Mission To Burma. Don Pendleton

have bad guys coming my way!” Nyin responded, but the grenade launcher down in Ta village thumped. The two men up in the tower noticed Bolan and Lily as they reached the palisade. One began shouting, while the other raised a rifle.

      The grenade launcher thumped again as Lily wriggled through the hole. The Willy Pete hit the front of the house, and the men on the porch screamed as white-hot smoke and streamers of burning metal erupted in all directions. Bolan slid outside. Men continued to stream out the gate, and at the pier engines were roaring into life as armed men piled into the boats for an amphibious assault on the grenadier in the village.

      Bolan spoke into his motherboard. “Fatso, I’m not going to be able to reach the boats. Extract, and I’ll meet you at the promontory.”

      “Yes, Coop!” Nyin responded. “I am extracting!”

      Bolan grabbed Lily’s hand and ran for the tree line. Behind them gray gas and white smoke was blanketing U Than’s fortress in a fog of war. It was a war that had just begun, and tomorrow it would become a hunt. U Than was going to want some payback.

      It was more than five hundred miles to the border of Thailand.

      4

      Ta village

      Captain Tam-Sam Dai passed out small bribes and iron-palmed slaps liberally among the villagers. None seemed to be able to give him any useful information, and he doubted hard interrogation would yield anything more. U Than had kept the village locked down for two days after salvaging everything of value from the crashed jet and capturing the woman. The villagers had heard the fighting the previous night and had quite prudently locked their shutters and doors and huddled in their huts with the lights off.

      Dai was a member of the PRC’s Special Operations Forces, specifically their highly secretive Special Purpose Force, or infiltration unit. The PRC kept special forces units whose members could pass as citizens of every nation they had a common border with, as well as many they did not. Dai was a member of China’s ethnic Shan minority. His skin was copper colored, and though incredibly broad shouldered he stood barely five feet tall. He spoke perfect Burmese and could easily pass himself as a native hill man of Burma, Thailand or Laos.

      Chinese military satellites had been intensely scrutinizing the area of the crash site. Dai and his team had been dropped in immediately but found the wreckage and the bodies stripped of all valuables. The satellites had detected the battle last night and vectored Dai and his men in. Dai had captured a villager, given him an envelope with a very thick stack of Chinese one-hundred yuan notes to take to U Than, along with the message that he would like to meet with him.

      The meeting had gone well. Several million yuan had soothed U Than’s troubled soul. Promise of aid in rebuilding had further convinced the warlord that he should conduct business with the Chinese triads rather than the syndicates in Thailand. All very profitable. Captain Dai’s superiors in Beijing had already commended him on it; however, the loyalties of U Than were not the main issue here.

      Dai glanced up as Sergeant Hwa-Che came trotting down from the burned-out mansion and gave his report. He, too, was Shan but he gave his report in Mandarin so that U Than and his people would not know what was said. “Captain, we have discovered residue of high explosive in the tower top and in the crater in the compound. The house was clearly burned down with white phosphorous. The hole in the palisade was cut with flexible charge. I believe the grenade barrage was done from Ta village and acted as a diversion while the Na woman and the computer were extracted.” The sergeant spit betel and frowned mightily. “It is clearly the work of U.S. Special Forces.”

      Captain Dai had already surmised that. He frowned at Hwa-Che. He knew the sergeant’s ways well. “What is bothering you?”

      Hwa-Che slid his eye over to the pier where U Than and several of his men were gathered by the boats. “I have spoken with Maung.”

      Dai was an adept at snake-hand kung fu, but even he had to admit the hulking man gave him pause. “And what says the mighty Maung?”

      “He says there was only one American.”

      Dai scowled. “One?”

      “Yes, and have you noticed Maung’s face, Captain?”

      It was hard not to. Maung was incredibly ugly to begin with, but now both of his eyes were a raccoon’s mask of bruising and his shattered nose looked like a flattened squid. “Yes, I have noticed.”

      “He said the American did it. Maung and two of the Thai bullyboys had the drop on the American, yet he defeated them with a flashlight and his bare hands and then took the woman. One has a broken jaw and the other sits on a sack of ice and pees blood.”

      Dai’s scowl deepened. “I find that hard to believe.”

      “I have also spoken with our Naga trackers. There are only one pair of boot prints leading to and away from the compound, and leading away the bare feet of a single woman.”

      “What about here in the village?”

      Hwa-Che shrugged. “All the footprints in Ta village are bare feet or native sandals. On the other hand, the Naga say the boot prints in the compound are large, definitely Caucasian, and undoubtedly belonging to a man such as Maung has described.”

      Dai settled on his plan. “Have the Naga begin tracking immediately. Gather the men and any of U Than’s who seem likely, and tell U Than he will be well rewarded for any assistance he gives us.”

      “What is the plan, Captain?”

      “One or two Americans, operating alone, could play hide-and-seek with us for months up here in the mountains, but that is not their mission. They must try to break out of Burma.”

      Hwa-Che brightened as he saw it. “The woman!”

      “Yes, the woman is the key. She is not American Special Forces. She is Taiwanese intelligence. Whoring, spying and assassination are her game. She will slow her rescuers.”

      One look at the woman had convinced U Than there was a hefty ransom somewhere, and he had kept his men from abusing the woman. Captain Dai had told U Than over the phone as he came in that China wanted the woman intact. That was not out of any sense of propriety. Lily Na would be horribly punished, but Chinese interrogators would start the punishment, and they did not feel like swimming in dirty water. Dai’s men had all seen her picture and been briefed on the mission. They were already gambling numbers for who would take her first. Dai did not discourage such talk. Their only orders concerning her were to bring her back alive and ready for interrogation. As captain, he would of course get first dibs.

      Dai peered up into the thickly wooded hills. “We will run them down.”

      FOR A WOMAN who had spent two days lost in the mountains and twenty-four hours as the guest of an opium lord hanging in a cage, Bolan thought Lily looked fantastic. She had cut the flowered batik-print sarong Bolan had stolen for her to above the knees for action and knotted the men’s dress shirt under her ribs. She carried her Uzi with familiar ease.

      But her feet were bruised, abraded and swollen. She had been barefoot for forty-eight hours in the mountains, and their night run from U Than’s compound hadn’t done her any favors. By the end of another day of hiking, her feet would be broken open, bleeding and going septic in the Southeast Asian soil and Bolan would be carrying her.

      Lily sat against a tree and wiggled her swollen toes. “So what is our plan for extraction?”

      “That’s a good question,” Bolan replied. “Burma is shaped like a diamond, and we’re in the north. We’ve got six hundred miles of Chinese border to the east, and then about the same to the west with India.”

      Her jade eyes narrowed slightly. “India is in play?”

      “It looks that way, and they may not be our friends on this one. I have forged documents for both of us and money. There are two airports in the north, Seniku and Bhamo. Both are about equidistant to us. We could clean ourselves