Mission To Burma

“So what’s his story?”

“He was operating in the northern mountains, in the Sagaing Division about a decade ago. He fell in love with a Naga tribeswoman. The local opium lord came in and wiped out her village. She and Nyin’s illegitimate child were killed. Nyin’s commander had a business arrangement with the drug lord and did nothing. The Naga are headhunters. The practice was banned in 1991, but rumor is some of the good old boys up in the hills still stick to the old ways. Rumor is Nyin got together a few of his woman’s relatives, got tattooed and inducted into the tribe, and they went and got a little payback. Most U.S. heroin comes from Afghanistan and Mexico, but a lot of the heroin in England is still coming in from the Golden Triangle. Nyin’s been one of the guys on the ground for MI-6’s antinarcotic Southeast Asia sector for a decade. Mostly, he works against the drug trade, but apparently he’s given them military intelligence from time to time, as well as helping break up a few slavery rings. He’d be your liaison among the locals.” Brognola cleared his throat. “If you go…”

“Anything else you need to tell me?”

“Well, now that you mention it, NSA has picked up some chatter.”

“What kind of chatter?”

“They believe the Indian government is aware of the situation and possibly even taking action.”

Bolan considered that. “India is a strategic ally of ours. Particularly against China. You’d think we’d be allies on this one.”

“So you’d think. But knowledge of China’s latest generation strategic nuclear missiles is vital to India. They lost a border war with them in the 1960s and still have ‘incidents’ with China every year. India might not wait for us to secure the information and share it. They’ll want to get hold of it first, and then probably trade the U.S. and Taiwan something for it economically. Chatter is India may have already deployed assets, and you shouldn’t necessarily expect them to be helpful or even friendly.”

Bolan sat back in his chair. “Great.”

“Listen, Mack, you don’t have to—”

“I’ll have to HALO in.”

Brognola blinked. “You’ll do it?”

“Yeah.” Bolan nodded. “I’ll do it.”

Kumon Mountains

BOLAN LOPED through the trees. It had taken eighteen hours for him to get geared up and to the Diego Garcia Airbase in the Indian Ocean. It took the B-2 Stealth “Spirit” bomber another six to get over northern Burma. Burmese air defense had no radars that could detect the bat-winged bomber, and even if they lucked out it was unlikely they could scramble anything in time to catch it. The problem with a Stealth bomber was it was not designed as a passenger plane. Bolan had ridden in a pressurized, coffin-size pod that had been adapted to fit into one of the rotary launcher assemblies the bombers used to launch cruise missiles. The pod had been just big enough to hold Bolan and his equipment. The belly of the Spirit of Texas had opened, and the transport pod had ejected and fallen free at thirty thousand feet. Bolan had opened the pod at twenty-seven thousand and deployed his chute. He had flown thirty miles into the Kumon Mountains and landed in the designated clearing on his map.

Fatso was nowhere to be found.

Bolan looked at his wrist. Strapped to it was a PDA with a phone feature, but basically Bolan almost had a supercomputer on his wrist. He was using the GPS to navigate his way toward the transponder. He tapped an icon and spoke into his satellite link. “Base, this is Striker. What have we got on infrared imaging?”

Barbara Price came back instantly. The Farm’s mission controller was watching Bolan’s progress on no less than three U.S. satellites. The Chinese data was that big. “Striker, this is Base. I have a possible heat source a hundred yards due east of your position.”

“Copy that. Give me feed.”

“Copy that, Striker.”

A red blob appeared on Bolan’s screen marking his target. A green blob represented him, along with a superimposed grid giving him distance.

Bolan slung his rifle. There had been no point to trying to blend in as Burmese, so Bolan had cherry picked his equipment. He carried a highly modified Steyr Scout Rifle. A suppressor tube covered most of the already short, fluted barrel, and it was loaded with subsonic ammunition. The bolt-action rifle had a 10-round magazine. Its optical sight was set forward of the action to give long-eye relief, allowing the operator to keep both eyes open and take in the full field of view, as well as look through the sight while using night-vision gear. The action was glass-on-oil smooth and the trigger tuned to a glass-rod break. It was a sharpshooter’s weapon rather than a sniper’s rifle, the weapon of a skirmisher rather than an assassin. Bolan’s rifle also happened to have an M-203 grenade launcher mounted beneath the fore-stock for serious social occasions such as needing to break contact, and he carried a bandolier of grenades slung across one shoulder. His Beretta 93-R machine pistol was strapped to his thigh, but that was not the weapon he went for.

