Mission To Burma

“He has issues.” Lily shrugged. “No doubt.”

“Miss Na, my name is Cooper. I’m here to rescue you.” Bolan took in the tiger cage. It was made of bamboo, but the shafts were as thick as his arm and the knots of hemp that bound it together were like fists. A heavy iron padlock bound the door shut. He had only a foot of flexible charge left, and trying to saw or hack his way through any part of it would take too much time. Bolan handed Lily his pistol and pulled his lock-pick case from a pouch in his web gear. He chose a pair of tensile steel picks, put his tactical light between his teeth and began working the lock.

Lily spoke low. “Men are coming.”

Bolan ignored her and repeated the breaking-and-entering mantra. “Forget everything else, work the lock.”

“They are almost here,” she urged.

Bolan worked the lock.

“They are upon us.”

Bolan didn’t speak Burmese, but he understood the snarl of command coming from the open door. Lily spoke in a whisper. “Maung is here with two of his men. They are telling me to drop my gun and you to freeze.”

“Do it,” Bolan ordered.

Maung shouted in broken English. “You! Drop gun!”

“But—”

“Do it!”

The Beretta fell through the floor of the cage. Bolan sighed inwardly as the weapon dropped into the blood-catching cistern set in the floor. A voice shouted the same angry words in Burmese twice. Lily flinched. “He says turn—”

“You! Turn round!” Maung snarled.

Bolan turned slowly.

Maung was flanked by a pair of U Than’s kickboxers. All three carried licensed copies of Uzi submachine guns. Bolan dropped the lock picks. Maung motioned at the tactical light between the Executioner’s teeth. He very slowly removed it.

Maung smiled to reveal his gold teeth in triumph.

Bolan spun the bezel in the buttcap with his thumb, and the flashlight went to full-strength-strobe mode. Most tactical lights had an output of eighty to one hundred lumens. Bolan’s Farm-modified light sprayed out at a thousand and blinked at over twenty times per second. It would burn up his battery in moments, but light strobing at that intensity was known to induce seizures in epileptics, and during tests even trained soldiers and martial artists lost their spatial orientation and were reduced to staggering like blind drunks.

The man to Maung’s right took a step forward and fell to his hands and knees. The man to Maung’s left teetered and stumbled against the doorjamb. Maung stood like a man leaning into a high wind and sprayed off a blind burst with his weapon. Lily yelped and cringed as bullets tore splinters from her bamboo cage.

Bolan strode forward strobing continuously. The massive amping up of the light’s candlepower wasn’t the only modification. The body of the flashlight was titanium, and the rim surrounding the lens sported teeth like the jaws of a bear trap for impact fighting. Bolan drove the still strobing light between Maung’s eyes like an ice pick.

Maung’s septum disintegrated beneath the blow. The shock of it dropped him to the floor as limp as a fish. Bolan drove his boot up between the legs of the man leaning against the door, and he fell vomiting next to his kneeling comrade. His comrade’s jaw shattered beneath Bolan’s heel. The big American drew his tomahawk and began chopping furiously at the hemp bindings of the cage. It was like chopping wood, but the strands slowly came apart. Bolan grabbed the bars of the cage and ripped the door off its hinges.

Lily hopped down and grabbed her laptop.

Bolan scooped up a fallen weapon and checked the loads. “That’s it?”

Lily closed the laptop and picked up a fallen Uzi. “Yes, they did not know what they had. They were using it to peruse pornography.”

“Let’s get you out of here.” Bolan and Lily ran from the smokehouse.

The soldier snatched a sarong and a man’s shirt from the clothesline in passing as they ran for the hole burned in the wall. The men in the guard tower were pointing and screaming, but no one on the ground and in the gas was paying them any attention.

Bolan spoke into his phone. “Fatso, hit the tower, then fire the house.”

“I have bad guys coming my way!” Nyin responded, but the grenade launcher down in Ta village thumped. The two men up in the tower noticed Bolan and Lily as they reached the palisade. One began shouting, while the other raised a rifle.

