Lethal Tribute

“Such a graveyard would take up half of this chamber.” Makhdoom shrugged helplessly. “I see no sign of digging in the floor.”

Bolan gazed around the room until his eyes fell on the pallet once more. He unclipped the light from his rifle and thoroughly scanned around its edges and through the slats for wires or booby traps. Bolan lifted the pallet and pushed it back to lean against the wall.

Beneath the pallet was the same gray dirt as the rest of the chamber. Bolan’s eyes narrowed as he knelt and ran his fingers through the dirt. The walls were wet. If the pallet had been here for any length of time the soil beneath it should have been moist.

“We dig here.”

Makhdoom’s face tightened. “Twenty-three men cannot be buried in such a space.”

Bolan stared back implacably. The Pakistani captain barked out a few words and his men broke out entrenching tools and began to dig. With the first shovelful one of his men looked and spoke in rapid Sind.

The soil was loose, moist and disturbed beneath the thin veil of gray dirt. Musa Company continued to dig. They didn’t have to dig long.

“Bismillah!” A corporal jumped back in fear and outrage. The corporal had encountered a head. The head was wearing a black balaclava from a night raid. The men lifted the body out and more cries of outrage met the discovery. Makhdoom’s face was stone. Many of his men made the sign against the evil eye at what they had found.

The body was one of Musa Company. The body’s shoulders and hips had been shattered, the arms and legs broken, the body folded up around itself like a cricket. The body took up no more space than that of a child. They all knew what lay below.

Beneath the tiny space of the pallet, a full platoon of Musa Company had been mutilated and buried.

Makhdoom swallowed as another and yet another of his men were exhumed. “Have you ever seen such a thing?”

“No. Not exactly.” Bolan watched as the doll-like bodies of Makhdoom’s troops were pulled from their communal grave. “But I think I know someone who has.”

CHAPTER THREE

Islamabad

“The Thuggees of Kali?”

Kurtzman was incredulous.

Bolan leaned back in the rickety wooden chair. He was back in his cell, but his satellite link equipment had been returned to him. The guard with the club stood glaring at him, and a man Bolan hadn’t met before stood taping everything Bolan said. “I need everything you have on them.”

“There is no more Cult of Kali, last I heard. The British wiped them out in the seventeenth century.”

“Didn’t Phoenix Force have a run-in with them some years ago?”

“Well, yeah, they did,” Kurtzman admitted. “But the guys Phoenix hit were yahoos. There were less than three hundred of them, a sideshow revival movement, and the whole thing was organized by the KGB. They were little more than Russian stooges, manipulated into killing Americans and Europeans in India. It was a real cute setup. The Russians even had a mechanical idol of Kali with a high-frequency laser built in it to keep the faithful in line. The only people they were fooling were mostly illiterate tribesmen and some well-heeled psychopaths in Bengal. Even their high priest was a fake. Once he was exposed, his own people killed him and the cult disbanded.” Kurtzman sighed. “Stealing nuclear weapons from high-security areas, turning invisible and taking out entire platoons of special forces troops just wasn’t in their repertoire.”

“These won’t be a bunch of barefoot, illiterate tribesman. This will be the real deal. True believers, highly organized, well-funded.” Bolan paused. “With a new agenda.”

“Striker, are you sure?”

“I’m not sure at all. But we found Musa Company’s lost platoon. Their shoulders and hips were broken and folded to fit twenty-three men into a mass grave barely big enough for six, and the autopsies revealed that each one of them had been strangled, to a man, and not a drop of blood was spilled.”

“Well, from what I remember about Thuggee ritual killing, that fits, but—”

“It also goes a long way toward explaining how the men of Musa Company were being jerked up into the air and flailing like marionettes.”

“Okay, but by invisible attackers? Who don’t show up on night-vision or high-resolution satellite imaging? And for that matter, how did they make the bodies instantly disappear?”

Bolan ate a chunk of barbecued goat and followed it with a spoonful of garlic-stewed spinach. His food had improved with his status since morning. “Bear, I’m going to let you figure that one out.”

“Uh-huh.” Kurtzman had seen that one coming a mile away.

“As I recall, Thuggee means ‘deceiver’ in Hindi.”

“That’s correct.”

“I think someone deceived their way into the Pakistani nuclear weapons site. They had to know the layout to make their attack. Invisible or not, they had people on the inside.”

“Well, assuming the bad guys aren’t supernatural in origin, I’d have to agree with you.” Bolan could hear Kurtzman pounding keys on his computer. “Phoenix is deployed right now, but as soon as they are inbound I’ll have the boys that were involved in the India mission get in touch with you. Meanwhile I’ll send you everything on the mission I have on file, though it’s going to have to be redacted for security unless you can guarantee a secure line.”

