Lethal Compound

Bolan knew from hard experience that there were three major heroin production centers. One was in Latin America, based out of Mexico and Colombia. The second was Southeast Asia, with Myanmar being party central. The third was Southwest Asia, and Afghanistan was ground zero. Afghani heroin took two major overland routes. One was the Balkan route. Turkey was the anchor and from there it branched out through the Balkans to eastern and western Europe. The other path followed the ancient Silk Road to Russia, the Baltic states and other former Soviet republics. Tajikistan was a major gateway state of the Heroin Silk Route.

Bolan knew China had a new generation of billionaire venture capitalists who sailed the seas of international commerce like buccaneers, and Chinese Triads were still the biggest heroin merchants in the world. They got most of their product from Southeast Asia, but the new breed of Chinese businessmen and gangsters were nothing if not expansionist in outlook.

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban had done little to stop the Southwest Asian heroin trade, but many routes had been closed, many drug warlords had been toppled. The situation was in flux and there were vacuums to be filled. The Chinese underworld and the mostly off-the-leash venture capitalists were always looking for opportunity, and with the U.S. and coalition forces in a state of occupation in Afghanistan, having one of the richest and most influential men in America on your side could smooth smuggling matters considerably.

Kurtzman read Bolan’s mind. “The Pentagon is thinking the same thing, but I don’t buy it. A man who willingly lost millions in the gem trade over his moral issues just isn’t the guy who’s going to set himself up in the international trade in junk. He doesn’t need the money. I just don’t buy it.”

Bolan had to admit that he didn’t, either. He’d only spoken to Eckhart for a few seconds but the vibe was wrong, and if Gary Manning said Eckhart seemed to be a stand-up guy, Bolan was willing to trust the big Canadian’s instincts.

Okay, lets get back to archaeology. Dr. Klein and Nancy Rhynman both specialize in the ancient Greeks. Why would Eckhart be consulting them about Tajikistan? Bolan glanced at the map on his computer screen. That’s three thousand miles off course.

“It is a conundrum,” Kurtzman admitted. “You’re just going to have to take the meeting and then you can tell me.”

You have gear in place for me? Bolan typed.

“A man is going to meet you when you get off the plane and give you a key. Take a cab from the airport. There’s a storage facility a few miles down the road. You’ll have a map, the key and the account number. The storage unit has a Land Rover parked in it and everything you asked for and everything else we could think of on our end.”

Thanks, Bear, Bolan typed. Anything else pertinent?

“Yeah, I took Manning’s info and found our Gurkha. Lalbahadur Rai reached the rank of havildar, which is the equivalent of sergeant in the British Army. He served with the British Brigade of Gurkhas C Company, Second Battalion, Parachute Regiment. He served with distinction and when it came time to re-enlist he opted to go to work in the private sector for the firm Global Risks. He served from 2005 through 2007. What he did there is company classified. We can find out but it will take a dedicated hack and some time.”

That’s enough to start with. With any luck he and I are going to end up being allies, Bolan typed.

“So you have a plan?”

Yeah. Bolan checked his watch. Touchdown in London was another two hours away. I’m going to take a nap, eat the in-flight breakfast and then take a meeting with a billionaire.

3

London

The Endeavor team meeting was in ten minutes. Bolan had gotten off the plane, ignored the man in chauffeur livery holding the sign that read Matt Cooper, met his Stony Man contact, gotten a cab, gone to the storage facility and geared up. Phillip Eckhart was the kind of man who did everything right. He didn’t go in for gold-plated toothbrushes and diamond-studded toilets, but he did insist on quality. The Stafford Hotel was not the fanciest in London, it lacked amenities like an in-house spa and gym and the rooms were not palatial. What the Stafford had was class and many travelers considered it the best hotel in London. The eighty-room Edwardian town house was centrally located on a secluded street with its own private access to Green Park and it had service in spades.

Eckhart had been mildly surprised when the Executioner had walked into the bar and introduced himself as Matt Cooper. He had looked Bolan up and down like he might examine a new company’s prospectus and apparently liked what he saw. He told Bolan that his good buddy from Canada had recommended him highly and that was good enough for him. He’d handed Bolan a folder full of files and asked him to peruse it at his leisure before the private dinner meeting later.

Back in his room Bolan examined each personnel file, scanned it and then e-mailed it to the Farm. Phillip Eckhart had hired himself his own private army. The men were from all corners of the globe, but so were Eckhart’s business contacts, and he had told Bolan each man came highly recommended from one respected source or another. Just as Bolan had himself.

