Psy-war, man, he thought. Just hope it works.
If not...
He made the move; dodged into traffic, barely checking left or right, and made it to the other side intact.
So far, so good.
* * *
“YOU’RE LOSING HIM,” Ahmad Taraki growled.
“What can I do?” Babur Kazimi asked him from the driver’s seat. “You see the one-way sign.”
“Turn that way!” Taraki shouted, then cursed with feeling.
He pointed south, toward Pell Street, one-way westbound. They could track their pigeon that way, farther into Chinatown, and pick him up on Mott Street when he tried to cross.
“You sure?” Daoud Rashad asked from the backseat. “He could go some other way or—”
Furious and nearly shouting now, Taraki told his driver, “Do as you are told!”
Kazimi made the turn, horns blaring at them, and Taraki gave them all the finger. He wished he could have sprayed them with the AK-105 he was carrying and shut them up forever. That would be a satisfying moment, but he couldn’t spare the time, much less risk drawing in police before his job was done.
Pell Street was half the length of Bayard and dead-ended into Mott. Taraki had a fair idea of where his boy was going, and their task would be to cut him off before he got there, thus avoiding any payback from his homeboys. It was meant to be a simple job, decisive, not a running firefight through the streets.
“Hurry!” he snapped at Kazimi. “If you let him get away, it’s your ass.”
“Two more minutes,” the driver answered. “But I can’t stop him from going someplace else.”
“Then pray he doesn’t, for your own sake,” Taraki said.
As if God gave a damn whether they caught the man or not.
But Wasef Kamran cared. And if Taraki failed him, there would certainly be hell to pay.
* * *
TOMMY MU FELT BETTER; thought he might have made it after all. Some of the people he passed on Bayard Street were likely wondering why he’d been running past them, jostling a couple here and there, but no one challenged him. They knew better, could recognize him by his haircut, clothes and haste as someone dangerous. They’d be thinking he wasn’t a person to mess with, and their instincts were correct.
Approaching Mott Street, he slowed to a walking pace, figuring the SUV could still be fighting traffic down on Pell. And if it wasn’t...well, he didn’t want to blunder into anything. The package underneath his arm was worth more than his life to Paul Mei-Lun.
Something to bear in mind.
Mu was cautious as he cleared the last few yards, keeping his right hand underneath his jacket, near the Stinger, ready for a quick draw if he needed it. It would be better for him if he ditched the hunters, rather than start a shooting match on his home turf, but he would do whatever was required to make it back alive.
Mott Street was his salvation, one-way traffic running north to south, so even if the SUV caught up with him, its driver couldn’t turn against the flow and follow him to the Lucky Dragon. He’d be safe then, with his brothers all around him, making the delivery. If he was not on time, at least he would be close and no one would have taken the package away from him.
Arriving at the corner, Mu felt sweet relief—until he saw the SUV parked at the corner to his left, downrange. He was about to flip them off, laugh in their faces, until he focused on the black car’s open windows and the weapons angling toward him from inside. Mu wasn’t sure if he should run or pull the Stinger, and before he had a chance to make his mind up it was already too late.
The bullets hit him like a pelting hailstorm, ripping through his stylish jacket, through his flesh, lifting him off his feet. The package underneath his arm burst open, powder rising in a cloud around him as he fell, no longer snow-white as it had been when he’d taken delivery. It was all red and clotted now, with Mu’s blood. Beyond him, farther down the street, the slugs struck others, killing, wounding.
Mu was dead before he hit the sidewalk.
The SUV turned south and vanished into traffic as the first screams rose in Chinatown. Sirens would take a little longer, and they’d be too late.
The war had already begun.
Manhattan Cruise Terminal
Waiting was the hard part, if you weren’t accustomed to it. Early on, Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, had acquired the gift of patience, something schooled into him by his military training and experience in war zones where a hasty move meant losing everything. It came as second nature to him now, a part of life and every mission that he undertook. He couldn’t always be proactive. Sometimes it came down to sit, and watch, and wait.
Like now.
The ferry from New Jersey was on time, no problem there, and he’d picked out the guys who had been sent to meet it. The two young males were Asian, Chinese American presumably, although they could be FOB for all he knew. Fresh off the boat that was, in common slang, although their journey from Hong Kong, Macau or points west on the Chinese mainland would have brought them to New York by air, or maybe overland from Canada.
No matter.
They were here to do a job, the same as he was. Not the same job, but the three of them were waiting for the same boat and the same guy, carrying a suitcase full of misery.
Bolan wasn’t concerned right now with how the heroin had reached the States from Southeast Asia. He would find that out in time, by one means or another, and pursue the powder trail. This day, right here and now, his job was to follow this shipment to its destination somewhere in the heart of Chinatown and to make sure it went no further.
Ten keys, maybe twelve, as pure as any lab could make it. Ready to be stepped on and distributed to addicts citywide at a tremendous profit for the men in charge. At last report, a kilo went for sixty thousand dollars, wholesale. Cut to 50 percent purity with powdered vitamin B or some other nontoxic substance, it doubled in volume and was then packaged into thirty thousand single-dose glassine envelopes for sale to street dealers at five bucks apiece. That was ninety thousand dollars profit to the cutters, while the dealers turned around and sold each dose for ten to fifteen bucks, somewhere between three hundred thousand and four hundred fifty thousand on the street.
Simple arithmetic. Ten kilos would be worth three million, minimum, in street sales; maybe four point five, with any luck. Who could resist a deal like that?
There would be risks, of course. City and state police, the DEA and FBI, all would be hungry for a major bust to raise their profiles, justify their budgets and convince a weary public that the war on drugs was still worth fighting in these days when the United States jailed more people than any other nation on the planet, at a cost some said was hurting the already-bruised economy.
And then there were the hijackers. Why spend six hundred thousand dollars on a suitcase full of smack if you could rip it off for nothing? Make a score like that, you clipped the rightful owner for the wholesale cost and cleared a cool three million, minus whatever it cost to cut the product. All you had to risk was life and limb.
The pickup team would be well armed, and so was Bolan. On the shotgun seat beside him in his gray Toyota Camry, a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun with a 100-round Beta C-Mag drum lay hidden in a canvas tote bag. Beneath his left arm hung his backup piece: a Glock 22 chambered in .40 caliber, with fifteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. In a crunch, Bolan could empty both guns in something like ten seconds, leaving devastation in his wake.
And he had