a homemade shank, he gutted one guard on the cell block, took another hostage and escaped in one of the prison vehicles. Car and hostage were abandoned on the outskirts of civilization, the guard decapitated, with his head mounted as a hood ornament.
Since then, for nearly twelve years, Balahadra Naraka had been a hunted fugitive, although it barely showed from his lifestyle. Granted, he spent most of his time in tents or tiny jungle villages, but so did half the population of West Bengal. His photos—half a dozen snapped by Naraka’s own men and sent to major newspapers—always depicted him in a defiant pose, armed to the teeth, standing beside the carcasses of tigers, elephants, or men in uniform.
Brognola had been right about the bandit-poacher’s body count. Although it seemed most of his victims were officials—cops, soldiers, game wardens—no two sources ever quite agreed on how many men he’d killed. The lowest figure Bolan saw, in excerpts from assorted press clippings, was 105; the highest, lifted from a sensational tabloid, ascribed “nearly four hundred” slayings to Naraka and his gang.
It was peculiar, Bolan thought, that no official source kept track of government employees murdered by a bandit on the prowl, but numbers didn’t really matter in the last analysis. Naraka was a dangerous opponent, and he’d moved from killing local lawmen to murdering U.S. diplomats.
Bolan assumed the Langley snatch had been a one-time thing, impulsive, maybe even carried out by a subordinate without Naraka’s prior knowledge. It made no difference, though, because Naraka had a lifelong pattern of internalizing and repeating bad behavior. If he’d been apprehended for his first known homicide, it might’ve made a difference. But as it was…
Naraka might be something of a folk hero to rural villagers, who welcomed charity and anyone who helped remove the threat of tigers from their dreary lives, but he still qualified as a mass murderer—perhaps the worst in India since British troops suppressed the thugee cult during the nineteenth century. If Bolan could supply the final chapter to Naraka’s long and cruel career, so much the better.
“He’s a tough one,” Bolan told Brognola. “Knows the ground like Jungle Jim. It won’t be easy to find him, and even then—”
“You’ve tackled worse,” Brognola said.
“Maybe.” Bolan handed back Naraka’s file. “Just let me check the ground.”
It was the worst of both worlds—first, a teeming city, second largest in the country, steeped in grinding poverty, then swamps and jungles rivaling the thickest, least hospitable on Earth. The Sundarbans, where Bolan would be forced to hunt Naraka if he couldn’t catch his target in Calcutta, spanned 2,560 square miles in West Bengal, with more sprawling across the border into Bangladesh. The Indian portion included a 1,550-square-mile game preserve, where three hundred tigers were protected by law, since the early 1970s.
Nor did the Sundarbans consist of any ordinary jungle. Seventy percent of the region lay under salt water, comprising the world’s largest mangrove swamp, crisscrossed by hundreds of creeks and tributaries feeding three large rivers—the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and the Meghna. Access to much of the region was boats only, and if tigers missed a visitor on land, the tourist still had to watch out for sharks and salt-water crocodiles. Electrified dummies had failed to discourage the cats, and every tourist party that entered the Sundarbans traveled with armed guards.
All that, before poachers and bandits were added to the mix.
“Sounds like malaria country,” Bolan said.
“I’ve got a medic on standby to update your shots,” Brognola answered.
“Thoughtful to a fault.”
“That’s me.”
“All right,” the Executioner replied. “I’m in.”
4
Calcutta
The cab dropped Bolan and Takeri two blocks north of Bolan’s hotel and they walked back through the darkness, alert for any sign of followers. Spotting none, they entered the lobby, where the night clerk shot a glance at them, suspicious, then ignored them after recognizing Bolan.
Takeri started toward the creaky elevator, but Bolan stopped him with a word and steered him toward the stairs. If anything had soured since he’d left the place that evening, Bolan didn’t want to meet new adversaries for the first time when the elevator’s door jerked open and the hostiles blazed away at point-blank range.
It proved to be a wasted effort, if security precautions could be wasted in a combat zone. No enemies were waiting for them on the third floor, none in Bolan’s room after he used his key and cleared the threshold in a rush, pistol in hand. The exercise did not make him feel foolish, even so.
Better to be alive and taking too much care than to relax and die.
When they were safely locked inside the room, lights on and curtains drawn, Bolan repeated his original question. “All right, we’re off the streets. Now fill me in on who we’re running from.”
Takeri found a seat and filled it, stretching in an effort to relax. “You understand I cannot be precisely sure. I did not recognize those men.”
“Best guess?”
“It was the first direct attempt upon my life since I left military service. I have enemies, of course, but in the circumstances I assume it was related to your mission.”
“Break it down.”
“Sorry? Oh, yes, I see. In preparation for your coming, I initiated certain contacts. Seeking information on Balahadra Naraka and his associates, attempting to identify his local contacts, vendors and the like. I exercised the utmost caution, but—”
“You tripped some wires, regardless,” Bolan finished for him.
“It is possible,” Takeri answered ruefully. “The other possibility, revenge for some work previously done, strikes me as too coincidental at the present time.”
“Agreed.”
It was a poor beginning to the mission, with his guide and contact compromised, already hunted by the enemy. Bolan had been sucked into the violence, seen by the enemy, and might have sacrificed the critical advantage of surprise.
Or, maybe not.
“You need to lay out everything you’ve done,” he told Takeri. “Everyone you’ve spoken to about Naraka, when and where. If we can figure out who’s hunting you, it tells us which direction we should go to minimize exposure.”
“Certainly.” Takeri frowned. “But, everyone?”
“In order, if you can,” Bolan replied. “We’ve got all night.”
“Do we have coffee?”
Bolan made a call to room service, then settled in to listen while they waited for the coffee to arrive.
“I started with police contacts,” Takeri said. “A Captain Gupta in Calcutta, who collaborates with agents from the Ministry of the Interior to curb the traffic in endangered species and their relics.”
“Is he straight?”
