China White

And he had something else the two young Wah Ching Triad soldiers couldn’t match: experience. He had been fighting for his life before the pair of them was out of grade school. He’d sent hundreds of mafiosi to their graves during his one-man war against the Cosa Nostra, by the FBI’s best estimate, and no one had been keeping score since he had pioneered the war on terrorism, operating on behalf of Uncle Sam.

All that since he had “died”—on paper, anyway—roughly a half mile from the spot where he was parked right now, in Central Park. Broad daylight, he’d been shot to hell, incinerated in front of a flock of witnesses.

Or so the story went.

And maybe it was true what people said. You couldn’t keep a good man down.

He saw the ferry coming now, making its slow and steady way across the broad East River. In the old days, Dutch Schultz and his ilk had dropped their adversaries into that gray water, their feet set in concrete. How many skeletons were down there, even now, their eyeless sockets gazing upward at the ferry as it passed?

Good riddance, Bolan thought. There’d always be a new crop lining up to fill the slots dead mobsters left behind.

As the ferry docked, he raised a pair of compact field glasses and focused on the gangway, waiting for his target to appear.

* * *

“WE SHOULD’VE SENT somebody with him,” John Lin said, watching the ferry as it nosed into the pier.

Smoking a cigarette beside him, Louis Chao said, “He was covered in New Jersey, all the way to boarding.”

“Still, after that shit with Tommy—”

“Nobody’s about to jump him on the ferry,” Chao said, interrupting him. “They can’t get off the boat until it docks, and there’d be cops all over, waiting for them.”

“Right. Sounds good, unless you’re dealing with a bunch of lunatics.”

“Hey, we’re the lunatics, remember?” Chao was smiling at him through a haze of smoke. “And payback’s gonna be a stone-cold bitch.”

“I don’t like all these cars around here,” Lin complained.

“We’re in a parking lot, for Christ’s sake. What did you expect?”

“I mean, they could be anywhere, you know? Just waiting.”

“Then you’d better keep your eyes peeled, Johnny Boy. Be ready for them.”

Lin was ready, even looking forward to it, with his Uzi cocked and locked, ready to rip if anyone looked sideways at the courier they’d come to meet. He was another Wah Ching brother, Martin Tang, who’d carried cash across the river bright and early, met his escorts on the Jersey side, and called home when the deal was done. Now he was on his way back with the skag, and it was Lin’s job to deliver both—the man and what he carried—to their boss in Chinatown.

So Lin was strapped, backing the Uzi with a sleek Beretta Px4 tucked underneath his belt, around in back, and for insurance, in an ankle holster, a little Colt Mustang .380. If none of that worked, he had a Balisong knife with a seven-inch blade in his pocket, sharp enough to shave with or to cut off some miserable lowlife’s head.

All that and Chao still had him outgunned. He’d brought a Bushmaster Adaptive Combat Rifle, made by Remington, and wore a double shoulder holster bearing a matched pair of Glock 33s, chambered for .357 SIG rounds. That still was not enough for his partner, though. He also carried a 4-shot COP .357 Magnum derringer, and just for luck, had put two M-67 fragmentation grenades in the glove compartment of their black Ford Focus.

They were ready for war, and as much as John Lin ached for payback, he hoped they could make it back to the Lucky Dragon without killing anyone along the way. Or getting killed themselves.

“I see him,” Chao said. “He’s just starting down the ramp.”

Tang was younger than Lin by six months or so, but had proved himself in action for the Wah Ching Triad. Nothing super-hideous, a little cutting and a drive-by, but he’d passed the test and this was graduation day. He might be nervous, but it wasn’t showing as he ambled down the ferry’s boarding ramp, keeping it casual among the tourists and commuters, careful not to jostle anybody with his suitcase full of powdered treasure.

It had come a long way from the Golden Triangle, halfway around the planet, to wind up in New York City, where it would keep several thousand junkies flying high and looking forward to their next fix, and the next one after that. Between times, they could rob their neighbors, prostitute themselves, do whatever it took to raise the cash for one more in an endless series of departures from reality. Lin knew the drill and didn’t care what kind of suffering the product ultimately caused, as long as he was paid his share to make it happen.

He was all about free enterprise.

