Stealth Sweep

“True, but very smelly!” the man countered, swinging open the door. “Hong Kong means fragrant harbor, only nowadays it refers to the reek from the industrial plants and pollution!”

“Well, my business is handling sewage….” Bolan said with a shrug, and stepped into the cab.

The cabbie closed the door, then got behind the wheel.

Quickly, Bolan checked the work permit on public display. The faded card was sealed inside a sleeve of foggy plastic, but the picture matched the driver. The name listed was Samuel C. Wong.

“Where to first?” Wong asked, starting the engine.

“Madame Tsai Shoe Repair,” he replied.

Shifting into gear, Wong gave no outward sign that the name meant anything special as he started the engine and pulled away from the terminal.

Merging into the stream of traffic, the cab was soon ensconced in a wild mixture of old and new vehicles—sleek hybrid cars and old ramshackle trucks that seemed to be held together with bailing wire. Huge BMW flatbed trucks hauling machinery muscled past flocks of people pedaling furiously on bicycles. Neatly dressed businessmen and women zipped along on scooters, while burly men covered with tattoos roared by on motorcycles, mostly Hondas and Suzukis.

As the cab stopped for a red light, Wong glanced into the rearview mirror. “Check under your seat.”

Warily, Bolan did so and found a flat plastic box sealed with duct tape. Thumbing off the tape, he popped the top and pulled aside an oily rag to reveal a slim 9 mm pistol, a sound suppressor, a belt holster and a box of standard ammunition.

“You took a big chance carrying these so close to the airport,” Bolan said, disassembling the pistol to check the internal workings before reassembling it even faster.

“Not really. I also deliver small packages for the local Customs inspectors,” Wong said with a laugh. “The local cops understand how the world works. As long as I only break the little laws, nobody asks about the big ones.”

“Fair enough.” Bolan screwed on a sound suppressor. Then he opened the box of ammunition, but as he started to thumb some rounds into an empty clip, he happened to look at the bottom of one brass casing.

“Damn it, those bastards have found me already,” Bolan growled, peering out the window. “Quick, pull over! We’re a sitting duck in this thing!”

“What’s wrong?” Wong asked in confusion, quickly shifting gears as he arched through the busy traffic. Horns blared at the maneuver, but the other vehicles melted out of the way.

“I’ve been made,” Bolan replied, brandishing the empty handgun. “When I hit the sidewalk, you run. Get clear fast!” He tried to put as much concern into his voice as possible.

“No, let me help!” Wong countered, savagely braking to a hard stop alongside a bright yellow fire hydrant. “Just tell me who—”

Flipping the useless pistol over, Bolan grabbed it by the sound suppressor and clubbed Wong directly behind the ear. The man crumpled with a sigh onto the wheel.

Dropping the weapon, Bolan reached around the moaning driver and grabbed a sleek .22 pistol. The safety was off the assassin’s weapon, and there was a round already in the breech for immediate use.

“What…don’t…” Wong mumbled, flapping his hands.

Ruthlessly, Bolan smacked the man in the temple with the HK and heard the deadly crunch of bone. Shuddering all over, Wong went still forever.

Rifling through the pockets of the dead man, Bolan unearthed two spare clips, a switchblade knife and some cash. But there was no cell phone or wallet. Hastily tucking everything into his jacket, Bolan exited the cab and walked casually through the array of vendors and pushcarts. Turning a corner, he snapped the switchblade into life and took refuge in a dirty alley that reeked of garbage.

Nobody seemed to be looking his way, so Bolan went deeper into the alley until reaching a small slice of sunlight coming in between two buildings. Quickly, he checked over the pistol and then the ammunition. Thankfully, both were clean, unlike what was in the box under the seat.

Every bullet had a manufacturer’s stamp on the bottom of the shell to show the lot number, location made and date. The police often tracked criminals by the brass ejected from a weapon. On the other hand, every major intelligence agency in the world made their own ammunition, which always lacked the stamp on the bottom. That was standard operational procedure. The cops knew something big was happening in their town when they found a corpse and empty “ghost” brass nearby. However, the ammunition in that box had carried a stamp, which meant it wasn’t CIA issue, and that meant Bolan’s cover had somehow been blown. He just didn’t know how, or by whom, but staying in that cab would have been his last act on Earth. Out of curiosity, he used the switchblade to pry open a cartridge for the HK, and out poured sand instead of gunpowder.

Just then, a tall figure blocked out the sliver of rosy sunlight.

Instantly, Bolan ducked, and something hot hummed by his head as a hard cough came from the darkness ahead. As the round ricocheted off the brickwork behind, Bolan dived to the side and fired twice, then twice more. The dark figure grunted from the impact of the tiny .22 rounds, but didn’t fall. Bolan bit back a curse. The other man had to be wearing body armor! The .22 rounds were doing less damage than a well-aimed snowball.

The silenced weapon coughing steadily, the other man slowly walked into the alley, blasting every pool of shadow.

Tracking the muted muzzle-flash of the weapon, Bolan guessed where his adversary’s head should be, then stood and triggered a fast six rounds in a tight group. There came the sound of multiple .22 ricochets off the brick wall, then a hard smack of lead into flesh.

Snarling curses in what sounded like Chinese, the other man fanned the darkness with his weapon until the clip cycled empty. The soft click of a clip being released could be heard, and Bolan surged forward, batting aside the bigger weapon with the HK, and ramming the switchblade upward with all his strength.

