Читать книгу China White - Don Pendleton - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

Chinatown, Manhattan

Paul Mei-Lun poured himself a second glass of rice baiju and slugged the liquor down, waiting to feel its heat spread from his throat into his belly. He hoped that it would calm him soon and damp the waves of anger that were threatening to prompt some foolish action he would certainly regret.

Details of the attack were vague, confused, but Mei-Lun knew the basics. He had lost three men and ten kilos of heroin, while suffering another grievous insult at the hands of foul barbarians. With Tommy Mu, that made four deaths within a week, eleven kilos lost. He did not want to think about what Ma Lam Chan would say—what he might do—on learning of the latest losses.

It was Mei-Lun’s job to put things right. He owed it to the Wah Ching brotherhood and to himself, since the responsibility had to ultimately fall on him. His problem now was where to start.

Of course, Wasef Kamran and his gorillas were responsible for Tommy Mu, but someone else had interceded in the second incident. Police had found the Afghans dead, along with Mei-Lun’s men, and witnesses described a seventh man wearing a mask and firing at both sides in the fight. He had been seen escaping with a suitcase—Mei-Lun’s suitcase—in a car already found abandoned on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, close to Central Park. Mei-Lun knew the car was rented, but he had not yet obtained the name of the killer who’d hired it.

When he did...

His thoughts stopped there. The gunman clearly was a trained professional. There was no reason to suppose that he would use his real name on a rental contract or that Mei-Lun would be able to locate him once he had the alias in hand. His task was to determine why a stranger, a professional, would leap into the middle of a firefight, tackle six armed men and kill them all.

The easy answer: for the heroin. But that was too easy.

To pull it off, the killer had to have known about the shipment, where it would be coming from and when it would arrive. He had to have followed Mei-Lun’s people from the ferry terminal. Without the Afghans intervening, Mei-Lun reckoned that the gunman would have trailed them to the Lucky Dragon where he sat right now, the empty liquor glass in front of him. But Kamran’s men had intervened, and even when the shooting started it was not enough to put the other gunman off. He’d gone ahead to fight six men and kill them all, then make off with the heroin.

Acting on whose behalf?

Mei-Lun’s thoughts turned immediately to the New York Mafia. His headquarters on Mott Street stood a short three blocks from Little Italy, where rivals spawned in Sicily despised him, seething enviously over his prosperity. There had been clashes in the past between his soldiers and the goombahs of La Cosa Nostra, but no overt violence had flared among them for a year or more. It would be out of character for them, he thought, to send a single soldier on a mission of such gravity.

But if they had...

Beside the baiju bottle, Mei-Lun’s cell phone buzzed and vibrated. He scooped it up and read the message: Number Blocked. Frowning, Mei-Lun pressed a button to accept the call and asked, “Who’s this?”

Instead of answering, a voice he didn’t recognize said, “Rumor has it that you lost a piece of luggage earlier today.”

The frown turned to a scowl, but Mei-Lun kept his voice in neutral. “Luggage?”

“I suppose you’re more concerned about the contents than the bag,” his caller said.

Cell phones were dangerous, their airborne messages fair game under the law for anyone who intercepted them. “Sorry,” Mei-Lun replied. “Wrong number.”

“Okay, then,” Mack Bolan said. “I’ll speak to Mr. Chan directly, shall I?” He rattled off the Dragon Head’s unpublished number in Hong Kong without missing a beat, as if from memory.

A trick? Undoubtedly. But if the stranger knew that much and Mei-Lun brushed him off, he might indeed call Ma Lam Chan. And that could be the end of Paul Mei-Lun.

“Perhaps I was mistaken,” Mei-Lun said. “If so, I would be willing to discuss it.”

“Small talk doesn’t interest me,” the caller told him. “I’ve got merchandise to sell.”

“I see.” There’d been no mention of the heroin, nothing that would incriminate Mei-Lun so far. “What figure did you have in mind?”

“Wholesale, I understand it runs around six hundred thousand. Call it half a mil and we’re in business.”

Mei-Lun wished that he could reach out through the cell phone, grasp the caller’s throat and strangle him, but he restrained himself, controlled his voice. “That is within the realm of possibility,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll call you back with details for the drop.”

