Contagion Option

Bolan’s fingers tightened and Pham’s eyes widened in horror as his feet left the deck. The pressure on his throat was enormous, not only from the crush of the Executioner’s grasp, but the weight of his own squirming body. Pham’s fingers dug into Bolan’s forearm, trying to pry it away to relieve the force of his own mass on his windpipe. “They never chose this life. Not that someone like you would care.”

Bolan let go and Pham crashed to the floor. The guard reached for his weapons, but somewhere along the line, probably in one of those moments when the air was being squeezed out of him, the tall, grim avenger had disarmed him. He crawled on all fours when Bolan stepped on his ankle, pinning him between two hundred plus pounds of muscle and sinew and crushing steel grating. Pham grit his teeth to keep from crying out. Bolan’s hand laced into the Vietnamese’s hair and yanked him up to a kneeling position. “I can find the hold myself. I don’t need a tour guide.”

Pham whimpered. “All right…all right…”

Bolan let go and Pham crawled to his feet. He walked with a limp, but by now, his spirit had been broken. Pham had no will to escape.

“Give me the knife and drag your dead friend into this cabin,” Bolan ordered.

Pham obeyed without a hint of protest. He pried the blade out of the corpse and handed it, pommel first, to Bolan. The soldier put the blade back in its quick-draw forearm sheath.

The Executioner wasn’t a cruel man, but he was practical. A display of just how much pain he could inflict was often enough to prevent an enemy from pushing his luck. It also had given the big warrior the opportunity to vent his rage somewhat.

Bolan had encountered sex slavers before across his career, from Las Vegas to Bangkok, and all points in between. He’d begun his crusade when his teenage sister had been pressed into prostitution by an organized crime group, and the fallout had resulted in his family exploding from within. Those who profited from adults were already scum, but it took a special kind of evil to engage in selling and destroying the innocence of adolescents and children. Bolan still thought of Cindy as a kid, even though she was in her late teens when she’d been forced into “the life,” so this was one crime that the Executioner felt very close to. Though the world was too big for the Executioner to focus on any one brand of evil, he had been lucky enough to get a tip from an ally in Thailand about a large shipment of slaves being shipped to another nation. Bolan figured that he’d deal himself in for this hand. It wouldn’t take long out of his War Everlasting, and he didn’t have any urgent, upcoming missions right now.

It was time the underworld learned once more that trading in human lives was a fatal mistake.

Pham limped along, sufficiently cowed. Since Bolan had demonstrated facility at understanding two of the languages the young man spoke, he doubted Pham would try to warn his friends in another language. Instead, he went silent, sullenly walking what he expected to be his final mile. Bolan wouldn’t have any compunctions if the young smuggler stopped a bullet, but someone would have to live to spread the word to the underworld that an executioner still stalked those who traded in flesh. Every battle Bolan fought, even though it was a very secret war, left a footprint, spreading fear and terror among those who didn’t fear the law.

“Play your cards right, Pham,” Bolan told him in Vietnamese. “I need a messenger to tell the world what happened here. You might just limp away with only a broken ankle.”

After seeing what happened to his partner, Pham considered a broken ankle a small price to pay. As they reached the hold, Pham stopped and looked back at Bolan.

“There are already guards on shift here,” Pham said. “We were just supposed to pick up a couple of girls.”

Bolan nodded. He took Pham’s rifle, dropped its magazine and emptied the chamber. He flicked on its safety and stuck the magazine back in. “It’ll take you too long to cock and get this rifle ready to fire. Don’t even think about it.”

Pham nodded. “I told you, because I don’t want to stop a bullet.”

“Good idea.”

Pham led the way into the hold where the guards were playing cards and smoking cigarettes. The smell of Turkish tobacco assaulted Bolan’s nostrils and he saw several more men of Western European heritage as well as a couple of Asians. Apparently, the Greek and Italian crewmen were sharing some of their vices with their Oriental counterparts. One Asian puffed on a Turkish cigarette, blowing smoke rings as the others laughed.

Shielded by Pham and staying in the shadows, Bolan hadn’t been noticed yet as the Vietnamese smuggler limped along toward the group.

“Hey, the captain wants us to bring up a couple of girls,” Pham called.

“What happened to your foot, Pham?” the smoke-ring-blower asked.

Pham shrugged. “Stupid. I slipped on a step coming down.”

“And Coy?” the ringmaster asked.

“Cap sent me,” Bolan answered in Italian.

One of the Italians squinted through the shadows. “Who—”

Bolan answered with a 9 mm bullet through the Italian’s forehead, his brains exploding out the back of his skull. The others were frozen in shock at the gory death of their compatriot.

