that I was Chinese and the government would subsidize my opium,” a young private said with a laugh, nudging the trunk with the steel toe of his army boot. “Think of it! They buy at fifty a kilo, then sell it on the streets at ten. Ten!”
“Perhaps there is something good to be said about communism, after all,” another private replied.
“The drug is just another way to keep their slaves from rebelling,” a large corporal growled without looking up from his French comic book. “We use whips and chains, the Chinese use heroin. What is the difference?”
“Shut up, all of you,” a grizzled lieutenant muttered, dropping the ammunition drum from a massive Atchisson autoshotgun, only to slam it back into the receiver. “Never talk about business in the open.”
“Way out here?” a private asked. “Who is going to overhear us, a lizard working for Interpol?”
“I said be quiet,” the lieutenant repeated, clicking off the safety. “That’s a direct order.”
Grudgingly, the troops obeyed, and went back to polishing the dampness from their AK-101 assault rifles, and daydreaming about the fleshpots of Vientiane. The capital city offered many tender delights for a real man with hard cash.
Sitting in the second truck of the convoy, Tul-Vuk Yang pulled a slim Monte Cristo cigar from the breast pocket of his military fatigues and bit off one end. Spitting it away, he then thumbed a gold lighter alive and applied the hissing flame to the tip of the expensive cigar. Once the tip was cherry-red, Yang removed the flame and drew the pungent smoke deep into his lungs. Ah, wonderful! The foolish Americans used all sorts of bizarre chemicals to cure their broadleaf tobacco in only a few hours—arsenic, lead, formaldehyde—while, the Cubans allowed their tobacco to naturally cure in direct sunlight. The process took a month instead of six hours, and aside from the obvious health benefits of not breathing in vaporized arsenic, the difference in taste was beyond belief.
“Magnificent!” Yang sighed, exhaling a long stream of dark smoke.
“Sir?” the driver asked, glancing sideways.
“Nothing, my friend. Pay attention to the road! The rebels have been planting more and more of those homemade bombs these days, and—”
A thunderous explosion ripped about the jungle as the road just behind the convoy violently exploded, smoking pieces of men and machinery spraying outward in every direction.
“Incoming!” Yang shouted, the cigar dropping from his mouth. Clawing at the radio in the dashboard, he pulled up a hand mike. “Alert! Red alert! We are under attack!”
Instantly, the five trucks increased their speed, and soon were racing along the rough dirt road at a breakneck pace. Following close behind, the barrage of incoming missiles chewed a path of destruction after them, coming ever closer.
Just then, a fiery dart streaked between the first and second truck, the exhaust blowing in through the open windows.
“Close!” the pale driver yelled.
“Too close,” Yang growled, scanning the sky for any sign of the enemy helicopter. The bastard had to be tracking his trucks by the heat of the engines. There was only one solution for that. He thumbed the mike alive.
“Everybody use your grenades. Throw them randomly, as far away as you can!”
Moments later, the jungle shook from multiple explosions all around the convoy. Bushes erupted from the soil, and trees toppled over. For an intolerable length of time, it seemed to the drug runners as if the entire world was exploding all around them.
Then the vines parted before the first truck and there was the Dee-wa Bridge, a modern box trestle that spanned a white-water gorge to reach the other side. Yang grinned at the sight of China. Nobody sane would dare to attack them there! The Chinese Red Army was bad enough, but the Red Star agents were psychopaths, genuine sadists who loved torture and bloodshed. No one dared to offend the dreaded Red Star!
“We’re safe!” the driver yelled, as the first truck bumped onto the bridge and rapidly accelerated across the smooth, perforated flooring.
“Not yet,” Yang replied, drawing a Very pistol, and firing a round straight upward.
The flare arched high into the sky and exploded into scarlet brilliance. Almost instantly a missile slammed into the sizzling flare and detonated in a controlled thunderclap.
Laughing in victory, Yang fired more flares as fast as he could, every one targeted by a missile and then swiftly destroyed.
“Last truck is on the bridge!” a voice announced over the radio.
“Now we’re safe.” Yang chuckled, lowering the flare gun.
That was when he saw a flock of big black birds hovering over the Dee-wa Gorge, as if they were nailed to the empty air. He blinked in surprise, then screamed as the winged machines cut loose with all of their remaining missiles at point-blank range.
The entire length of the Dee-wa Bridge was engulfed in a fireball from eighteen antitank missiles. The steel mooring ripped from the concrete beds, and the trestle writhed like a dying thing, twisting and convulsing, rivets flying and welds cracking until the bridge was smashed into a million pieces. Smashed and on fire, the armored trucks tumbled down into the gorge, the men already dead from the bone-pulverizing concussions.
It took the burning vehicles almost a full minute to reach the bottom of the gorge, and trees were flattened for a hundred yards from their meteoric impact. Then a pair of drones arrived to crash among the smoldering wreckage and ignite their self-destruct charges of thermite. Soon, a raging chemical bonfire filled the area, melting the metal trucks into slag, vaporizing the cargo and forever completing the total annihilation of the infamous Yang Moon Convoy.
Patiently, the rest of the Sky Tiger swarm waited until their miniature computers were assured everybody was dead, and the cargo of opium was beyond recovery. Now the machines automatically switched to their secondary targets, and swooped away to find the next bridge of any kind that crossed the Dee-wa River. The wild waters had a different name in each new territory, but the drones were concerned only with bridges and dams. At each one, a drone would smash into the structure and set off its payload of deadly thermite. Burning at the surface temperature of the sun, the lambent fire destroyed everything it reached. Concrete, iron, granite or steel—nothing could withstand the hellish infernos.
Less than an hour later, there were no functioning bridges between Laos and China, and the drug trade between the two nations was terminated for the time being.
Hong Kong International Airport, Hong Kong
THE AIRPORT WAS bustling with crowds of people arriving and departing, and nobody seemed to be paying any attention to the Chinese soldiers standing on the overhead catwalks carrying QBZ assault rifles.
Maintaining a neutral expression, Bolan gave them only a cursory glance, then ignored the guards completely, just like everybody else. The Customs line moved swiftly, faster than he had expected, and soon he was standing before a small Asian man who scrutinized his passport as if knowing it was a fake. Except that it wasn’t, aside from the name imprinted on the federal paper.
“And what is the purpose of your visit, Mr. Dupree?” the customs inspector asked, looking at the passport. “Business or pleasure?”
“A
