CHAPTER FOUR
PROLOGUE
The body plummeted through the sky and crashed with a dull, sickening thump into the dry grass. More bodies followed as the transport plane made a slow, lazy circle over the field.
The team had done this a hundred times before, and the men, dressed in black, took to the field.
The bodies were hollowed-out cattle, their bellies distended with packages. Some clinked with the heavy ring of metal, while others were stiff pillows of compressed powder. Two of the cows were filled with rolls of rifles, wrapped in plastic and cushioning foam.
“Looks like Christmastime for the gang,” a man dressed in black mentioned as he pulled the weapons from the body cavity of the slaughtered animal. “Must be twenty rifles here.”
“Chatter,” another replied quietly.
The first fell quiet, admonished with a single word. Sound carried, and even though their helicopter had scanned the area for miles with infrared and radar, they still worked in hushed, professional silence to ensure their private, midnight endeavor went undetected.
In the darkness, none of the men in black used regular white lights. Occasionally they would flash on a low-powered, low-signature red light, but only for a moment. In the empty field, there was too much risk of strangers noticing.
They had been doing this for years and hadn’t been caught.
One man spoke among the group. “Leave a souvenir for the conspiracy theorists.”
The others nodded and as they dragged a dozen carcasses off the field, they left one lying in the dried grass.
One man pulled a small butane-lighter-like device and burned a brand into the carcass. He worked from memory, knowing which ranch they were on.
The rest of the team took out folding rakes and went over the entirety of the field before returning to the helicopter. The branding artist backed his way to the helicopter, obscuring his tracks, leaving no trace that anyone was ever there. The long, padded skids of the transport chopper rose from a patch of hard, rocky soil and sparse grass leaving little clue of the vehicle’s presence.
The presence of the gutted cow would obfuscate the situation handily. No one would suspect their smuggling ring, in business across several decades, was in operation. Not when investigators were hampered by crackpot theorists who blamed slaughtered cattle on aliens or top-secret Army surgical teams testing surgical lasers. The truth was at once mundane and would shock the world should it ever get out.
But the men in black, as they left the gutted, cauterized corpse in the field, wouldn’t be responsible for that leak in secrecy.
The dark helicopter rose into the Utah night, its Kevlar hull minimizing its radar signature to that of a sparrow, sideways speakers reflecting the sound of the rotors at a right angle to the original racket to dampen the noise to a thrumming whisper. The stealth bird swung lazily back toward its home base.
It was business as usual.
CHAPTER ONE
The Gulf of Thailand, twenty miles out of Pattaya
It was business as usual for Mack Bolan, a.k.a. the Executioner, as Jack Grimaldi raced Dragon Slayer low over the Gulf of Thailand, so low that the sea spray pelted the windshield. The high-tech combat helicopter was loaded to the gills with electronics and weaponry to give Bolan the kind of edge he needed when fighting impossible odds. The war bird had been designed specifically for the soldier’s crusade against the forces of evil. With encrypted communications, wireless satellite computer links and sensors that could pick up anything across the spectrum, Dragon Slayer could find almost any target. Laden with rocket and grenade launchers, and the awesome .50-caliber GECAL multibarreled machine gun, the helicopter could destroy even a small column of tanks.
Grimaldi held them low over the water, about five feet between the belly of the sleek bird and the tops of the tallest waves. With speakers that reflected the sound of the bird’s own rotor slap at ninety-degree angles to the original sound, the normal thunder and roar of the helicopter was muffled to little more than a low hum. This was a stealth insertion on a freighter loaded with contraband from Thailand.
The ship was on course for North Korea. The freighter was registered to Liberia, which enabled it to travel around the world without more than a second glance. Sometimes that registry also covered illegal operations, but since major corporations profited from both tourism and “under the counter” transportation of goods, powerful sponsorship kept governments from looking too closely at the problem.
Mack Bolan wasn’t the government. He wasn’t a civil servant with a license to kill. Certainly, through the Sensitive Operations Group