And he was gone.

Flushing, Queens, New York

KHODA HAFIZ, an Afghan social club and quasi-covert headquarters of Wasef Kamran’s organization, stood near the corner of Franklin Avenue and Colden Street, in a neighborhood occupied mostly by South Asian immigrants. Some old-time residents called the neighborhood Little Afghanistan, while others dubbed it Little India. Kamran, these past four years, had simply called it home.

The club’s name translated in English to “May God protect you,” but He had not smiled on Wasef Kamran lately, and it angered the mobster.

The loss of three good men plus failure to secure the Wah Ching shipment he had sent them to collect had Kamran simmering with rage, augmented by frustration since he had no one to punish for that failure. With no outlet for his fury—and despite the strictures of his faith—Kamran had pacified himself to some extent with a small glass of homemade liquor that included alcohol, hash oil, sugar, nutmeg, a bit of cinnamon and cloves.

It had begun to work, soothing his nerves enough that Kamran thought he was prepared to face the second-worst part of his day: reporting his losses to Khalil Nazari in Kabul. He knew approximately how that call would go, and Kamran knew his only saving grace was that the conversation would occur long-distance rather than in person, where Nazari could slit his throat.

Killing the bearer of bad news was still in fashion with some Afghan warlords, a tradition hard to shake. Kamran had done the same himself, a time or two. Why fix what was not broken, after all?

He thought about another glass of liquor, then decided it would be too much. He wished to sound composed and in control, not high and babbling incoherently. If he appeared unstable, or Nazari surmised that he had lost control, his fate might well be sealed.

No further stalling, then.

Kamran picked up his encrypted sat-phone and was just about to speed-dial Kabul, when the smartphone beside his elbow chirped its ringtone, playing the first three bars of Farhad Darya’s “In a Foreign Land.” Kamran set down the larger instrument and checked the smartphone for a number. He found it blocked and answered anyway, against his better judgment.

“What?”

“Your people missed today,” a strange voice said, raising the short hairs on his nape.

“Wrong number,” Kamran snarled, and was about to cut the link when his caller said, “That’s what I heard from Paul Mei-Lun.”

“Oh, yes?”

“He wants to buy back the suitcase. I’m wondering if you’re prepared to beat his price.”

Kamran considered what he’d heard so far. Police were fond of stings in the United States, but this seemed far too subtle and innocuous. With no mention of contraband per se, he could discuss the generalities with no fear of indictment or arrest.

“What was his price?” Kamran inquired.

“Five hundred thousand.”

“That’s a lot of money for a suitcase.”

“Or the property inside it.”

He ran the calculation quickly through his mind. Buying the heroin cost more than stealing it, but even so, he had a chance to make a killing here—and not only financially. If he could meet this caller and determine if he was responsible for dropping Kamran’s men...

“I can improve on that by...shall we say ten percent?”

“Fifteen sounds better,” said the caller.

That was more than Kamran wished to pay, but still some twenty-five thousand less than Paul Mei-Lun would have shelled out for the merchandise. Call it $2.4 million and change in clear profit—and the drugs might cost him nothing, if the hijacker was dumb enough to bring them on his own, without backup.

“Where shall we meet, and when?” Kamran inquired.

“I’ll let you know,” the caller said, then broke the link.

Central Park, Manhattan

BOLAN HAD SOME time to kill while he decided on a meeting place—he was determined not to start the party until after nightfall. Seated on a stone bench within sight of where his former life had ended and the new one had begun, he ate a hero sandwich and perused a guidebook to the city that was once again his battleground, if only for a little while.

Phase one of his campaign would end this night and he’d move on, assuming he survived. He could have skipped the New York interlude, left it to normal law-enforcement agencies, but shutting down Wasef Kamran and Paul Mei-Lun was part of Bolan’s larger plan. It was step one in rattling some larger cages, putting more impressive predators on the defensive, kicking off a psy-war that would keep them guessing, sweating, while he homed in on another kill.

New York was one end of a global pipeline pumping heroin into the States. On second thought, make that two pipelines. One reached across the Middle East, Europe and the Atlantic, from Afghanistan. The other ran across the vast Pacific, from its starting point in Southeast Asia, to deliver poison on the West Coast, and from there across the continent. The only way to cripple both, however briefly, was to play off the existing competition between drug lords, bring it to a head, and take the top men down in flames.