Bolan ran the files a second time. Each man had served in private military forces. If you had served in your national army with distinction, had a useful military specialty, or had the magic “Special Forces” moniker attached to your record you could earn, double, triple or even quadruple pay compared to regular military service. The opportunity to safeguard convoys, local royalty and political bigwigs, or bodyguard your occasional billionaire, could bring perks and social and business contacts beyond the wildest dreams of a regular serviceman.

Bolan flipped through the files. Each one included a photo, a brief of each man’s service record and his nickname written over his picture.

Vivian “Viv” Blackpool was an Englishman from the famous beach town of the same name. He had served in Her Majesty’s Royal Artillery. The file said he had been a forward observation officer. That meant his job was to creep behind enemy lines, find the enemy, radio back to the artillery and ground attack fighters and rain hell down on them. He’d won the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross in Afghanistan. He had a steel-wool-tight white man’s afro and a jaw like a lantern. Eckhart had written Scout on his file.

Gobun Yagi had been a rugby player for team Kobe Steel. He’d served with Japanese 1st Airborne and been deployed to Iraq. Japan didn’t have official Special Forces but Yagi had qualified for the Central Readiness Force that was their closest equivalent. He was deeply tanned, had a shag haircut with strands of silver in it and he was grinning good-naturedly in his file photo. Eckhart had written C

over Yagi’s photo with a red pen. C cubed stood for communications, command and control. Bolan knew that meant Yagi would be trained in battlefield communications with radios, computers and satellites. Bolan noted the warrior had also been a hand-to-hand combat instructor.

The big American flipped to the next file.

Yuli Simutenkov was a Russian who had served in his nation’s 10th Mountain Brigade. He had done two tours in Chechnya then deserted. Bolan had a hard time blaming him. He had then managed to smuggle himself to Paris and joined the French Foreign Legion. Eckhart had used a yellow highlighter to emphasize that while Simutenkov was ethnically Russian he had been born in the city of Shaymak, which just happened to be the most eastern city in Tajikistan. His language proficiencies were also highlighted. He spoke Russian and his native Tajik as well as Kyrg, Arabic, Mandarin, English and French. He was blue-eyed, blunt-featured and had taken up the Russian military in-the-field habit of shaving his head and then letting his skull and beard stubble grow to same length. In his photo he was smiling in a not particularly friendly fashion with a hand-rolled cigarette dangling out of his mouth. Some of his teeth were gold, some were silver and some were missing. Eckhart had written Interpreter over his picture.

Bolan raised an eyebrow at the next photo. You didn’t hear about Hungarian mercenaries very often, but Zoltan “ZJ” Juhasz was a combat engineer who had served attached to the Hungarian 88th Rapid Reaction Force in Afghanistan. With his wavy black hair, arched eyebrows and Vandyke beard he looked like a Napoleonic Hussar, or Satan, or maybe just a man from Eastern Europe who enjoyed playing with explosives a little too much. Eckhart had written Demo Man!!! over the Hungarian’s head.

Bolan turned the page. Gilad Shlomo Gideon, or “Giddy” had served ten years with the Israeli Field Intelligence Corps. They were tasked with collecting combat intelligence in real time during battle, which meant that there was probably very little in the way of modern warfare the man had not seen or done. He was a wiry-looking guy with curls even tighter than Blackpool’s. Medic was scrawled above his picture. Bolan frowned. Interrogation was written below it. As a battlefield intelligence man Bolan suspected Gilad was skilled in keeping the wounded alive long enough to give up the goods.

He flipped to the next page. Pieter Van’s blond hair was almost white and his fair skin turned to saddle leather by years of fighting under the African sun. He had been a South African SAS commando and his resume read like a travelogue of every African trouble spot in the last twenty years. He’d worked security for several diamond consortiums in Africa that was undoubtedly where Eckhart had met him. Sniper was written and underlined on his photo.

Bolan turned over another wild card. Evo Solomon “Waqa” Waqa was Fijian. The man had a head like a block of granite and his hair was a series of two-inch, cone-shaped spikes that stuck up out of his head in remarkable imitation of Bart Simpson. Bolan noted his career highlights. He had been a member of Fiji’s infamous “Zulu” company counterrevolutionary specialists. The unit had been disbanded after elements of it had mutinied during the 2000 coup. Waqa had survived the purge and gone on to serve with the United Nations peace-keeping forces in East Timor. Over his name Eckhart had written Rai recommended, and Bolan recalled that five hundred Fijians had served or were serving with the Global Risks group in Iraq along with a similar number of Nepalese. Bolan doubted a Gurkha rifleman would recommend any non-Nepalese who couldn’t pass muster.

