Blood Tide. Don Pendleton

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.

      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