1
“Death to the United States!”
The words were spoken in Arabic, but the Executioner had heard them before, all too often. They were being chanted in such an orgiastic frenzy that Mack Bolan could hear them clearly on the lagoon. Drums and other percussive instruments beat in rhythm to the thundering chant.
“Death to the United States!”
Bolan’s canoe slid through the rollers and crunched to a halt in the sand. He stepped into the foam of the Java Sea and dragged the outrigger out of the surf and onto land. The beach was a patchwork of grays, greens and blacks in his night-vision goggles. The chants grew louder and even more excited. There was exultation in the voices of the chanters, and beneath that, expectation. A clear baritone called out and was met by at least thirty voices in answer.
“Death to the United States!”
The call and response grew more and more savage. Bolan smiled grimly. The pandekar was in fine form.
“Death to the Great Satan!” a new voice shouted.
Bolan shook his head. The mullah was not willing to be outdone.
The Executioner was wary of rescue missions. They threw every single advantage into the hands of his opponents. He was always outnumbered, always outgunned, and savvy enemies always had multiple opportunities to kill their captives or use them as shields. Bolan, himself, was always in dire risk of killing those he had come to save. The fact was that in the past two years hostage rescues in the Pacific had not all gone according to plan. American and Australian rescue missions in the Philippines and Indonesia had resulted in dead hostages. It seemed as if fate dealt from the bottom of the deck and gave all the high cards to the goblins. It was the same old situation. Bolan was one man, and he held but a single card.
In special operations circles it was spoken of with awe. It was known as surprise. It trumped everything, and there was nothing sweeter when it was achieved.
The chanting from beyond the tree line degenerated into wordless howls and screams of rage. Bolan wasted no time as he marched up the beach.
The voice of the pandekar boomed forth. Pandekars were master teachers of pentjak-silat, the national martial arts of the Indonesian archipelago. Along with the great technical skills they developed, they were renowned spiritualists, famed for their supernatural powers, rumored to include telepathy, mystic healing and clairvoyance. They were thought to be invulnerable.
Pandekar Binpadgar Regog was a master of the Jokuk style, and was considered by his followers to be a mystic. When the Taliban mullah Abu-Hamid al-Juwanyi had fled Afghanistan during Operation Anaconda, Regog had welcomed the refugee mullah as a divine sign. Al-Juwanyi’s teachings of jihad against the United States had been welcomed and were taken on with religious fervor by Regog and his followers.
Suddenly a woman’s scream cut across the chanting. Bolan moved quickly through the thin jungle. A two-story hut dominated the clearing. A number of smaller huts arced out on either side of the big house in a horseshoe shape. A bonfire burned in the middle.
Beside the pyre a pair of posts had been sunk in the soil and Famke Ryssemus was strung between them. She was a famous European fashion model who came to Java annually to help her uncle with his missionary work. That was enough to make her a target of the pandekar. Bolan could see she was bruised and her blond hair was disheveled, but there was no obvious blood or serious wounds yet.
The real fun was clearly about to begin.
A half-naked man leaped into the sand near Ryssemus and shrieked. He wore only a red turban, and a white breechclout tied with a red sash around his hips. Foam flecked his lips. His wiry musculature stood out in high relief as his hips and shoulders jerked with the drumbeats. He tossed away his AK-47 rifle. The cries of the mob rose as he reached both hands into his sash and withdrew two Javanese kris. The sinuous handles of the daggers were carved into the shapes of dragons. The mob moaned expectantly as he reversed the twelve-inch undulating blades in his hands. His eyes glazed over as he aimed the quicksilver weapons at his chest. Sweat streamed down his torso in rivers. Spittle flew as he let out a horrific groan. It was matched by the captive woman’s scream of horror as he stabbed both blades into his own chest.
The crowd roared.
Roughly forty people formed a circle around the fire. Regog and Al-Juwanyi sat on raised divans. A half-dozen men sat cross-legged in the sand at their feet pounding drums and cymbals. The rest of the gathering stood swaying to the music and chanting. All carried bladed weapons, and most also clutched rifles, pistols, or submachine guns. Many in the throng were working themselves into a trance like that of the dancer. They called out wordlessly as the dancer stabbed himself again. The blades stuck between his ribs, and he yanked them forth with a howl.
No blood ran down the dancer’s sides.
A man in a trance was said to be unstoppable. Bolan had faced opponents armed with mystical powers on more than one occasion. Around the globe, martial artists and mystics used rigorous training, ritual and special breathing techniques to manipulate their personal energy and aspects of the autonomous nervous system that were on autopilot in most humans. Such people were capable of almost inhuman feats. But most mystical fighting had been rendered obsolete in a modern world of high-capacity automatic rifles and helicopter gunships. Bolan did not believe in magic, but he had long ago learned not to sneer at sorcerers.
Facing such opponents made his one-man rescue operation just a little more nightmarish.
Bolan considered the M-16 he held. If he opened up with his rifle, the mob would blindly, suicidally rush him and he would fall beneath their knives before he managed to empty his magazine, much less reload. However, Bolan had other ideas.
The dancer turned on Ryssemus. She screamed as the man raised his knives overhead like ice picks.
Bolan reached beneath his rifle and slipped his finger around the trigger of the FN 303 Less Lethal Launcher mounted under the forestock. He flicked off the safety, and his thumb pressed down. The laser sight came to life and put a red spot on the knife-wielding dancer’s chest.
It was time to see exactly how much control of his autonomous nervous system the dancer really had.
The FN 303 was a glorified paint-ball gun that fired fin-stabilized .68-caliber projectiles. They hit the target like a fist, and breaking on contact to prevent penetration injuries. They were unlikely to stop a highly trained martial artist, much less one in self-induced trance.