Don Pendleton: Blood Tide

Bolan was silently relieved, as well. The yacht was not a normal pleasure craft by any stretch of the imagination, but RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers were the ocean-borne artillery of choice in the South Pacific. A few broadsides of antiarmor rockets with shaped-charge warheads would burn the old girl down to the waterline.

Scott grimaced as the killers closed in. “Whole lotta cutlery, though.”

Bolan nodded. Pirates the world over had an anachronistic love of edged weapons.

Piracy in the South Pacific had recently taken a very ugly turn. Boats had been found adrift from the Sulu to the Andaman Sea. Everything from private yachts to cargo vessels had been taken. The ships were stripped of their cargo and any valuables, and the passengers, whether professional seamen or sport fisherman out for a trophy, were ritually butchered to the last man, woman and child. The stripped hulks were left to drift like floating slaughter yards.

Mack Bolan was sailing the South Pacific in a million-dollar yacht off the Philippines. To all appearances he was a rich westerner with a native wife, asking in every port of call for private coves and beautiful, secluded spots off the beaten path.

The atoll where they lay anchored had no name. It was picture-postcard beautiful, well off the beaten path, very secluded, and Bolan, Mei and the yacht made for a very tempting target.

Someone had just taken the bait.

Clellande was posing as their hired crewman and cook. He was an able sailor, and Bolan would have wanted him along for his culinary skills alone, not withstanding his skills as a Special Forces operator.

The pair was on loan from the CIA station in Manila. Clellande peered at the incoming enemy. “They’re slowing down.”

“Jesus…” Mei’s ever-present smile went down in wattage. “They’re slinging their rifles.”

“And out comes the cutlery.” Bolan watched as a platoon of pirates drew razor-sharp kris daggers, parangs, and bolo knives. Elaborate curved, razor-sharp steel of every description flashed and glittered in the Executioner’s night vision.

The men in the canoes were bent on slaughter.

Bolan clicked the seven-inch, saw-toothed blade of his bayonet onto the muzzle of his carbine. “Control, high-level of probability that targets are prime.”

“Affirmative, Striker. Choppers are in the air. ETA twenty minutes.”

Bolan signaled his team. “I think these are some of the boys we’re looking for. Be ready.”

Mei and Clelland fixed bayonets.

Bolan’s strategy was simple. He had lifted it from British WWII naval tactics. In the battle for the Atlantic, German submarines had initially ruled the waves. The U-boats sank allied shipping with impunity, but U-boats were small and could carry only two dozen torpedoes, and those were reserved for enemy warships and large transports. To engage smaller merchant vessels, the German submarines would surface and use their deck guns. The British had invented the Q-boat in response. They had adapted merchant ships, mounting them with powerful six-inch cannons hidden amidships. When German submarines surfaced, the British sailors had flung open the Q-boat’s trapdoors and blown the exposed U-boats to hell in a floating ambush.

Disguise equaled surprise, and surprise was the most precious weapon in any operator’s arsenal. The yacht didn’t have a pair of six-inch British naval guns hidden beneath the mast, but she did have some very nasty surprises, courtesy of Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz.

Bolan reached down and punched a few keys on the portable computer perched on the galley counter. “Arming countermeasures.” Tiny green LED lights on the black box next to the laptop turned red. Wires snaked from the box throughout the yacht.

The pirates closed to within ten yards.

Bolan lifted his nose and sniffed the air. Mei cocked her head. “You smell that?” she asked.

Bolan did. It was the sweet stench of hashish, and it didn’t bode anything good. He pressed a key on the laptop and hit Enter. “Here we go.”

The hull shook as the two dozen hidden smoke dischargers fired simultaneously in a 360-degree arc around the yacht. They were the same kind of smoke dischargers that tanks and armored vehicles used to screen themselves from enemy fire. Only those on the yacht weren’t loaded with canisters of smoke-emitting hydrogen carbon powder.

They were loaded with military strength CS tear gas.

Bolan and the agents clicked their respirators into place beneath their night-vision goggles as they were instantly shrouded in blossoming clouds of CS.

The pirates shouted in a ragged chorus of surprise and anger. Wooden canoes thudded against the hull of the yacht. A war cry sounded a few feet away from Bolan’s porthole. “Allah Akhbar!”

The killers hurled their voices to the heavens in response to the call.

Bolan hit another key and closed his eyes.

The second ring of dischargers fired.

Twenty-four Magnum ultra-flash stun grenades detonated like a ring of exploding suns around the ship. Each grenade lit off in a two million candlepower flash into the tear-gas streaming eyes of the pirates. At the same instant each grenade blasted out an eardrum-shattering 185 decibels of sound.

“Back to back, stay close,” Bolan ordered Bolan. “I want one or two alive, but don’t risk yourself to do it.”

The Executioner raced up the tiny stairwell and threw open the hatch. Mei followed as Clellande exploded up from the forward hatch.

A dozen pirates blinked, wept and groped their way across the deck of the yacht. Others struggled to clamber aboard in their temporarily deafened and half-blind condition. Thousands of sparks drifted through the thick fog of tear gas, blinking and whirling like drunken fireflies in the stun grenade’s disorienting secondary pyrotechnic effect.

A bare-chested, tattooed pirate stumbled toward Bolan with a bolo knife in each hand. The Executioner squeezed the trigger of his carbine and sent a burst into the killer’s chest. The pirate staggered back a step and let out a blood-curdling scream of rage. He lunged forward blindly, his blades crisscrossing before him in a frantic attempt to fillet his unseen opponent.

Bolan punched a second burst through the killer’s turban and dropped him half headless to the deck. Mei’s and Clellande’s weapons snarled on full-auto on Bolan’s flanks. The range was point-blank, and they wielded their weapons like buzz saws. The pirates stumbled and tottered but did not go down.

More pirates climbed aboard. They lurched through the gas and the dark, guided to their opponents only by the strobing muzzle-flash of Bolan’s and his team’s weapons. Bolan put ten rounds into one of the killers, and only the eleventh shot that transversed the assassin’s spinal cord finally put him down.

“These guys are hopped up out of their minds!” Bolan shouted into his respirator’s microphone. “Go for a head shot!”

A screaming pirate to Bolan’s left dropped his knife and unslung his AK-47. Mei’s M-4 spit fire and hammered the pirate’s head into ruin.

A streamer of fire streaked into the air.

“Flare!” Bolan roared. The team snarled and squinted as a unit. Their light amplifying night vision went whiteout as the incandescent illumination round turned night into day. Bolan ripped away his night-vision goggles, and the respirator came with it. He swung his carbine aft. A second flare trailed up into the night from a canoe full of killers. Bolan aimed the M-203 grenade launcher beneath his carbine and squeezed the trigger. The personal defense round sent a thirty-six pellet swarm of buckshot like a wall of lead sweeping through the canoe.

The damage was done. Bolan and his team had lost the cover of darkness. The Executioner felt the sting in his eyes and the burn of the gas streak down his throat. He had been exposed to CS and worse before and fought on, but now the playing field had been leveled.