Don Pendleton - Jungle Justice

“I’ve got his file here,” Brognola said, raising his left hand to stroke his overcoat, feeling the fat manila envelope that filled his inside pocket. “And I brought along Naraka’s, with some background on the area.”

“So, is the White House miffed, or is there some real likelihood this character may pose a future threat?” Bolan asked.

“To the States?” Brognola shrugged. “Who knows? It’s not his first kidnapping, just the first involving U.S. citizens. Our analysts are split fifty-fifty, as to whether the experience will scare him off or piss him off so badly that he wants another piece of Uncle Sam.”

“It’s a distraction from his trade,” Bolan remarked.

“Which means he may start taking other risks, making mistakes. I’d hate to see him fixate on the embassy, its personnel. This guy’s been living like a hermit in the jungle since his prison break. I’m not sure he was civilized before that all went down, but he’s a Grade A wild man now.”

“A wild man with a taste for ivory and tigers,” Bolan said.

“And hostages. Let’s not forget.”

“How solid is his dossier?”

“Good question. The ambassador to India says we got everything they have in New Delhi. Beyond that, who knows?”

“Naraka could have someone running interference for him in the government,” Bolan suggested.

“It’s a possibility, all right.”

“And if I find someone like that? What, then?”

“Officially, we’d want to know about it. Off the record, use your own best judgment.”

“All right,” the warrior said, at last. “Let’s see the files.”

THE FILES HAD BEEN condensed, photos and all printed on flimsy paper for convenience and easy disposal when Bolan had finished his reading. He sat on a bench in the sunshine, outside Fort McHenry, with Brognola at his side, watching any stray tourist who wandered too close. Bolan read steadily, absorbing all the salient facts and asking questions when he needed to.

His contact, Abhaya Takeri, was a twenty-six-year-old ex-soldier who had dabbled in private security before landing a dull office job in Calcutta. That had lasted for nearly a year before he got restless, picking up covert assignments from his government, and later from the CIA. It wasn’t clear in Takeri’s case if one hand knew what the other was doing, but he’d managed to avoid any conflicts so far, after three years of service, and that said something for his tradecraft at the very least.

Takeri’s photos were a study in contrast. The first, a posed shot in his army uniform, revealed a stern young man who wouldn’t smile to save his life, proud of his threads and attitude. The other was a candid shot, taken just as Takeri left a small sidewalk café, his arm around a pretty, laughing young woman. Takeri’s smile seemed genuine, good-humored, as if he enjoyed his life. The flimsy printouts meant that Bolan couldn’t check the flip side of the photographs for dates, but he assumed the army photo had been taken first. Takeri seemed a little older in the second, definitely more at ease.

Takeri’s record in the military had been unremarkable, and most of what he’d done since entering the cloak-and-dagger world was classified. Of course the CIA didn’t mind leaking what he’d done for India, as long as it had no impact on his work for the Company. Apparently, Takeri had been used to infiltrate a labor union thought to be involved in sabotage—they weren’t, according to his last report—and to disrupt a group of Sikhs who showed displeasure with the government by blowing up department stores. Four bombers had been sent to prison in that case, while their ringleader had committed suicide.

It sounded like a good day’s work.

Takeri spoke three languages, had studied martial arts before and after military service, and he’d qualified with standard small arms in the army.

“Sounds all right,” Bolan said, handing the dossier to Brognola.

Balahadra Naraka was something else entirely. Thirty-eight years old and a career criminal by anyone’s definition, he had survived Calcutta as an orphan, living by theft and his wits on the streets, then fell in with poachers when he was a teenager. The shift to country living didn’t help. Naraka was suspected of killing his first game warden at age nineteen, but no charges were filed in that case and he’d remained at large for three more years, then took a fall for shooting tigers. The charge carried a five-year prison sentence, and he’d spent nearly a year in jail prior to trial. Upon conviction, Naraka had received the maximum and was packed off to serve his time.

It took him nearly three years to escape, but he made up for the delay in grisly style. Using a homemade shank, he gutted one guard on the cell block, took another hostage and escaped in one of the prison vehicles. Car and hostage were abandoned on the outskirts of civilization, the guard decapitated, with his head mounted as a hood ornament.

Since then, for nearly twelve years, Balahadra Naraka had been a hunted fugitive, although it barely showed from his lifestyle. Granted, he spent most of his time in tents or tiny jungle villages, but so did half the population of West Bengal. His photos—half a dozen snapped by Naraka’s own men and sent to major newspapers—always depicted him in a defiant pose, armed to the teeth, standing beside the carcasses of tigers, elephants, or men in uniform.

Brognola had been right about the bandit-poacher’s body count. Although it seemed most of his victims were officials—cops, soldiers, game wardens—no two sources ever quite agreed on how many men he’d killed. The lowest figure Bolan saw, in excerpts from assorted press clippings, was 105; the highest, lifted from a sensational tabloid, ascribed “nearly four hundred” slayings to Naraka and his gang.

It was peculiar, Bolan thought, that no official source kept track of government employees murdered by a bandit on the prowl, but numbers didn’t really matter in the last analysis. Naraka was a dangerous opponent, and he’d moved from killing local lawmen to murdering U.S. diplomats.

Bolan assumed the Langley snatch had been a one-time thing, impulsive, maybe even carried out by a subordinate without Naraka’s prior knowledge. It made no difference, though, because Naraka had a lifelong pattern of internalizing and repeating bad behavior. If he’d been apprehended for his first known homicide, it might’ve made a difference. But as it was…

Naraka might be something of a folk hero to rural villagers, who welcomed charity and anyone who helped remove the threat of tigers from their dreary lives, but he still qualified as a mass murderer—perhaps the worst in India since British troops suppressed the thugee cult during the nineteenth century. If Bolan could supply the final chapter to Naraka’s long and cruel career, so much the better.

“He’s a tough one,” Bolan told Brognola. “Knows the ground like Jungle Jim. It won’t be easy to find him, and even then—”

“You’ve tackled worse,” Brognola said.

“Maybe.” Bolan handed back Naraka’s file. “Just let me check the ground.”

It was the worst of both worlds—first, a teeming city, second largest in the country, steeped in grinding poverty, then swamps and jungles rivaling the thickest, least hospitable on Earth. The Sundarbans, where Bolan would be forced to hunt Naraka if he couldn’t catch his target in Calcutta, spanned 2,560 square miles in West Bengal, with more sprawling across the border into Bangladesh. The Indian portion included a 1,550-square-mile game preserve, where three hundred tigers were protected by law, since the early 1970s.

Nor did the Sundarbans consist of any ordinary jungle. Seventy percent of the region lay under salt water, comprising the world’s largest mangrove swamp, crisscrossed by hundreds of creeks and tributaries feeding three large rivers—the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and the Meghna. Access to much of the region was boats only, and if tigers missed a visitor on land, the tourist still had to watch out for sharks and salt-water crocodiles. Electrified dummies had failed to discourage the cats, and every tourist party that entered the Sundarbans traveled with armed guards.