Bolan drew his tomahawk in one hand and his Cold Steel Outdoorsman knife in the other as he ran wide around his adversary. Bolan was going to have to lurk rather than infiltrate and considered both implements much more as tools than weapons. However, a bullet was never sure, and a man could still flail with his throat cut.

There was no surer way of silencing a sentry than sinking a tomahawk into the back of his head.

Bolan squelched his electronic devices and moved in for the kill. Most people thought of Southeast Asia as one vast, green mass of impenetrable vegetation, but much of it, Burma in particular, was much more rolling low mountains of hardwood forest.

Bolan could see his prey in his night-vision goggles. A man was crouched on a little promontory holding a rifle. Bolan noted the short, curved blade of a dha sword thrust through his belt. The man knelt in a stand of trees that made a sheltering cathedral on the little knoll and looked down on the valley below. It was a perfect hunter’s point. Bolan’s boots made no noise in the soft soil as he approached. The man jerked in alarm as the Executioner whipped the bottom edge of his tomahawk under his chin and yanked him backward. The man froze as the point of Bolan’s blade pressed against his liver. “Nyin?”

“Shit, Hot rod! Don’t sneak up on a brother like that!”

Bolan withdrew his steel, and the man sagged and turned. Fat Sho Nyin wiped his sweating bald head and exposed his buck teeth in a shaky smile of relief. He took in the goggle-eyed, weapon-laden and camouflaged warrior looming over him and shook his head. “God damn! Uncle Sam ain’t playing around!”

“No, he’s not,” Bolan agreed. He sheathed his weapons and held out his hand. “MI-6 has a lot of good things to say about you. My name is Cooper.”

Fatso clapped his palm happily into Bolan’s hand. “Bullshit GI! But you go ahead and call me Fatso. I will call you Cooper.”

Bolan shrugged. “Make it Coop.”

“Coop.” Nyin savored the familiar diminutive. “Sorry I was not at extraction sight. Some assholes came by.”

“What kind of assholes?”

Nyin’s smile dimmed in wattage. “U Than assholes.”

Bolan knew all about U Than. He was an opium warlord, and they were deep in his territory, which was where Lily’s transponder signal was transmitting from. The good news was that U Than was in league with the heroin syndicates in Thailand rather than the triads in China. Of course, ten or twenty million Chinese yuan notes could change that allegiance, but at least he wasn’t going to immediately go goose-stepping to Beijing and hand over Lily without some profitable negotiation first. U Than’s problem was that while he ruled his area, he was surrounded by three ethnic groups that considered him their traditional enemy. He had a private army of his own and some backing by some high-ranking army officers, but his neighbors and even his serfs were highly warlike and given to rebellion at the least sign of weakness or provocation. He guarded his poppy fields to the death, but if he was sending men up into the highlands at night that meant U Than was all stirred up about something.

Bolan had a good idea what.

“Have you seen the woman?”

“No, but I saw crash site. It was no ‘catastrophic mechanical failure.’ That plane shot down. I know cannon hits when I see them.”

“Any survivors?”

Nyin shook his head. “No one survive that. You want to see?”

“No, the woman is our priority, and according to intel she jumped right before the fighters opened up.”

“What woman look like?”

Bolan tapped an icon on his screen and called up a photo of Lily Na. “This.”

“God damn!” Nyin shook his head in wonder. “That worth going to war over!”

Bolan changed the screen back to the GPS tracking Lily’s transponder signal and then spoke over his link. “Base, this is Striker. Have established contact with Fat Man. Proceeding to signal source.”

“Copy that, Striker.”

Bolan turned to Nyin. “You ready to go to war?”

Nyin grinned and brandished an ancient-looking .30 carbine. “Always!”

“Then follow me.” Bolan set out at a ground-eating jog, and despite his laughing-Buddha-like physique Nyin kept up easily. Bolan watched as the signal got closer and closer on his screen. They had to stop twice as armed men passed by on the trails through the heavy woods.

“Dangerous place,” Nyin muttered after a group of men passed by. The men weren’t wearing uniforms and wore a hodgepodge of Western and traditional highland clothing. They also carried a collection of weapons from the latest assault rifles to World War II relics. All carried one or more blades. They were sweeping the forest trails and keeping a wary eye on the forest itself. Traditionally it was where danger came from. They were right to be wary. This night Mack Bolan crouched among the giant ferns, and the forest had never been more dangerous.