perfect clarity by the continuously running camera.

The killing shadow moved toward her, gun in one hand and bloody knife in the other. She recoiled in terror from the gore-stained apparition. Seeing her reaction, Bolan stopped and returned his silenced pistol to its shoulder holster before pulling down the balaclava and revealing his face.

“Easy,” he whispered. “I’m here to get you out.”

He cut her hands free just as he heard the first thundering of footsteps on the stairs outside the room door. He pulled the blade toward him in one smooth motion and sliced the bonds binding her hands, then pressed the knife hilt into her shaking grip.