Manhattan was a test case; Bolan’s master plan conducted on a smaller scale to see how well it played. And so far, even with the shooting match outside Chinatown, it seemed to be on track.

Next up, he needed someplace where the warring tribes could meet without endangering large numbers of civilians, someplace midway between Flushing and Chinatown, a spot with combat stretch, where he could set his trap and lie in wait for whoever showed up. Three million dollars’ worth of heroin made Bolan confident that both sides would attempt to grab the prize.

The second map he studied did the trick. Roosevelt Island, two miles long and three hundred yards wide, lay in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. At various times in its 377-year history, it had supported a prison, a lunatic asylum and a smallpox hospital. The mostly unoccupied northern tip of the island boasted Lighthouse Park and the historic Blackwell Island Light. Access points included East 66th Street passing under the river from Manhattan, the Roosevelt Island Bridge serving Queens. Once on the island proper, a person could drive around or take the tram to see the sights.

Bolan would be arriving from the west, using the tunnel, after he’d made sure no one was tailing him. From there he’d take the island’s West Road all the way, until it terminated, some three hundred yards from Blackwell Island Light, which put him in the kill zone. He would start at dusk and be in place before he made the calls directing Kamran and Mei-Lun to the appointed drop site, neither one expecting that the other would be there.

One question still remained in Bolan’s mind: would either of the top men show in person? He believed the odds were good, particularly if he made delivery contingent on their turning up to make the payoff. Naturally, they’d come with heavy backup, hoping to eliminate the stranger who was vexing them and claim the heroin without paying a dime. Bolan was counting on both sides to try their best at cheating him. He needed soldiers on the ground to help him with the mopping up.

And if he missed Kamran, Mei-Lun or both...well, he could take a little extra time to visit them before he moved on to the second phase of his campaign. Why not?

Anything worth doing was worth doing well.

Chinatown

“ROOSEVELT ISLAND?” Paul Mei-Lun pronounced the name as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. “What’s on Roosevelt Island?”

“Your shipment,” Bolan replied. “It waits for you till half past midnight, then goes looking for another buyer.”

“That would be a big mistake.”

“I’ll risk it if you don’t show up.”

“I said I’d be there, didn’t I? The park, out by the lighthouse, right?”

“That’s it,” the caller said. “If you decide to change your mind, the bag goes to Kamran.”

“Hey, now—”

But he was talking to dead air.

Standing beside him, almost at his elbow, Kevin Lo asked, “Well? What did he say?”

“Midnight, Roosevelt Island. At the lighthouse park.”

“This whole thing smells.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“It has to be some kind of setup.”

“Obviously. But it’s not the pigs,” Mei-Lun declared. “No mention of the H at all, so far. I show up and they bust me, I can always claim somebody called about my uncle’s missing suitcase.”

“Okay. It’s the Afghans, then.”

“Three of their men got wasted, right along with ours. If they already had the bag, why call me?”

That stumped Lo, but he still was not satisfied. “So what’s the angle, then? This can’t be straight.”

“His angle doesn’t matter,” Mei-Lun answered. “Only ours. He wants to dance, we call the tune.”

“We go in hard?”

“As hard as diamonds, brother.” Mei-Lun checked his Movado Swiss Automatic SE Extreme watch and smiled. “The meet’s at midnight. That gives us four hours to get there. I want a dozen of our best men here in half an hour, dressed to kill.”

“No problem,” Lo assured him. “You’re still going with us?”

“Kevin, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Get moving now and set it up.”

Lo bobbed his head and left the office, cell phone already in hand. Mei-Lun considered changing his command to make it twenty soldiers, rather than a dozen, but that felt like overcompensating. From the early eyewitness reports, one guy had done the killing on Canal Street by himself, and he would likely come alone to claim his payoff for the stolen heroin. But if he showed up with a friend or two, so what? Mei-Lun would have his soldiers waiting at the drop well in advance of midnight, primed to waste this fool on sight.