The last man was an American. He had blond hair and a blinding smile. He was grinning out of an American military ID photo and just from his neck and shoulders alone Bolan could tell the man had spent many hours pushing heavy iron in the gym. Roy Blair was 3rd Ranger Battalion. He’d been in Afghanistan then redeployed to Iraq. He then opted not to reenlist but had stayed in Iraq and gone to work for a private security company. Pig was written over his photo. That was Ranger-speak. There were two kinds of Rangers. “Maggots” were riflemen and “Pigs” were in the weapons squad. Roy Blair would know his way around machine guns, recoilless rifles, and antitank and antiaircraft weapons.

Bolan grunted in thin amusement at the last file. It had one word typed in quotes, center-spaced.

Cooper?

There was a hand-drawn smiley face beneath it.

There was another page that had a table with each man’s name and then a number of specialties checked off. Each man could ride a horse. Each man had qualified as expert or his national army’s equivalent with a rifle. Each man had passed courses in mountaineering and orienteering. Some men had specialty footnotes. Waqa, of all people, was a cook. Pieter could fly a helicopter and both Blackpool and Yuli could drive semis. Zoltan had Wrangler checked off by his name so the Hungarian probably knew something about the care and feeding of horses and he had been a Hungarian armed forces fencing champion. Roy Blair had attended the Defense Language Institute between deployments and learned basic Arabic. Yagi had done the Japanese equivalent and spoke Mandarin. Not surprisingly for a combat intelligence man in the Middle East, Giddy spoke Arabic as well as Farsi. Bolan’s line was empty so he checked off a few boxes that applied. He left out a lot. He’d demonstrate those abilities when and if the time came, and he’d give Eckhart his impressions after he’d had face time with each man.

Bolan closed the folder and grunted to himself. Eckhart had his own private little Foreign Legion and Bolan had joined it.

The Executioner checked the loads in his sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R. It was a .22 caliber conversion and had twenty-five rounds in the magazine plus one in chamber. He placed it in a shoulder holster under his left arm and four spare magazines rode under his right. Bolan pulled on a black leather jacket and went downstairs to the hotel’s private meeting room.

Sitting around the conference table were a billionaire, his bodyguard, a hot blonde and eight very dangerous men.

Eckhart gave Bolan a friendly wave and gestured at the one empty chair. “Coop! Glad you could join us. Take a seat.”

Bolan handed the file back to Eckhart and took the offered chair. He nodded to the Fijian and Hungarian sitting to either side of him.

Eckhart called the group to attention. “Gentlemen, let’s get started. First off, you will all find a nondisclosure contract in front of you, which I will require you to sign if you want to attend the rest of this meeting. If you don’t wish to sign, I’ll have to ask you to leave immediately.”

This was met by some muttering but Eckhart waved it away dismissively. “However, your rent here at the Stafford is paid ’til the end of the week, you have an open tab at the bar and your return tickets are open-ended. Thank you for coming.”

The soldiers made mollified noises.

Eckhart’s face became serious. “If you sign, stay and afterward do not wish to participate, you may leave. However, if you sign and then break the nondisclosure contract and talk about what is discussed in this room outside of the Endeavor Team here assembled, you will be subject to the kind of lawyers and lawsuits only a billionaire can bring on. And, short of hiring hit men, I will use every legal, political and business contact I have to shit on you for the rest of your lives. I strongly urge you to think about that before you sign.”

No one had to think about it. A couple of the men made a pretense of flipping through the pages of legalese but everyone quickly signed. Rai collected the contracts and put them in a folder.

“Good.” Eckhart rapped his knuckles on the table and on cue two of the hotel staff staggered in carrying buckets of beers from around the world on ice. The arrival was met with cheers. Bolan smiled inwardly. Alcohol had been part of successful soldier recruitment since the Renaissance. Beers were passed around the table and Bolan picked himself out a Guinness.

“Gentlemen, may I introduce Nancy Rhynman,” Eckhart continued. “She’ll be part of our team.”

A chorus of whistles and catcalls greeted the news. Bolan noted Rhynman blushed slightly and smiled at the barrage of lewd suggestions but she didn’t seem intimidated.

“Most of you have probably heard of me,” Eckhart said.

This was met with some pointed comments that Eckhart ignored. “And as you may have heard every once in a while I go off on an endeavor in the name of science. Africa, the Amazon, Southeast Asia, I’ve had a few adventures around the globe and been on a few boondoggles.” Eckhart eyed the assembled soldiers wryly. “As I suspect have most of you.”