Mission To Burma. Don Pendleton

button and counted down the seconds. The compound lit up in an orange flash as the offensive grenade detonated. Bolan pressed his own detonator, and the crack of the flexible charge was lost in the thunder. Armed men spilled out of the main house like a kicked-over anthill. The tear-gas grenade landed, and its multiple skip-chaser bomblets broke apart and began spewing out gray gas. The two men in the watchtower were shouting and pointing frantically. The men below began flailing and clawing at their eyes as what they thought was smoke from the explosion turned out to be war-strength CN tear gas.

      Bolan pushed in the panel of bamboo he’d cut with his charge and crawled into the compound. Everyone was running toward the commotion while Bolan moved toward the back of the main house. The back of the fortress was more prosaic than the front and marked by pig enclosures, outdoor barbecue pits large enough to roast entire hogs and heat woks large enough for a grown man to go sledding in. Bolan moved through laundry lines hung with Western clothes, as well as native sarongs and tunics. He dropped between two stone washbasins as the back door flew open and a pair of men with submachine guns checked the back perimeter. Bolan waited a moment to be sure no one was behind them, then rose up with the 93-R in both hands. The machine pistol barely whispered as he put a 3-round burst into each man’s chest. Bolan moved up the low stone steps past the two dead men and entered U Than’s compound.

      The back porch opened onto the kitchen. A pair of women wearing turbans were huddled in a corner clutching each other as gunfire rattled from the front of the compound. They stared in slack-jawed horror at the grease-painted, camouflaged giant who had appeared in their midst. Bolan put a finger to his lips, and the two women nodded in vigorous assent. One of the women had a bruise under her eye, and Bolan suspected U Than and the boys weren’t too respectful of the hired help. They cringed as Bolan loomed over them and tried to press themselves back through the wall as he dropped to a knee in front of them. Their fear turned to awe as Bolan displayed Lily’s photo on the PDA on his wrist. He reached into a pocket of web gear and produced two thick folds of Burmese currency. He held the money up and shrugged. “Where?” he asked quietly.

      Both women pointed back the way Bolan had come.

      Bolan cleared the screen on his PDA and brought up the sketching function. He took out the stylus and drew a quick sketch with a circle for the palisade and squares for the main house and the outbuildings. Bolan shrugged again.

      Both women pointed at the smaller square directly behind the main house.

      Bolan handed them the money and retraced his steps. His target was the largest of the outbuildings. It was a heavy-beamed A-frame with bamboo for walls, and the smell of smoked meat and fish radiated out from it. The Burmese people were overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhists, but most were also confirmed carnivores. Bolan’s destination was the meat-smoking and slaughterhouse. There was a light on within it.

      Bolan crept to the door. It wasn’t particularly well fitted, and through the seams he could see it was barred from the inside. He could also hear voices within. Bolan cut a two-inch length of flexible charge and pressed it into the doorjamb. The charge hissed as he pressed the detonator, and the shaped charged burned through the bar. The soldier put his boot into the door, and it flung open on its leather hinges.

      Two men started up in shock from playing with a laptop and reached for their automatic rifles. Bolan nailed both men in the chest with a triburst each, and they dropped to the dirt floor. Lily Na hung two feet from the floor in a bamboo tiger cage. Only sweat and humidity kept the shredded remnants of her black cocktail dress clinging to a divinely curved body. She had a black eye, but she perked the eyebrow over her good one in interest as she took in the commando before her and managed a smirk. “Hey, sailor.”

      Bolan shook his head at her situation. “This U Than asshole comes straight out of a comic book.”

      “He has issues.” Lily shrugged. “No doubt.”

      “Miss Na, my name is Cooper. I’m here to rescue you.” Bolan took in the tiger cage. It was made of bamboo, but the shafts were as thick as his arm and the knots of hemp that bound it together were like fists. A heavy iron padlock bound the door shut. He had only a foot of flexible charge left, and trying to saw or hack his way through any part of it would take too much time. Bolan handed Lily his pistol and pulled his lock-pick case from a pouch in his web gear. He chose a pair of tensile steel picks, put his tactical light between his teeth and began working the lock.

      Lily spoke low. “Men are coming.”

      Bolan ignored her and repeated the breaking-and-entering mantra. “Forget everything else, work the lock.”

      “They are almost here,” she urged.

      Bolan worked the lock.

      “They are upon us.”

      Bolan didn’t speak Burmese, but he understood the snarl of command coming from the open door. Lily spoke in a whisper. “Maung is here with two of his men. They are telling me to drop my gun and you to freeze.”

      “Do it,” Bolan ordered.

      Maung shouted in broken English. “You! Drop gun!”

      “But—”

      “Do it!”

      The Beretta fell through the floor of the cage. Bolan sighed inwardly as the weapon dropped into the blood-catching cistern set in the floor. A voice shouted the same angry words in Burmese twice. Lily flinched. “He says turn—”

      “You! Turn round!” Maung snarled.

      Bolan turned slowly.

      Maung was flanked by a pair of U Than’s kickboxers. All three carried licensed copies of Uzi submachine guns. Bolan dropped the lock picks. Maung motioned at the tactical light between the Executioner’s teeth. He very slowly removed it.

      Maung smiled to reveal his gold teeth in triumph.

      Bolan spun the bezel in the buttcap with his thumb, and the flashlight went to full-strength-strobe mode. Most tactical lights had an output of eighty to one hundred lumens. Bolan’s Farm-modified light sprayed out at a thousand and blinked at over twenty times per second. It would burn up his battery in moments, but light strobing at that intensity was known to induce seizures in epileptics, and during tests even trained soldiers and martial artists lost their spatial orientation and were reduced to staggering like blind drunks.

      The man to Maung’s right took a step forward and fell to his hands and knees. The man to Maung’s left teetered and stumbled against the doorjamb. Maung stood like a man leaning into a high wind and sprayed off a blind burst with his weapon. Lily yelped and cringed as bullets tore splinters from her bamboo cage.

      Bolan strode forward strobing continuously. The massive amping up of the light’s candlepower wasn’t the only modification. The body of the flashlight was titanium, and the rim surrounding the lens sported teeth like the jaws of a bear trap for impact fighting. Bolan drove the still strobing light between Maung’s eyes like an ice pick.

      Maung’s septum disintegrated beneath the blow. The shock of it dropped him to the floor as limp as a fish. Bolan drove his boot up between the legs of the man leaning against the door, and he fell vomiting next to his kneeling comrade. His comrade’s jaw shattered beneath Bolan’s heel. The big American drew his tomahawk and began chopping furiously at the hemp bindings of the cage. It was like chopping wood, but the strands slowly came apart. Bolan grabbed the bars of the cage and ripped the door off its hinges.

      Lily hopped down and grabbed her laptop.

      Bolan scooped up a fallen weapon and checked the loads. “That’s it?”

      Lily closed the laptop and picked up a fallen Uzi. “Yes, they did not know what they had. They were using it to peruse pornography.”

      “Let’s get you out of here.” Bolan and Lily ran from the smokehouse.

      The soldier snatched a sarong and a man’s shirt from the clothesline in passing as they ran for the hole burned in the wall. The men in the guard tower were pointing and screaming, but no one on the ground and in the gas was paying them