Pham swung his rifle around and smashed the smoke-ring-blower across the jaw with its butt, then tossed aside the relatively useless weapon, dropped to the deck and curled up into a ball as Bolan cut loose, flicking the Beretta to burst mode. The Vietnamese sentry had bought the Executioner another heartbeat, and Bolan charged hard into the breech, tribursts of 9 mm slugs chopping into two of the Asian crewmen before they could grab their rifles. Corpses flopped to the floor, weapons clattering atop them when two swarthy Greeks lunged at Bolan.

The Executioner got off a burst into the gut of one of the sailors before the other tackled him, hands clamped around Bolan’s forearm and the Beretta tumbled away. He snaked his foot behind the Greek’s ankles and pushed hard with his forearm, toppling the hapless smuggler to the floor. With a pivot, Bolan buried his heel into the downed smuggler’s solar plexus and pulled his forearm knife. The fallen Greek vomited blood as shattered ribs slashed through his lungs.

A third man, an Italian, reached for the Beretta holstered on his hip, but being only a stride away, the Executioner speared him under the chin with the wicked forearm knife. Sharp steel tore through soft flesh, tongue and the roof of the goon’s mouth before coming to a halt in his brain. Dead on his feet, the gunman toppled backward. Bolan scooped the unused handgun out of the corpse’s insensate fingers and turned the pistol against a third Asian who rushed at him in a blur of speed.

Before Bolan could pull the trigger, a hard kick rammed his forearm. The 9 mm slug speared into the chest of a fourth sailor who was still trying to make sense of the melee, despite the revolver that was clenched in his fist. Bolan whirled with the force of the kick and dropped to one knee. His other leg swept out like a broom and caught the Asian across the knees, hurling him to the floor. The Executioner brought up the Beretta with both hands and fired two bullets into the downed martial artist before he could recover, both slugs smashing through his belly and tearing up into his rib cage.

The wounded man with the revolver coughed up blood and cut loose at the Executioner, but wounded and confused, his gunfire flew wildly. Pham yelled out and wrapped his arms around the sailor’s legs, throwing his balance off even more. Bolan snapped off three shots into the gunman’s head. The slugs crushed bone and burrowed into gray matter.

The hold fell eerily silent.

The Executioner retrieved his machine pistol and holstered it. He lowered the hammer on the handgun in his fist and walked over to the Vietnamese captive. He tapped his toe against Pham’s thigh.

“You can let go. It’s over,” Bolan said.

Pham looked up, eyes bloodshot, forehead damp with sweat. Hair was matted against his bronzed skin, and he took a deep breath.

“Thanks for the assistance,” Bolan said, and helped Pham to his feet.

“I don’t want to die,” the smuggler explained.

Bolan looked at the pommel of his knife poking out the jaw of his third opponent, and considered the blade buried too deep to retrieve easily. He left it pinioned through the skull of the smuggler like some form of cannibalistic shish kebab. The man Pham had hit with the butt of his rifle hadn’t moved, and Bolan felt for a pulse. There was nothing, and the Asian’s neck rolled with nauseating ease on the floor at the slightest touch.

“Broke his neck,” Bolan told him.

Pham shrugged. “Eh. The bastard kept stealing my cigarettes.”

Bolan shook his head. He looked at the containers and from the infrared scans of the ship, he knew which ones were occupied. He didn’t have an accurate map, but it was a good place to begin.

Then he paused, looking into the darkness. The musky scent of livestock filled the air and he realized that half the containers that had registered heat were full of cattle.

“Livestock?” Bolan asked.

“Yeah,” Pham said, limping along. “I don’t get it, either. You’d think the Koreans would find an easier way to get hamburger meat.”

Bolan frowned and looked at one of the livestock cars. An animal looked at him from within, large brown eyes blinking lazily in response. The soldier frowned. “These aren’t Thai livestock.”

“I know,” Pham replied. “It’s weird. All kinds of cattle in Africa and the Middle East, even in Southeast Asia, and the Koreans want European or American stock.”

Bolan looked at the limping smuggler. There was a long moment when Pham looked at the loaded revolver in a dead man’s fist, before stepping away. The Vietnamese smuggler had gotten the hint. One man against several, and he’d come out with only a few bruises, despite being disarmed at one point. If Pham had any fight left in him, he was reserving it for anyone who was going to screw up his survival, not the tall wraith who killed with bullets, blades and bare hands.

“Come here, Pham,” Bolan said.

The sentry limped over as Bolan pulled a plastic cable tie from his harness.

“Turn around and hold your wrists behind you.”

Pham nodded and Bolan pulled the cable tie firmly, but not painfully, around the Vietnamese man’s wrists. “You don’t want the girls to notice me?”