Grave Mercy. Don Pendleton

touched the captor in control of Honey, and as soon as Bolan felt that spongy contact, his finger closed on the trigger.

      A 3-round burst tore through the gunman’s face, emptying his head of brains as if it were a gore-filled piñata. Honey snaked herself loose from the dead man’s grasp, pushing herself away from Long Eddy, who was still in the fight.

      His shotgun’s payload expended, the Jamaican drug lord sneered and whipped it around like a club, the hot double-muzzle slicing open skin on Bolan’s cheek. The twin barrels and their wooden furniture continued swinging after the bloody impact, cracking against the soldier’s left wrist. It was almost painful enough for the Executioner to drop his Beretta, but all it succeeded in doing was stopping the gun from aiming at Long Eddy. The only weapon Bolan had was in his right hand, and his right biceps had taken two pellets from the shotgun, the bare limb pouring blood from the injury. Agony seemed to be crushing half of his body, but the Jamaican drug lord was looking to make a far more impressive dent in his adversary’s skull with the empty shotgun.

      It felt as if Bolan were pushing his knife-wielding fist through molasses, muscles screaming at him to stop even as the double-bladed dagger’s tip struck Long Eddy in his chest, between the fourth and fifth buttons of his vividly colored shirt. There was resistance as the knife encountered a Kevlar vest underneath the linen shirt, but Bolan pushed hard with both legs, using their tremendous strength to add to the penetration power of the knife. The Kevlar’s ripping gave way to the squishy parting of flesh and the grinding rustle of bone cut by steel.

      Blood poured over Long Eddy’s lower lip, his big brown eyes bulging in horror.

      “Fuck…er…” Eddy gurgled as the Bokor Applegate-Fairbairn fighting blade twisted in the man’s chest, tearing arteries and bronchial tissue.

      Bolan didn’t respond except to bring up the Beretta. A stroke of the trigger left the would-be king of Jamaican crime without half of his face and skull. Bone snagged the knife blade between ribs, and Bolan didn’t have the strength to yank it out. He simply released the blade’s handle, and Long Eddy’s corpse toppled backward over the rail, gangly limbs flying in the air as he struck the water.

      Honey had figured out how to work the throttle and had killed the boat’s engines, then turned to Bolan. “You came for me?”

      Bolan nodded weakly, collapsing into the pilot’s seat now that the danger was over. Less than a hundred yards away, black dorsal fins broke the surface around the splashy froth where Eddy had gone into the Caribbean Sea. “It let me take care of two birds with one stone.”

      Honey chuckled nervously. “What do I call you now?”

      “Friend is good enough,” Bolan answered. The trembling young woman gave him a tight hug, her eyes clenched shut so she couldn’t see him silently redden as she aggravated his broken rib.

      “They were going to sell us,” Honey whispered. “The bastards were going to sell us.”

      Bolan stroked the frightened young woman’s hair. “You’re too rebellious to be for sale, Honey. You’d have found a way out.”

      Sooner or later, Bolan was going to have to start the engines and head for land, but right now, he had to soothe a young woman’s trauma and recover enough strength to pilot the craft. Above, Jack Grimaldi orbited the Hughes over the speedboat. With luck, Bolan would have a week or three to recover from the injuries he received today, but Long Eddy, the King of the Caribbean, was dead.

      Bolan put enough breath together for four words as he watched a shark swim past, a gangly leg in its jaws. “Long live the king.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      Three couples were entwined in each other’s arms on the bobbing yacht that was anchored at sea. They were watching the Caribbean sunset, yet seemed more interested in their partner’s curves and supple warmth.

      It was an idyllic interlude, the soundtrack provided by an MP3 file pumping out tropic island tunes over the yacht’s sound system.

      Pierre Fortescue felt a pang of regret for ruining such a perfect romantic vacation, but it was quickly subsumed as he remembered that these were Americans, the people who had withdrawn their approval and allowed the Duvaliers’ ceaseless control of Haiti to disappear. Since the end of Papa Doc’s and Baby Doc’s reign, Fortescue’s home nation had fallen into a sewer pit. The worst insult was when the earthquake that he and the rest of his cult had prayed for was misread as the punishment of God against the nation that had bartered their freedom to the Devil.

      Fortescue snorted. The gods that he and the Black Avengers spoke with predated the quaint humanist concepts of a supreme being weak enough to let his son be nailed to a tree. The loa were no sniveling pacifists, no way in heaven or hell. When the Fortescue family’s first Haitian ancestors called them down, their vengeance against France was a total emasculation that had allowed the British, an insane emperor, the Nazis and now the Muslims to overrun them and bring them ruin. The loa didn’t caress their enemies, they scourged the fools until they were hollow echoes of their former selves.

      France was but one crippled victim of the dark lords of voodoo. And now, America and Haiti would feel the harsh caresses of voodoo magic.

      The motion of the yacht wasn’t sufficient to make it hard for the tall, dark-skinned Fortescue to hop up, grab the rail and haul himself over. There were two young people on the deck, a swarthy young man with black hair, nuzzling into the neck of a young blond woman who looked emaciated except for a pair of swollen breasts too large for her bony torso.

      Fortescue, crouching out of sight behind the deckhouse, sneered as he realized that those were probably some of the best breasts that money could buy. Typical whites—so frightened of having an ounce of body fat on them, and yet they were envious of the voluptuous curves of healthy women.

      One of his fellow Black Avenger raiders had slipped aboard as he observed the scene, then opened up a small duffel to retrieve the inoculator pistols. Fortescue loaded the first twin-dart cartridge into the breech of the inoculator. The tiny weapons were designed for dealing with animals, and had been stolen from a Florida wildlife ranger station.

      Fortescue walked onto the bow, staying low so as not to betray his position, yet craning his neck to see if there was any semblance of alarm on the part of the two couples on the port deck. They, like the couple closest to him, were oblivious to the presence of dark raiders on their craft. Fortescue cleared his throat, and the man looked up in his direction.

      Fortescue could see that the young man was a Hispanic, and the young Latino grunted as Fortescue’s first dart caught him under his pectoral muscle. The dart wasn’t actually an anaesthetic but a quick-acting paralytic. The dose froze the young man, rendering him inert, yet not strong enough to stop his lungs. The blonde woman was about to squeal when Fortescue punched his second dart into her, striking her in the stomach. He wasn’t certain that if the dart had struck one of those silicone-inflated bags on her chest that it would reach her bloodstream.

      The blonde stiffened in paralysis, the paralytic effects of the tubocurarine hitting her like a ton of bricks. The toxin was one of the main chemicals from the primitive jungle poison curare. The young woman’s eyes widened with horror as she was unable to move. She was too small, too light, for the dose of toxin that Fortescue had put into her, but as long as her diaphragm was paralyzed, she couldn’t make noise. It was better to let her die here, on the yacht.

      The young man beside her was strong enough that his chest still rose and fell, lungs working despite the complete loss of strength in his arms and legs. He’d likely survive the dosing with tetrodotoxin, leaving him mentally malleable. It wasn’t as if a scrawny, ninety-pound girl would have provided as much of a threat as a 180-pound man, not with the plan proposed by Morrot, the Black Avengers’ leader.

      Blue eyes looked up pleadingly at Fortescue. The young woman looked as if she wanted to move her lips, minor twitches, but the power of the tubocurarine was just too much for her. It would take upward of a minute or two more for her to suffocate. The young man twitched, able to influence his own body that much, staying alive.