LITMIR.BIZ

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her lips. Machida had heard about the so-called Goth look, but he’d never read a Gothic romance novel, and doubted the heroine wore a black cable-knit sweater torn at the neck, fishnets with intentional runs in them, or piercings in one nostril, and two in the center of her lower lip.

      “I asked you a question, or don’t you—”

      “I speak fluent English,” Machida snapped. He flipped open his sunglasses and slipped them over his aching eyes before opening the rear door of the white stretch limousine and stepping out into the daylight.

      “Are they—” the girl began to speak, but Machida cut her off, slamming the door and shutting out her voice.

      Daimyo Botan Okudaira said the annoying girl was a part of the grand new future of their clan. The money they were getting from snatching this girl was only the beginning. Her father was a man of means, means that would give them a chance to change the entire face of Asia.

      Machida shook his head. He put two and two together. Daimyo Okudaira expected to turn the kidnapping into a gateway to link the Silver Tengu Clan and Colin Anthony’s Ironcorp—a Yakuza clan with a formidable contraband distribution network hooked up to a major arms manufacturer.

      Machida figured that Okudaira wanted to compete with the triads on a level they hadn’t dreamed of. Machida didn’t know exactly what Ironcorp produced, but it had to be important to attract Okudaira’s attention in spreading his already formidable international reach.

      Machida saw one of the men had out a stainless-steel Magnum revolver and was rolling the cylinder of the long, silver beast along his bronzed forearm. Unno smirked at Machida, twirled the gun and slipped it into its holster under his black vest. He shrugged his bare shoulders. His long black hair was tied off into a ponytail that swung down to midback, and when he smiled, a gold tooth glinted in the reflected sunlight. He was trying so hard to be hip and dangerous, he hurt Machida’s eyes.

      “Everything okay, old man?” Unno asked with that gold-toothed grin.

      “Yeah. I just needed some fresh air,” Machida answered, taking a few steps away from the limousine.

      He looked at his team with disdain—the younger, hipper, harder Yakuza. Machida knew he was part of the old guard. The almost fifty-year old enforcer felt like he was babysitting a crew of prima-donna kids who thought they were the cutting edge.

      Machida sighed, then looked at his watch.

      Only a few more minutes, and he’d be done with this and back to watching his career stagnate as the head of security in Nagoya.

      He looked down the road, missing the shadow of the suspended Ise Bay Highway. He was a man of the city, not the woods, but there was a quiet calm and dignity here. Machida frowned.

      Thoughts of dying far from home haunted him.

      MACK BOLAN HAD ESCAPED from the van with a relatively soft landing. His back hurt, but his shirt had protected him from most of the slashing, stabbing chunks of gravel in the road, and the thick, heavily toned muscles surrounding his shoulders and spine kept his bones from shattering as he somersaulted. It was not the most graceful of landings, but any one that you could walk away from, as his friend Jack Grimaldi once told him, was a great one.

      The Executioner had only just come out of his roll, when he was looking at the front grille of a car bearing down on him. He had a gun with a dud round under the striker, was trying to recover his balance and heard the sound of brakes being applied behind him. Angry shouts from Rhode Hogan filled his ears.

      The car screeched to a halt, the driver acting on instinct, gravel spitting from under the wheels. That was Mack Bolan’s only chance, a break in the onward advance that would have crushed him. He kicked with both legs, launching himself hard out of the path of the vehicle.

      More tires screeched, and there was the sound of bumpers hammering each other. Bolan didn’t see the collision. He was rolling once more, this time through thick foliage at the roadside. Pliant green stalks snapped at his bare forearms and face as momentum carried him through. His shoulder felt as if it were on fire. Stinging pain and wet stickiness told him that his flesh had opened, and the enemy hadn’t even fired a shot.

      He tucked onto one side and used both hands on the Glock in his fist.

      At least the first round in each of the magazines had healthy looking primers. He racked the slide and ejected the dead, dud round, the next shot coming up and ready to go with one pull of the six-pound trigger. There were no safety catches or levers to be flicked into position to get the gun up and running.

      The firearm was perfect for Matt Cooper, FBI agent, the smoke screen to get Mack Bolan within striking range of Yakuza daimyo Botan Okudaira.

      Bolan considered his situation. This wasn’t about a hostage negotiation. This wasn’t about arresting someone. This was about the Executioner on the hunt for a criminal mastermind and stopping him before his organization grew strong enough to cause a turf war between Chinese and Japanese criminals—a turf war that would leave innocents dead in the cross fire and governments sweating the fallout.

      The air was chilly without his jacket or a long-sleeved shirt, but it was starting to heat up as bursts of exploratory fire pumped out of the back of Hogan’s van, silenced automatic fire slicing into the brush. Bolan stayed low and crabwalked toward the tree line, not afraid of getting the Glock covered in mud or dirt. The plastic-framed pistol was nearly as reliable as his Beretta in resisting mud and the elements.

      Bolan moved swiftly and was far enough away that all he could make out was Hogan shouting orders, the words suppressed by distance and gunfire.

      The odds didn’t look good, not that Bolan was going to poke his head above the top of the foliage to expose himself. He just kept moving, walking on all fours, crouching low. His foot hit some tangled, muddy weeds and slipped. He fell to his knees and one elbow. He suppressed a grunt, but the foliage around him shook.

      Bolan didn’t wait for the enemy to spot and react to the sudden movement. With all his strength and speed, he launched from the foliage into the woods, ducking behind a tree just as a blast of high-velocity bullets smashed into the trunk. The Executioner swung around and contemplated returning fire, but instead held it.

      Thirty-nine shots wasn’t going to cut it, no matter how good a marksman he was. Not against automatic weapons with twice to three times the range of his pistol, and not against weapons in the hands of professionals who knew how to make use of every ounce of the superior shootability of a long-barreled rifle, or even a submachine gun. Bolan decided firing off even a short, discouraging burst would only attract attention and bring down the hammer of concentrated fury on him.

      Instead, Bolan stayed behind the cover of a tree trunk about two feet in diameter. He was fifteen feet in from the tree line, watching for anyone starting for the woods. He watched as four men, wearing body armor and carrying big, black weapons, moved away from Hogan’s convoy.

      The vehicles were starting up, disappearing up the road to continue to their rendezvous with the Yakuza.

      Between Bolan and the rendezvous were four heavily armed killers, better equipped and better protected than he was, and several miles of road. He looked over his hurt shoulder and saw his shirt was torn. Gravel had scraped a layer of dermis away, leaving him raw and bloodied, but the wound was superficial. His shirt flapped open at the back, and a cold wind washed over him. The weather was in the fifties, and while he knew that wouldn’t be too bad for the short term, spending a whole day exposed to the cool could make him lapse into hypothermia. It happened to hikers all the time, people underdressing for the weather, thinking a spring day or a cool fall day couldn’t possibly threaten their health.

      Bolan gave the Glock’s grip a reassuring squeeze, and waited for the enemy gunmen to draw closer. He had cover, and he was scouting out their angles of approach.

      No good, he thought. Even if he could tag one, maybe two of the mercs, the others would nail him in a cross fire. They were too well spread out, yet able to give even the farthest of their partners cover fire. If Bolan exposed himself to take down one, three more would

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