Don Pendleton: Blood Tide

It would come down to a question of will.

Bolan inflicted his will. The carbine went hot in his hands as he swept it from target to target. He staggered as a bullet struck the ceramic trauma plate of his armor. Bolan spun and put a 3-round burst through the shooter’s eye socket. The Executioner’s own eyes streamed, and he struggled to breathe as the gas entered his lungs.

Bolan’s carbine slammed open on an empty chamber.

A pirate who couldn’t have been more than sixteen screamed and charged waving an escrima stick. Bolan squinted against the chemical burn engulfing his eyes and decided the young man was POW material. He aimed his empty carbine and thumbed the pressure switch on the forestock. The X26 Taser mounted on his weapon chuffed twice, and the two barbed probes streaked into the young pirate’s chest trailing their conductive wires.

Bolan pressed the switch a second time and held it down. The stun gun crackled as Bolan pumped the five watt shaped pulse into his target at eighteen pulses per second. The force should have dropped the young fighter into the fetal position on the deck.

It did not.

The pirate let out a scream and ripped the bloody, sparking probes from his chest. He gasped and fell shuddering to his knees as he inhaled CS.

Bolan realized he would have to take his prisoner old school style. He rammed the aluminum buttplate of his carbine between the young man’s eyes and dropped him limp to the deck.

Marcie Mei gasped raggedly behind Bolan. “Striker!”

Bolan ducked as a pirate flew past him. The killer’s heavy parang passed inches from Bolan’s temple and sliced splinters from the boom of the mainsail. The blade rang off Bolan’s bayonet as he parried the second blow. The Executioner rammed his shoulder into the pirate’s chest, pinning the killer’s sword arm and shoulder-blocking him against the mast. Bolan shoved his bayonet beneath the pirate’s chin, ramming the razor-sharp steel up. The pirate slid to a sitting position against the mast.

Bolan let his spent carbine fall and slapped leather for the pistols strapped to his thighs.

A pirate came at Bolan wielding a machete overhead like a samurai sword. The Desert Eagle rolled like thunder in Bolan’s hand. The pirate folded as the .50-caliber bullet smashed him down the hatchway.

Clellande’s grenade launcher belched yellow flame as he blasted a 40 mm buckshot round into a canoe off the bow. He moved along the grab rail, his carbine spraying the canoes astern.

Two pirates levered themselves up from the water, pulling themselves up into the push pit with daggers in their teeth. Bolan extended the Beretta 93-R machine pistol in his left hand in a fencer’s lunge. The Beretta snarled as he touched off two 3-round bursts. The first pirate fell back from the stern with his turban unspooling in ribbons of cloth and brain behind him. The second hung tangled in the rail with his throat blasted open.

Bolan spun, the big .50 and the 9 mm rolling in his hands like a gunslinger. The Desert Eagle hammered a howling pirate into the jib, and the machine pistol painted the white canvas with the arterial spray of his target’s life.

The pirates were not acting like pirates. They weren’t cutting their losses and running. They were coming on like feudal Japanese samurai bent on death before dishonor. In the light of the flare, Bolan could make out the fins of sharks churning the dark waters of the lagoon as they feasted upon the dozens of fallen.

Mei knelt before the hatch, half-gagging from the gas as she rammed a fresh magazine into her carbine with streaming, swollen eyes. She held her trigger on full-auto as she swept the pirates off the port side of the deck. Clellande’s weapon snarled in continuous fire as he put thirty rounds into a canoe full of steel-wielding cutthroats.

A pirate erupted out of the water at the bow and heaved himself up into the forward pulpit. Metal flashed and red fiber fluttered from the end as he threw a piece of glittering steel. Bolan and Clelland swung around, their weapons hammering the pirate in ruptured ruins to the black water below.

Bolan dropped to one knee. He struggled to bark out an order through the gas sizzling in his chest. “Hold your fire!”

Mei and Clellande knelt with their weapons ready.

“Scott! Anything off the bow?”

The man hacked and coughed. “Nothing moving! All targets down!”

“Marcie! Port?”

“No…hostiles all down,” she replied, struggling for air.

Bolan scanned to starboard and astern. Nothing moved. He rose to take in the bigger picture as the second flare drifted low toward the water. The wind was dispersing the gas. The yacht was littered with bodies from stem to stern. Head shots at point-blank range were not pretty business. Neither was buckshot raking canoes out of 40 mm tubes. The canoes drifted dead in the water. None of the occupants moved.

Bolan reloaded his pistols. “Marcie, secure the prisoner and get him below before he chokes to death. Scott, let’s clean up the deck and call for extraction. We keep two bodies for forensics, the rest go over the side.”

“Affirmative, Striker, I…” the big man stumbled slightly.

Bolan moved toward the bow. “Scott?”

“Nothing, just a scratch.” Clellande plucked a tuft of red fiber at the collar of his armored vest. “What the hell?”

Clellande went rigid as blood geysered between his fingers. “Jesus!”

Bolan lunged. “Leave it in!”

Clellande was already going into shock, and his first instinct was to get the intruding metal out of his neck. The shard fell to the deck with a clatter as Clellande fell facefirst onto the roof of the cabin.

“I need immediate medevac!” Bolan roared into his radio. “The big man is down!”

“Affirmative, Striker!” Price came back. “Choppers inbound.”

Boland rolled Clellande over. Blood was pouring out of him like a river that had jumped its banks. The soldier applied pressure to the wound. He grimaced as his fingers sank through the gruesome, multiple channels the blade had dug into him. “Marcie! Field dressing!”

“Scott!” Mei raced to help.

Bolan grimly applied pressure while she ripped open a field dressing. Bolan pressed the dressing into the wound, and it instantly bled through. He pressed down as Mei ripped open another. The dressing bled through again. “Give me another!”

“Scott!” Mei screamed as she ripped open another dressing. “Scott!”

Bolan sat back on his heels. Escotto Clellande was gone.

The Executioner stared at the deadly gleaming weapon on the deck. It was a strangely shaped piece of razor-sharp steel. It resembled a hawthorn leaf save that it was six inches long, slitted and had a tail of red fiber to stabilize it in flight.

It was about the ugliest implement the Executioner had ever seen.

He pressed his thumb into his throat mike. “Control, be advised the big man is KIA. Tell command we have a prisoner.” He shook his head bitterly. “We are ready for extraction.”

Manila Station, Philippines

Aaron Kurtzman’s face stared unhappily at Bolan from the computer monitor connected to the satellite link. He forced a smile. “You did real good, Striker. In the two months we figure these guys have been operating, no one who’s laid eyes on them has lived to tell about it. You took out a platoon of them and brought in a boatload of useful evidence.”

Bolan frowned. A good man had gone down. “Yeah.”

“You took a prisoner,” Kurtzman said. “That’s the biggest break we’ve had since the Farm got involved in this.”

Bolan considered the fight on the yacht and his young opponent. “I need more wattage.”

“What?”

“I juiced that kid for two and a half seconds before he ripped out the probes, Bear.” Bolan glanced at the weapon system on the table. “And that was after at least a full fifteen seconds of exposure to military strength CS.”