No, scratch that. They would have to chat a little with him first, to make sure that he’d brought the merchandise. Killing the bastard without getting back the skag would be a waste of time—and it would leave Mei-Lun at risk from Ma Lam Chan when he admitted to the loss.

A sudden thought disturbed him. What if Chan already knew about the heist? He almost certainly had eyes and ears inside Mei-Lun’s Manhattan cadre, someone who would tip him off to any problems Mei-Lun tried to cover up. If word had reached the Dragon Head at home, would he reach out to Paul Mei-Lun, or simply send a team of his enforcers to correct the situation, meting out the punishment Chan deemed appropriate?

Mei-Lun peered at his watch again, counting the hours since the slaughter on Canal Street, guessing how long it would take to have a team airborne from Hong Kong to the States. As he remembered it, the flight to San Francisco took approximately fifteen hours, then they’d face another seven hours in the air, if they were fortunate enough to catch a nonstop flight from Frisco to LaGuardia or JFK. If they were airborne now, Mei-Lun shouldn’t expect to see them nosing around Chinatown until sometime tomorrow afternoon.

No sweat.

He’d have the problem solved by then, the merchandise in hand, and they could tell Chan that he’d taken care of business without any interference from the East. And if that didn’t satisfy the Dragon Head, perhaps they ought to meet and talk about it, face-to-face.

Maybe, Mei-Lun decided, it was time for him to think about advancement in the Family.

Flushing, Queens

“THIS MAKES NO SENSE, WASEF,” Ghulam Munadi said.

Wasef Kamran shrugged in response. “This man stole heroin we planned to steal, and now he wants to sell it. What confuses you?”

“First, that he knows the number where to reach you.”

“Anyone can find a number nowadays,” Kamran replied. “The internet is free to all, and this man has skills.”

“Too many skills,” Munadi countered. “He is some kind of policeman. I’m convinced of it.”

“Some kind? What kind? He asks for money to return an item that was stolen. There is nothing to incriminate us, eh?”

“Until we claim the bag. Then they arrest us.”

“Think, Ghulam! Would the police kill six men in the public eye, then steal the drugs just to arrest us?” Kamran did not wait for his lieutenant to reply. “Of course not! If this person is a cop, he’s more like us. Trying to save a little for retirement, eh?”

“And what if it’s a trap?” Munadi asked.

“I can assure you that it is. We seem to take the bait, then close the noose around his neck. With fifteen men, what can he do?”

Munadi frowned. “I don’t like going to this island.”

“Tell me what you do like, Ghulam. It’s a shorter list, I’m sure.”

“What I would like is to forget this business. Since we can’t do that, I’d like you to remain here under tight security until the bag has been retrieved and this is settled.”

“Stay at home and miss the show this bastard has planned for me especially? I wouldn’t think of it.”

“You’ll wear the Kevlar, though?”

“Of course. I’m not an idiot,” Kamran replied.

He would be armed, as well, with his usual sidearm for a start, a Heckler & Koch P30 chambered in .40 S&W, with a 13-round magazine. To back it up, another favorite: the Spectre M4 submachine gun with its casket magazine containing fifty 9 mm Parabellum rounds, less than fourteen inches long with its metal stock folded above the receiver. With the Spectre he could lay down 800 rounds per minute, killing anyone or anything that stood between him and his goal.

Including this killer who believed that he could dupe Kamran somehow, perhaps make off with Kamran’s hard-earned money, and the heroin besides.

“Good luck with that,” he muttered to himself.

“What did you say?” Munadi asked.

“Nothing. Go and make sure the men are ready. We should leave soon.”

“But it’s only—”

“Yes, I know the time. I want to be there, waiting, when our friend arrives. Let us surprise him, eh?”

“As you wish it, Wasef.”

He was looking forward to the meeting with this stranger who had robbed him—or, in truth, who’d robbed the Chinese Kamran had meant to rob. He felt a sneaking kind of admiration for such courage and audacity, but it required a harsh response to salvage Kamran’s reputation as a man whose enemies enjoyed short, miserable lives.

