LITMIR.BIZ

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over and sending him back. Bolan crouched and ripped the knife free from its sheath as the pirate he faced struck a pose with a machete. The chipped and well-used blade glinted in the corridor lights.

      “That’s right, bad man,” the pirate said. “I got your ass, just me.”

      “You’re American,” Bolan said, genuinely surprised. The man in front of him was easily six foot five and three hundred pounds, a muscled monster of a man. He wore a torn desert camouflage BDU blouse with the sleeves cut off and stained blue jeans tucked into U.S. Army-issue combat boots.

      “That’s right, for whatever that shit means,” the man said, his teeth very white in his scarred, dark-skinned face. “I was in Iraq, man.”

      “And now you’re a pirate?” Bolan said. Keeping the man talking was the only way to buy time. He could not afford to have the pirate alert the others before he was ready to free the hostages. Strangely, the man facing off against him seemed to have no urge to do so. Quite the contrary, in fact. The pirate looked relaxed, even pleased.

      “I been bored a long while,” the American pirate said. When he smiled the scar creasing his forehead and left cheek turned his features feral. “Don’t go in for the rape-and-pillage act. Ain’t no sex offender, man.”

      “You’re as much a part of this as the others,” Bolan said. “You’re a traitor to your nation.” He moved slightly, testing the pirate’s reactions. The big man shifted a bit but remained calm, his fingers flexing on the handle of his machete.

      “Don’t matter what you think,” the pirate scoffed. “I fought for my country. And what did I get when I got home? A big fat bag of nothing, man. And a nasty letter telling me they could call me back up anytime they felt like, even though I did my tour! I ain’t nobody’s slave, man. First chance I got I was out of there.”

      “To take up with murderers and hijackers,” Bolan said.

      “Kicked around from place to place a while.” The man began to circle Bolan in the corridor, forcing the Executioner to move to counter. He eyed the Beretta on the floor, beyond reach. The man caught his gaze and shook his head. “Uh-uh, tough guy,” he sneered. “I’m tellin’ my story. Don’t want to interrupt me before I’m finished.”

      “All predators have justifications, rationalizations,” Bolan said. He gauged the distance, calculating a strike, knowing that for the best effect he would have to make his move while the other man was talking. Already he was breaking several tactical rules, allowing an enemy to engage him in dialogue, refusing to attack the attacker immediately. But he needed time. If he could resolve this quietly he might still have a chance.

      “I ain’t no predator, man,” the pirate said, frowning. “I’m just me. I fight, that’s what I do. There weren’t nobody to fight once we got the crew taken care of. Where you been hidin’? I’d have remembered a big boy like you. We’re gonna have this out, and maybe for a few minutes at least I won’t be bored while they finish their damned game upstairs.”

      So it did not occur to the pirates, at least not to this one, Bolan thought, that external forces could or would infiltrate the boat. That was good news—it indicated limited thinking. Bolan continued to circle, his knife held before him, wondering when the pirate would make the assault he was sure to initiate once he was finished with his monologue.

      “There anybody else in your crew?” The pirate nodded to Bolan’s Beretta on the deck. “How many more are there? Where they hidin’? You tell me, man, and maybe I won’t cut you up real bad before I kill you. Come on, man, tell a brother how many—”

      Bolan struck. He lunged inside the arc of the machete, and drove the point of his knife in a half-circle comma cut toward the man’s throat. To his credit, the American pirate was fast. He snapped his head back and brought the spine of the machete up, trying to parry Bolan’s knife arm with the only tool available to him. Bolan brought his support arm up across his chest, out of the way, as he snapped the blade of the knife diagonally into the pirate’s machete arm. The man howled as his arm was opened up. He stumbled back, dropping the machete and clutching at the terrible wound.

      “You son of a—”

      Bolan stomped on the man’s ankle, snapping it. As the traitorous pirate drew in a breath to scream, Bolan fell on him, driving the butt of the knife into the man’s temple. He struck again, then a third time, hammering the pirate insensate before he could make enough noise to expose the Executioner’s position.

      Bolan scooped up his Beretta, press-checked it and turned back to the fallen American. The big African-American was already beginning to recover, crawling to his knees despite the grievous slash in his forearm. He smiled shakily, one pupil visibly dilated, as he got his legs under him.

      “Don’t,” Bolan warned.

      The pirate surged forward.

      The Beretta barked a triple-burst of suppressed subsonic rounds. Bolan sidestepped as the pirate plowed into the deck, a strange groan escaping from his throat. He stopped moving and seemed almost to deflate, the death rattle that racked his big frame an almost inhuman sigh. Then the body was very still. Bolan had seen more than enough death to know that the reaper had claimed this wayward American.

      He took the body by the legs and dragged it into the nearest cabin. He could not cover the blood on the carpeted deck, so he did not try. Searching the corpse, he found something that worried him—a short-range radio of the type used by hikers, hunters and ATV riders. If he was carrying this it was possible the pirate had been tasked with checking in, or at least radioing back his status when queried. Obviously he’d been hidden somewhere among the officers’ quarters, evading Bolan’s sweep. It was more than likely he’d been guarding the biohazard canisters.

      The numbers of Bolan’s combat countdown had fallen to zero. Reloading the Beretta with a fresh magazine, he also checked the Desert Eagle, making sure a round was chambered. With his fist full of 9 mm death and the Desert Eagle hand cannon by his side, the Executioner took one last look around.

      The short-range radio began to crackle in broken English. Whoever was at the other end was asking for the pirate to check in.

      Bolan started to run.

      3

      Tranh Khong held his Kalashnikov close to his bare chest, cradling it one-handed against his wiry frame as he breathed in the smell of fear. In his hand he clutched a dog-eared sheet of paper, printed from one of the machines in the bridge of the Duyfken Ster. He ran down the list with his eyes, his lips moving over missing and stained teeth, as he matched the two names to those listed on the screen of the wireless phone he also held in that hand. He then flipped the phone shut and stuck it in his pocket, pausing to adjust the heavy brown leather pouch slung haphazardly through the belt loops of his cutoff jeans. The device inside was as necessary, if not more so, than his phone or all the radio equipment aboard. Even so, it still galled him to have to haul it around.

      “They are here,” he said in English, as much to worry the cowering captives as because it was the closest thing his band of thugs had to a common language. Forgetting his minor irritations, he looked out over the men, women and children sitting on the floor of the lounge. Most of them had their heads in their hands as they knelt or sat cross-legged amidst the colorful slot machines and other gambling tables. Tranh smiled a gap-toothed smile, jerking his chin toward a female couple near the middle of the multilevel lounge. Two of his crew hurried to obey, the worn French MAT-49 submachine guns in their hands no less deadly for their age.

      They were a motley collection, Tranh and his pirates. The majority were Javanese, castoffs from the coastal scum that Tranh found easily enough when he made port and recruited in the local dives. One was even American, a man named Jones, whom Tranh used for his most brutal tasks. A couple were Indonesians of Chinese descent, and one was Vietnamese like Tranh. They wore ill-fitting and cut-down clothing, a mixture of military surplus fatigues—like the sleeveless camouflage BDU jacket Tranh wore open over his jutting ribs—shorts, combat boots or sandals, and whatever civilian clothing they liberated in raids.

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