Mission To Burma

“Ah!” Nyin took the optics reverently.

Bolan handed Lily his canteen. “Nyin and I are going to do some discouragement duty. Why don’t you rest here for a bit? Nyin, leave her the phone I gave you, just in case.”

Nyin handed over the phone and then rummaged through his mess bag. He pulled out the little brown medicine bottle. “Reapply.”

Lily didn’t argue. She took the canteen, phone and the medicine bottle and sat down with obvious relief. Bolan and Nyin went back down the game trail. Coming down from the escarpment, a ledge broke the rows of hardwoods marching up the hillsides. “There. They should be there in about five minutes if they keep the pace.”

Nyin grunted in agreement.

Along the trail, it was about two and half kilometers to the cliff, but from hillside to hillside it was around five hundred meters. Far out of range for most assault rifles without an optic sight. Bolan dropped into a rifleman’s squat. Nyin brought the laser range-finding binoculars to his eyes and pressed the laser designator button. Invisible to the human eye, the binoculars sent out a beam and measured precisely where it stopped. “Five hundred twenty-five meters.”

The scout rifle was not a sniper weapon. Rather it was made for rapid sharp-shooting at close to medium ranges. Nevertheless, the Austrian engineering of the rifle was precise in the extreme. It was as accurate as the man shooting it and could reach out and touch Fort Mudge if the man behind it was good enough. Bolan wrapped his rifle sling tight around his left arm and dropped his elbow to his knee, wedging himself into a solid firing platform.

Nyin spoke quietly. “I see them. They come.”

Bolan kept his eyes on the open cliff. “Give me a count.”

Nyin was quiet for a moment. “Three…two…one…”

The lead man came out across the cliff at a steady jog. Bolan’s rifle was suppressed, and to keep it quiet the bullets it fired were heavy and subsonic. The Executioner put his crosshairs on the lead Naga’s chest and then gave him three degrees of lead. Bolan took up slack on the trigger as he tracked the running man.

The rifle bucked back against the big American’s shoulder. Bolan instantly worked his bolt. In the split second it took him to chamber a fresh round, the man ran another two meters and then suddenly his head broke apart like a melon. His rifle and ax flew in two directions as his arms flapped like a ruptured pigeon. His forward momentum dropped him into an ugly sprawl onto the escarpment.

The other three Naga instantly disappeared into the trees.

Nyin whistled softly and lowered his binoculars. “I am in awe of you.”

Bolan picked up his spent brass shell and shrugged. “I was aiming for his chest.”

Nevertheless, Bolan suspected the message had been delivered. He retrieved his binoculars from Nyin and flipped on camera mode. “Get Lily moving. I’ll catch up.”

CAPTAIN DAI STARED at the headless corpse from a prudent distance. He was having a hard time believing that one man was a sniper, grenadier and an infiltrator. “Where are the Naga?”

Hwa-Che sighed. “Hiding.”

Dai searched the heavens for strength. The blue skies of Yunnan Province seemed a million miles away, and the gods of his fathers seemed to have abandoned him in this place. Naga were a warrior people, but they hardly ever engaged in open war. Headhunting was more like a lifelong, lethal game of tag, and Naga could hide for days while waiting for their prey to pass by. Or their angry employers to go away. “Tell them double pay. In gold.”

Sergeant Hwa-Che raised his voice to parade-ground decibels and shouted the words in Naga. The three remaining trackers seemed to sprout out of the forest eagerly holding out their hands. Hwa-Che grimaced in distaste and crossed the Naga’s palms with Chinese golden panda coins.

Dai turned back to his team. “Private Su!”

Private Su did not look up from scanning the opposite hillside with the powered telescope of his JS sniper rifle. “If the American is still there, he is very well hidden.”

Dai nodded. “Old Man! Give us cover and check the body for booby traps!”

Corporal “Old Man” Cao was the team’s grandfather. He was pushing field retirement and was a long veteran of China’s misbehaviors on the Vietnamese border. He did his best work with a knife and was an inveterate lurker. He was a head taller than everyone else in the team, blade thin, and assiduously cultivated his wispy mustache and beard. Cao pulled a pair of smoke grenades and hurled them out onto the escarpment. Thick white smoke began occluding the cliff and a good bit of the hillside. Cao ran out and disappeared into the smoke. He quickly came back grinning and holding up a ghoulish prize. “No traps, Captain. But I found this.” Cao handed Dai a bloody bullet. “Do you see? American .308. But heavy. Round nose rather than pointed. The American fired through a silencer. That is why we did not hear the shot.”

“And you think the enemy having a silenced sniper rifle is good news?”

“No, Captain.” Cao continued smiling. “But in a sniper battle, Private Su will outrange him by three hundred meters. Perhaps four.”

