Contagion Option. Don Pendleton

CHAPTER TWENTY

       CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

       EPILOGUE

      PROLOGUE

      The body plummeted through the sky and crashed with a dull, sickening thump into the dry grass. More bodies followed as the transport plane made a slow, lazy circle over the field.

      The team had done this a hundred times before, and the men, dressed in black, took to the field.

      The bodies were hollowed-out cattle, their bellies distended with packages. Some clinked with the heavy ring of metal, while others were stiff pillows of compressed powder. Two of the cows were filled with rolls of rifles, wrapped in plastic and cushioning foam.

      “Looks like Christmastime for the gang,” a man dressed in black mentioned as he pulled the weapons from the body cavity of the slaughtered animal. “Must be twenty rifles here.”

      “Chatter,” another replied quietly.

      The first fell quiet, admonished with a single word. Sound carried, and even though their helicopter had scanned the area for miles with infrared and radar, they still worked in hushed, professional silence to ensure their private, midnight endeavor went undetected.

      In the darkness, none of the men in black used regular white lights. Occasionally they would flash on a low-powered, low-signature red light, but only for a moment. In the empty field, there was too much risk of strangers noticing.

      They had been doing this for years and hadn’t been caught.

      One man spoke among the group. “Leave a souvenir for the conspiracy theorists.”

      The others nodded and as they dragged a dozen carcasses off the field, they left one lying in the dried grass.

      One man pulled a small butane-lighter-like device and burned a brand into the carcass. He worked from memory, knowing which ranch they were on.

      The rest of the team took out folding rakes and went over the entirety of the field before returning to the helicopter. The branding artist backed his way to the helicopter, obscuring his tracks, leaving no trace that anyone was ever there. The long, padded skids of the transport chopper rose from a patch of hard, rocky soil and sparse grass leaving little clue of the vehicle’s presence.

      The presence of the gutted cow would obfuscate the situation handily. No one would suspect their smuggling ring, in business across several decades, was in operation. Not when investigators were hampered by crackpot theorists who blamed slaughtered cattle on aliens or top-secret Army surgical teams testing surgical lasers. The truth was at once mundane and would shock the world should it ever get out.

      But the men in black, as they left the gutted, cauterized corpse in the field, wouldn’t be responsible for that leak in secrecy.

      The dark helicopter rose into the Utah night, its Kevlar hull minimizing its radar signature to that of a sparrow, sideways speakers reflecting the sound of the rotors at a right angle to the original racket to dampen the noise to a thrumming whisper. The stealth bird swung lazily back toward its home base.

      It was business as usual.

      CHAPTER ONE

      The Gulf of Thailand, twenty miles out of Pattaya

      It was business as usual for Mack Bolan, a.k.a. the Executioner, as Jack Grimaldi raced Dragon Slayer low over the Gulf of Thailand, so low that the sea spray pelted the windshield. The high-tech combat helicopter was loaded to the gills with electronics and weaponry to give Bolan the kind of edge he needed when fighting impossible odds. The war bird had been designed specifically for the soldier’s crusade against the forces of evil. With encrypted communications, wireless satellite computer links and sensors that could pick up anything across the spectrum, Dragon Slayer could find almost any target. Laden with rocket and grenade launchers, and the awesome .50-caliber GECAL multibarreled machine gun, the helicopter could destroy even a small column of tanks.

      Grimaldi held them low over the water, about five feet between the belly of the sleek bird and the tops of the tallest waves. With speakers that reflected the sound of the bird’s own rotor slap at ninety-degree angles to the original sound, the normal thunder and roar of the helicopter was muffled to little more than a low hum. This was a stealth insertion on a freighter loaded with contraband from Thailand.

      The ship was on course for North Korea. The freighter was registered to Liberia, which enabled it to travel around the world without more than a second glance. Sometimes that registry also covered illegal operations, but since major corporations profited from both tourism and “under the counter” transportation of goods, powerful sponsorship kept governments from looking too closely at the problem.

      Mack Bolan wasn’t the government. He wasn’t a civil servant with a license to kill. Certainly, through the Sensitive Operations Group at Stony Man Farm, he had official backup in the form of intelligence, a gunsmith and occasionally two of the best covert strike teams on the planet. Still, the Executioner considered them just that—backup. He enjoyed his camaraderie with the warriors and support crew at Stony Man, but he was his own man, with his own resources and his own crusades. Even Dragon Slayer had been funded from the massive war chest that Bolan had accumulated, the spoils of countless wars against organized crime. While the aircraft was assigned to Stony Man Farm and was registered to the United States Justice Department by the Federal Aviation Commission, the Executioner didn’t let taxpayer dollars fund his arsenal. Instead, the sleek aircraft had been funded from money “donated” by gangsters, drug dealers and terrorists.

      Where the donors had been sent, they wouldn’t ever need money again.

      “Coming up on the freighter. ETA thirty seconds,” Grimaldi said over Bolan’s LASH radio.

      “Smooth ride as usual,” he told the pilot.

      Grimaldi smiled. “Well, the last time the lady was flying in Thailand, she took a pounding. She’s proving to Daddy that she can handle this.”

      Bolan grinned, then opened the side door. He’d have to get out quickly. Even with a radar signature the size of a hummingbird, and making not much more sound, the rotor wash would be noticeable to anyone on the freighter’s deck. In addition, the helicopter itself wasn’t invisible, despite its dark-colored hull. The ship’s running lights would betray Dragon Slayer’s presence in a heartbeat.

      He gripped the sides of the door opening as Grimaldi popped the helicopter up and over the rail. With a surge of muscles, Bolan leaped to the deck, landing in a crouch, then rolling into a somersault as Grimaldi dipped the helicopter back and out of sight. The drop was fifteen feet, but Bolan was strong and agile, and he allowed momentum and supple movement to absorb most of the shock.

      As soon as he hit, Bolan drew his Beretta 93-R, folding grip snapped down, sound suppressor in place.

      On a data screen in the passenger cabin of Dragon Slayer, he’d kept an eye on infrared blobs, humans walking the decks, memorizing where his enemies were on this ship. According to the scanners, there were twenty-five people on board in various compartments.

      That didn’t count the containers in the hold. Infrared scans had trouble going through both the hull and the tractor-trailer containers in the hold, but there was a definite heat signature that caught Bolan’s attention. He was here on the advice of an old ally in Thailand who had said that the ship was smuggling people to North Korea. Bolan had pulled a few strings to get Dragon Slayer delivered, because he knew the sleek high-tech aircraft could possibly be needed to get wounded or dying bystanders back to shore.

      Bolan had engaged the slave trade in Thailand once before, and had dropped a brutal ax on its neck. The trade still existed and thrived, because the Executioner had been able to take out only one mastermind of the insidious child slavery