Lin thought of Tommy Mu again and scanned the parking lot with restless eyes. He had a fair idea of who had taken Mu down, and no one he had spotted so far looked the part. They might have hired white boys to do the dirty work, of course, but as Lin understood it, Afghans weren’t averse to bloody hands.

It was something they had in common with the Wah Ching brotherhood.

Tang had disembarked, had seen their car and was moving toward it at a normal walking pace. The trick was not to stand out in a crowd, whether you had a package to deliver or were closing on a hit in broad daylight. Look normal, even boring. Fly under the radar.

“Hey, man, how’d it go?” Chao asked as the courier put his bag in the backseat and slid in next to it.

“No sweat,” Tang replied. “This end?”

“We’re cool,” Chao said.

Lin thought things were okay so far, but kept it to himself.

Two minutes later they were rolling south along 12th Avenue, which would become the Lincoln Highway once they crossed West 42nd Street. From there it was a straight run to the juncture where Canal Street paralleled the Holland Tunnel, and a left turn through Lower Manhattan on their way to Chinatown.

An easy trip, unless you were at war and being hunted.

Lin drove well, obeying all the laws, watching the traffic up ahead and flicking frequent glances at his rearview mirror, watching for a tail.

Eternal vigilance was the price of running an illegal business in New York.

* * *

BOLAN TRAILED THE Ford south at a cautious distance. Taking out the couriers was not part of his plan. He wanted them to lead him home, show him the drop and let him scout the neighborhood for angles of attack.

It wouldn’t be the simplest job he’d ever done. White faces were anomalies in Chinatown. Locals could spot the tourists, often coming by the Gray Line busload, trooping in and out of cheesy shops to drop their money. But a round-eye snooping on his own meant cop or worse, and he’d get nothing in the way of information from the members of that closed community. Start poking into corners on his own, and he could meet resistance well beyond a simple wall of silence.

Picking up the Jersey shipment was a coup of sorts. He’d had to squeeze a dealer for the intel, then make sure his source was in no shape to rat him out to the higher-ups. Call that the first kill on his latest visit to New York, but not the last. Before they found the dealer’s body, Bolan reckoned he’d be finished in Manhattan, likely on his way to some more distant battleground.

But he was taking care of first things first.

There was a war brewing in New York City, ready to explode between the Wah Ching Triad and a gang of interlopers from Afghanistan. Two syndicates financed primarily by the sale of heroin produced in their respective bailiwicks had come to blows, and the prognosis was for worse to come. In other circumstances Bolan would have been content to stand aside and let them kill each other, but the action had already claimed civilian lives and that was where he drew the line.

Police were on it, sure, along with Feds from several agencies. For all he knew, the Afghan angle might be setting off alarms at Homeland Security back in D.C. That made it doubly dicey, jumping into the middle of a war and dodging cops of all persuasions in the process. It was nothing that he hadn’t done before, but still a challenge.

One more chance to do or die.

The Ford was making good time, rolling south with Lincoln Highway turning into West Street once they got past Barrow. Bolan knew they’d likely take Canal Street, veering off southeastward from the river on its way to Chinatown, just south of Little Italy. He’d spent his share of time in that vicinity, as well, when he was hunting killers of a different complexion, but the local Mafia—whatever might be left of it—was safe from him today.

Next week...who knew?

Part of the deal this day was to watch out for other tails. A shipment on the road, ten keys at least, made an inviting target for the other side. The last thing Bolan wanted was to get caught in a cross fire or, worse yet, to see the delivery go up in smoke before he marked its final destination. Later, sure, he’d torch the smack himself, and everyone associated with it.

So he was watching when the midsize SUV with three male passengers became a fixture in his rearview. Bolan made it as a Chevy Trailblazer, as black as the Ford that he was following, hanging behind him in no rush to pass. It could be coincidence, since Bolan hadn’t seen the vehicle at the ferry terminal, but he already had that itchy feeling he’d learned to trust in situations where his life was riding on the line.

A tail, maybe. He bumped it up to definitely when the shotgun rider shifted in his seat and let the muzzle of a weapon rise above the dash for just an instant. It was there and gone but Bolan caught it, and he didn’t think it was a pogo stick, a fishing pole or the antenna on a satellite phone. Those were hunters in the SUV. The only question now: were they on Bolan’s tail or following the heroin?