He felt the warm breath explode from the other man as the steel found flesh. Gurgling, the man stumbled, his weapon clattering to the ground. Grabbing a fistful of hair, Bolan slashed across his adversary’s throat and pushed him away. With blood raining to the ground, the man smacked into a wall and collapsed alongside a pile of garbage cans. A few seconds later the gurgling stopped.

As Bolan searched for the dropped weapon, he listened for any sounds of backup, sirens or running shoes. But nobody in the market had seemed to notice the brief tussle in the dark alleyway, or else the merchants simply knew better than to become involved in such matters. In this part of the world, the first rule of survival had always been stay low and don’t get noticed.

When finally satisfied that nobody was coming, Bolan checked over the new weapon. It was a sleek 9 mm Norinco pistol, the official sidearm of the Chinese Red Army. The grip was rough, and Bolan scowled at the realization that it had been cut with notches. No professional soldier would have done that, so this man had simply been a very talented amateur. Just some street muscle, nothing more. Fire-and-forget.

Locating the corpse, Bolan went through the pockets. As expected, there was no cell phone, car keys or wallet. But he discovered four more ammunition clips, a butterfly knife, an enormous wad of cash held together with a rubber band, half a pack of chewing gum, plus something small, rectangular and hard.

Lifting the object into the sliver of daylight, Bolan snorted at the sight of the Hong Kong “octopus” card, a prepaid pass for every form of mass transit in the city. Excellent.

Depositing everything he didn’t want into a garbage can, Bolan quickly left the area, zigzagging through the maze of back alleys until coming out a full block from where he had abandoned the cab. Strolling over to a street vendor, he purchased a cup of surprisingly good coffee, and sipped from the cardboard container while walking through the busy crowds.

There was a bad apple in the local CIA station. Maybe the cab driver was the only bad guy, maybe he was just a henchman. Whatever, the Executioner would hand over the information for Brognola to deal with.

It was a wake-up call, though. I can’t trust any of the established contacts, rendezvous, or safehouses, Bolan realized. He would have to find his own source of additional weapons, and some way to sneak into Communist China.

Looking over the noisy throng to make sure nobody was paying him undue attention, Bolan turned away from the Asian teenager sitting on a park bench. The young woman was smoking a cigarette, and smiled as their gazes meet, then hitched her denim skirt high on her thighs to show she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

Arching an eyebrow in pretend shock, Bolan then patted his pockets to mime that he was broke. She managed to look sad, then shrugged and turned away to find another big American tourist.

At the corner, Bolan dropped the coffee container into a waste can under the watchful gaze of an armed police officer, then boarded a tram headed for the waterfront. His choices were rather limited at the moment, so he was going to have to do this old school and infiltrate China through the criminal underworld. That would mean risking encounters with a lot of people who would be delighted to bury him alive, but there was no other recourse at the moment. Once the news of the drones became public knowledge, China would slam its borders closed, so time was short. That would mean getting his shoes shined.

Surreptitiously checking the pistol tucked into his belt, he smiled at the memory of the sultry redhead. A mixture of Irish and Chinese, she possessed the best traits of both races, intelligence, grace and a figure that made most internet sex bombs look like cartoon stick figures. Tsai “Pat” Adina was the tenth wonder of the world.

However, it had been a long time since Bolan had last seen the woman. Hopefully, she was still working freelance, and he wasn’t walking directly into another trap.

CHAPTER THREE

Engels Air Force Base, Russia

The abandoned freight yard, high on a hill overlooking the air base, was overgrown with weeds and brambles. The small brick building that had once served as an office was almost buried from sight under multiple layers of ivy.

The steel railroad tracks were long gone, and the wooden ties crumbled back into the earth. Only random pieces of rusting machinery lay about on the cracked asphalt, along with unrecognizable piles of trash and windblown leaves. Once, there had been thousands of cargo containers waiting patiently to be shipped across Russia. Stacked on top of one another, the containers had formed cubist mountains that rose defiantly to challenge the Ural Mountains on the horizon. But now there was only a handful of the big steel boxes, most of them rusted through in places to become homes for rats and other small vermin.

Artistically surrounded by a dozen other corroded containers, one steel box was heavily streaked with rust and bird droppings, but still in good shape, and unbreeched. Lying in the nearby weeds were the gleaming white bones of an itinerant worker, what the Americans would have called a hobo. Still clenched in her right hand was an iron crowbar whose sharp tip perfectly matched a set of gouges in the surface of the unopened box. Four years ago, the woman had climbed the wire fence and attempted to break open the container, hoping it was full of stereos, or cell phones, or anything that could be sold on the black market for a fast ruble.

She’d labored for hours to pry open the access panel, and her reward had been a searing burst of pain as 20,000 volts of electricity surged through her body, making her blood boil, her kidneys shrivel, her teeth shatter, then her cooked brain quite literally explode.

The rats and black beetles had feasted well that autumn, but soon the bounty of flesh was gone and only the bones remained, along with a few scraps of cloth, and the relatively undamaged crowbar.

Suddenly, the steel box began to softly vibrate, the dried bird nests and loose scales of rust dancing along the top until tumbling over the ends. With a hard clang an internal lock disengaged, and the lid swung aside just as a dozen spheres blasted upward on a column of compressed air.