Blood Tide. Don Pendleton

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      1

      Malay Archipelago

      The killers were coming. Their outrigger canoes slid through the water beneath the starless, storm-warning-black South Pacific sky, knifing through whitecaps toward the yacht.

      Mack Bolan touched his throat mike. “Contact.”

      “Striker!” Barbara Price’s voice was urgent in Bolan’s earpiece. The mission controller back in Virginia was clearly unhappy. “Twenty-two minutes until satellite window! We do not have visual! Repeat! We do not have you!”

      “Doesn’t matter,” Bolan said.

      The enemy showed up clearly in tones of green and gray in the Executioner’s night-vision goggles. They were half naked, wearing turbans and sarongs and festooned with weapons.

      “They have us.”

      “Striker, be advised strategic withdrawal recommended.”

      The premonsoon winds moaned through the rigging of Bolan’s yacht. The craft lay anchored thirty yards from the beach. The tiny atoll was little more than a crescent of palm trees jutting a few feet above sea level. The canoes aimed for the mouth of the lagoon to cut off the yacht from the open ocean. The paddlers did not need night-vision equipment to acquire their target. The yacht’s dim deck lights marked it as a pool of radiance in the velvet dark of the shallow harbor.

      Bolan checked the loads in his weapon system as the jaws of the trap closed. He was a sitting duck.

      And that was just the way the Executioner wanted it.

      “Noted, Control. Standby,” he whispered.

      The killers would be in boarding range in less than a minute.

      Across the galley Bolan’s wife checked her weapon.

      Marcie “The Mouse” Mei was barely five feet tall, and the mass of highly modified, blackened steel and plastic she was toting appeared impossibly large in her tiny hands. She manipulated the weapon’s controls with practiced ease. If an Olympic gymnast and a pixie had spawned a warchild in the Philippines, Marcie Mei would be it. Only her snub nose and generous mouth showed beneath her night-vision goggles.

      The CIA field agent’s big smile flashed at Bolan in the dark of the hold. “Platoon strength,” she said as she flicked off the safeties on her weapon system. “Closing fast.”

      “Roger that.” Bolan spoke low. “Scott?”

      Escotto Clellande nodded from the other side of the cabin. In comparison, the M-4 carbine looked like a toy in the hulking ex-Philippine special operation commando’s hands. “Yeah, I make it about forty hostiles. Heavily armed.” Scott grunted to himself with relief. “No support weapons visible.”

      Bolan was silently relieved, as well. The yacht was not a normal pleasure craft by any stretch of the imagination, but RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers were the ocean-borne artillery of choice in the South Pacific. A few broadsides of antiarmor rockets with shaped-charge СКАЧАТЬ