Private Su smiled without looking up from his optic. “I believe the corporal is correct, and further I do not believe the American has a real sniper rifle. It would not be appropriate to his mission. I just think he is a very good shot.”

Dai looked back and forth between his two grinning men. “And if the American is clever enough to have brought along a few full-powered shells?”

“Full-power ammunition will destroy his silencer, and lose him the one real advantage he has,” Cao concluded smugly. “Any offensive action he takes now will be a terrible choice of alternatives, all fraught with danger.”

Special forces operators were the same the world over. Even in the most regimented armies they knew they were better than everybody else, and discipline within the ranks became somewhat lax. Officers throughout China’s two-million-man army could expect blind obedience out of their soldiers. In the special forces, respect had to be earned, and rise in rank came on ability and merit far more often than party and family connections or bribery. Dai did not reprimand his men for speaking out of turn. Private Su was one of the best shots to ever come out army sniper school, and Old Man Cao was a decorated veteran whose tactical opinion was worth its weight in gold.

“Sergeant, get the Naga moving. Corporal Cao, get the men across the escarpment before the smoke thins. We have hunting to do.”

BOLAN LOWERED his binoculars. It wasn’t good. Physically, it was hard to distinguish the Chinese from the Burmese auxiliaries, but since they were on a combat mission rather than infiltrating enemy territory they displayed it in the superior air they showed their flunkies, as well as their superior armament. That they weren’t even trying to hide. They had the latest PRC and Russian equipment. Two men had backpacks with very suspicious looking, large-diameter tubes sticking up out of them. Bolan counted at least one sniper among them, and he had been debating taking the shot on the man here and now when the enemy had popped smoke and begun moving. Bolan counted a twelve-man Chinese team, backed up by Maung and another fifteen of U Than’s goons, as well the three remaining trackers.

Bolan worked his way back up the hillside and began loping down the trail. He quickly caught up with Nyin and Lily. The Taiwanese intelligence agent wasn’t limping, but she was obviously in pain. “How’re you doing?”

Lily kept her eyes on the ground ahead, keeping an eye out for rocks and trotting on soft soil. It was saving her pain, but she was also leaving very clear footprints. “I was supposed to be on a beach in Costa Rica by now.” Her green eyes lifted for a moment and stared into the middle distance. “I am told the sand is pink.”

“It is. Don’t worry, we’ll get your toes in the sand and piña colada in hand yet.”

Lily smiled wanly and returned her gaze to the trail. “The thought of it is the only thing that keeps me moving.”

Nyin was puffing along, but his smile stayed painted on. “How many?”

“Call it half a platoon. Maung and U Than’s men I could probably cut up and scatter, but the Chinese team is going to give them backbone and prop it up with hard cash. They also have light support weapons and a sniper. They outrange everything we’ve got.”

“What we do?”

“I was hoping you might have an idea.”

Nyin pointed toward a range of hills to the southeast and laid out a plan as they ran. Bolan felt a headache coming on.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad plan.

But it sure as hell wasn’t good.

And unfortunately Bolan couldn’t think of a better one.

6

Lily was clearly appalled. “This is not a good plan.” She had to draw her knees to hip height with each sucking step she took through the abandoned paddy. Normally wet-rice farmers also farmed ducks and crayfish in the same fields, and between them they kept the fields fertilized and free of pests. Leeches covered Lily’s bare legs, and the biting flies fearlessly buzzed through the blighted, overgrown rice plants and weeds and drew blood at an eye blink of inattention. Bolan had no attention to spare for the parasites.

They were literally walking through a minefield. Bolan mucked through the knee-deep swamp an inch at a time, using a five-foot pointed stick for a probe.

The problem for the Burmese military was that up in the highlands, with just a little bit of warning, rebels could melt away into the forests before an attack. However, almost all the rebels were farmers, and sooner or later they returned to their villages once the soldiers left. Like a number of governments, ruling junta had figured out there were few better ways to sow apprehension and dissension among farmers than to sow their fields with land mines. After the first few men and water buffalo lost their legs, the fields were abandoned and without a crop, so were the villages. Rebel strongholds became ghost towns, and the rebels and their families became masses of starving, migrant refugees. The Burmese army’s weapon of choice was a locally produced copy of the U.S. M-14 antipersonnel mine. It carried just enough explosive to take a man’s leg off at the knee, and was nicknamed the “toe-popper” for fairly obvious reasons.

So far, Bolan had found three of them.

Ostensibly the Burmese military kept charts of the minefields so that someday they could come and reclaim the farmland. Nyin, through various means, had acquired maps charting a number of the minefields in his area of operation. However, wet-rice farming was dependent on controlled flooding, and after a year or two without anyone manning the dykes the river had assumed its natural course.