The grenade launcher thumped again as Lily wriggled through the hole. The Willy Pete hit the front of the house, and the men on the porch screamed as white-hot smoke and streamers of burning metal erupted in all directions. Bolan slid outside. Men continued to stream out the gate, and at the pier engines were roaring into life as armed men piled into the boats for an amphibious assault on the grenadier in the village.

Bolan spoke into his motherboard. “Fatso, I’m not going to be able to reach the boats. Extract, and I’ll meet you at the promontory.”

“Yes, Coop!” Nyin responded. “I am extracting!”

Bolan grabbed Lily’s hand and ran for the tree line. Behind them gray gas and white smoke was blanketing U Than’s fortress in a fog of war. It was a war that had just begun, and tomorrow it would become a hunt. U Than was going to want some payback.

It was more than five hundred miles to the border of Thailand.

4

Ta village

Captain Tam-Sam Dai passed out small bribes and iron-palmed slaps liberally among the villagers. None seemed to be able to give him any useful information, and he doubted hard interrogation would yield anything more. U Than had kept the village locked down for two days after salvaging everything of value from the crashed jet and capturing the woman. The villagers had heard the fighting the previous night and had quite prudently locked their shutters and doors and huddled in their huts with the lights off.

Dai was a member of the PRC’s Special Operations Forces, specifically their highly secretive Special Purpose Force, or infiltration unit. The PRC kept special forces units whose members could pass as citizens of every nation they had a common border with, as well as many they did not. Dai was a member of China’s ethnic Shan minority. His skin was copper colored, and though incredibly broad shouldered he stood barely five feet tall. He spoke perfect Burmese and could easily pass himself as a native hill man of Burma, Thailand or Laos.

Chinese military satellites had been intensely scrutinizing the area of the crash site. Dai and his team had been dropped in immediately but found the wreckage and the bodies stripped of all valuables. The satellites had detected the battle last night and vectored Dai and his men in. Dai had captured a villager, given him an envelope with a very thick stack of Chinese one-hundred yuan notes to take to U Than, along with the message that he would like to meet with him.

The meeting had gone well. Several million yuan had soothed U Than’s troubled soul. Promise of aid in rebuilding had further convinced the warlord that he should conduct business with the Chinese triads rather than the syndicates in Thailand. All very profitable. Captain Dai’s superiors in Beijing had already commended him on it; however, the loyalties of U Than were not the main issue here.

Dai glanced up as Sergeant Hwa-Che came trotting down from the burned-out mansion and gave his report. He, too, was Shan but he gave his report in Mandarin so that U Than and his people would not know what was said. “Captain, we have discovered residue of high explosive in the tower top and in the crater in the compound. The house was clearly burned down with white phosphorous. The hole in the palisade was cut with flexible charge. I believe the grenade barrage was done from Ta village and acted as a diversion while the Na woman and the computer were extracted.” The sergeant spit betel and frowned mightily. “It is clearly the work of U.S. Special Forces.”

Captain Dai had already surmised that. He frowned at Hwa-Che. He knew the sergeant’s ways well. “What is bothering you?”

Hwa-Che slid his eye over to the pier where U Than and several of his men were gathered by the boats. “I have spoken with Maung.”

Dai was an adept at snake-hand kung fu, but even he had to admit the hulking man gave him pause. “And what says the mighty Maung?”

“He says there was only one American.”

Dai scowled. “One?”

“Yes, and have you noticed Maung’s face, Captain?”

It was hard not to. Maung was incredibly ugly to begin with, but now both of his eyes were a raccoon’s mask of bruising and his shattered nose looked like a flattened squid. “Yes, I have noticed.”

“He said the American did it. Maung and two of the Thai bullyboys had the drop on the American, yet he defeated them with a flashlight and his bare hands and then took the woman. One has a broken jaw and the other sits on a sack of ice and pees blood.”

Dai’s scowl deepened. “I find that hard to believe.”

“I have also spoken with our Naga trackers. There are only one pair of boot prints leading to and away from the compound, and leading away the bare feet of a single woman.”