This one, whoever he might be, would have been wiser to go hunting somewhere else, perhaps rob the Jamaicans or Dominicans, maybe the damned Armenians. He was about to learn a lesson that Afghanis had been teaching Westerners since 1839. Kamran’s people could not be vanquished in their homeland—not by England, Russia or America—and now they were expanding into every corner of the planet to assert themselves and claim their proper share of wealth.

This night, Roosevelt Island. This time next year, perhaps Manhattan. And beyond that...who could say? It was a whole new world, beyond Khalil Nazari’s wildest dreams from Kabul, where the old ways mired him down. Perhaps a younger, stronger man was needed to command that new domain and bend it to his will.

Job one: collect the heroin without dispensing any cash to the audacious thief. Then, having proved himself, Wasef Kamran could think about tomorrow and the great things he was going to accomplish.

All he had to do was make it through the night alive.

Roosevelt Island

BOLAN PARKED HIS latest rental car, a Honda CR-V, in the visitor’s lot at Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital, and made his way to the roof of the X-shaped facility’s northwestern wing. From there he had a view across treetops to Lighthouse Park, where his intended targets would be showing up, at least in theory, sometime in the next three hours.

Waiting was a sniper’s specialty. Bolan likely could not have counted all the times he’d lain in wait for enemies in heat and cold, under a drenching rain, while insects crawled over his skin and hummed around his ears. He’d learned to lie in perfect stillness, barely breathing, while a target took its own sweet time about appearing, stepping finally into the crosshairs of his telescopic sight and dying there, struck down from half a mile or more away, with no idea how death had come so suddenly, without a hint of warning.

He was ready now, with his weapon of choice for this phase of the hunt, an M-110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System manufactured by Knight’s Armament in Florida. The rifle measured 46.5 inches with its buttstock extended and a suppressor attached, tipping the scales at just over fifteen pounds with a 20-round magazine full of 7.62 mm NATO rounds. Its AN/PVS-10 night sight would let him place accurate shots out to 875 yards, nearly nine times the range he would be firing from this night. It should be like shooting fish in a barrel.

But these fish might be shooting back.

His plan was simple: place the Afghans and Wah Ching hardmen into proximity, both looking for the same thing, then cut loose and see what happened next. A well-placed shot or two might do the trick, but if the opposition needed any more help, Bolan had a stack of extra magazines on hand and was prepared to use as many as the job required.

Scorched earth, all the way.

He didn’t need to rattle either side for information, since the next stop on his tour had been determined in advance. Khalil Nazari’s opium was processed into bricks of morphine near the poppy fields he cultivated in Afghanistan. Bolan knew approximately where the morphine bricks were sent for their conversion into heroin. The details he did not as yet possess would be available when he arrived on-site, secured by one means or another to complete the next link in the chain.

This night he would be shutting down the pipeline in Manhattan. Not for good; no one could claim permanent victory in any war against a human craving for release. But Bolan could remove the major players in this one dark corner of the world. Maybe incite some other scavengers to take each other off the board while they were grappling to fill the power vacuum that resulted.

Doing what he could with what he had.

His field of fire was open from the hospital’s six-story rooftop to the Blackwell Island Light, four hundred feet northeast of where he sat cradling the rifle, waiting. Once the action started, Bolan’s enemies could break in one of three directions: toward the light, away from him; to cars parked on the left or right, against the river’s edge; or back toward Bolan, seeking refuge among trees that formed a kind of horseshoe shape at his end of the park. Whichever way they ran, it would be under fire from Bolan and from adversaries on the other side, who’d come expecting to go home with ten kilos of heroin.

How many would go home at all?

Bolan never indulged in overconfidence. He trained and practiced, planned and double-checked his plans, then trusted to his own experience and skill. That recipe had kept him in the game so far, but he did not deceive himself into believing that his luck would hold forever. No one had that guarantee, and least of all a fighting man who put himself in harm’s way constantly.

His greatest apprehension at the moment was that Paul Mei-Lun or Wasef Kamran might decide to stay at home, let their gorillas keep the date and see what came of it. If he missed one or both of them this night, he’d have to stick around New York until the job was done, giving his adversaries at the next stop more time to prepare themselves.

For all the good that it would do them.

Even with the news of his Manhattan blitz, they wouldn’t know with whom they were dealing.

They would not be prepared to meet the Executioner.