“Right now I can’t guarantee whether or not I’m going to be shot as spy. I’m going to give you Captain Makhdoom’s fax number. Send everything you can that doesn’t compromise the home team or national security.”

“How do you feel about this Makhdoom guy?”

“He’s good people, but he’s a captain. A highly decorated special forces captain, but he won’t have the final say about my final disposition, and my presence here has rattled the cages of a lot of people above his pay grade.”

“I understand.” Kurtzman stopped multitasking for a moment. “How’s the food?”

Bolan smiled as he ate another bite and washed it down with mint tea. The food was excellent. Pakistanis knew a thing or two about goat shish kebob, but Kurtzman wasn’t asking about the food. He was asking if Bolan wanted him to arrange some kind of extraction. Unfortunately, Pakistan was an ostensible ally of the United States. A U.S. raid on one of their prisons could strain that slender relationship to the breaking point. Frankly, Bolan was fairly sure it was something the U.S. was unwilling to risk. Not that it wasn’t something the men from Stony Man Farm wouldn’t gladly risk anyway if asked. “Food’s not bad. I’m not missing home yet.”

“Glad to hear it. It might be hard to get a Big Mac into Islamabad at the moment.”

“Don’t worry about it, just fax Makhdoom the files. I’m interested to see what he thinks of them.”

“I’m on it. Kurtzman out.”

Bolan clicked off his link and smiled at the guard. The man with the tape recorder took back the communications gear and left without a word. The guard slammed the door shut and the soldier tossed back the last of the tea, then stretched out on his bunk. Thin white clouds passed overhead as he looked up through the grille.

Bolan took a nap and waited to see what developed.

“THE Thuggees of Kali?”

Makhdoom was appalled.

Bolan leaned back in his chair. It was nice to be in a conference room instead of a cell. “You’ve heard of them, I gather.”

“Yes, I have heard of them. Murderers and worshipers of idols.” The captain flipped through the file of information that Kurtzman had anonymously faxed him. “The information you have shared with me is fascinating, but I do not see how it is relevant. The British East India Company wiped out the Thuggees more than a century ago.”

Bolan shook his head. “Not all of them.”

“Granted.” Makhdoom closed the file. “But your file says that the Thuggees encountered were a rather pale revivalist movement and dupes of the Russians.”

“This won’t be the same group. As a matter of fact, I believe whoever we’re dealing with is hard-core, old-school Thuggee.”

Makhdoom blinked. “Old school?”

“Originals. The real deal. Probably a splinter sect of those who were originally operating and driven underground by the British. Their tradition has been practiced unbroken for possibly thousands of years. It is now resurfacing with a new agenda.”

“I see.” The captain nodded.

“But I believe they will have many of the same modes of operation and we can draw a lot of clues from studying what the U.S. team encountered.”

Makhdoom flipped open the file again.

Bolan’s voice hardened slightly. “The theft of your warheads was an inside job.”

The captain frowned. “I suspect so, also.”

“Perhaps we should visit the facility,” Bolan suggested.

“The place where the weapons were stolen from is a high-security area, and secret. It has already been locked down and the people who work there interrogated, vigorously.” Makhdoom raised an eyebrow. “And I suspect my superiors would take a dim view of a renegade American commando examining the premises.”

“They have a dim view of me now,” Bolan countered. “The weapons are already gone and the facility is in high-security lockdown. What could it hurt?”

Makhdoom stared ruefully out the window. The mysterious American had saved his life. Beyond that he was making Makhdoom’s life a living hell and doing nothing to help his career prospects.

But avenging his men was more important to the special forces captain than his career. “Right!” Makhdoom threw up his hands. “Let us go look for Thuggees in one of my country’s top-secret weapons facilities.”

“Don’t you need to clear that with your superiors?”

Makhdoom sighed with infinite fatigue. “Do you really think I should tell my superiors I am going to take a renegade American spy into one of our top-secret nuclear facilities and search for invisible, idol-worshiping assassins?”

“Well, yeah, you should.” Bolan shrugged. “But only afterward, and only then if we produce results.”

The captain nodded. “You and I shall get along splendidly.”

Al-Nouri Weapons Facility

BOLAN WATCHED footage from the facility security cameras. The film was grainy black-and-white. It wasn’t particularly well focused and the video appeared to have tracking problems. Most convenience stores in the United States had security video of better quality. What the footage showed was shocking in the extreme.

The weapons facility was a small, heavily fortified building within a large Pakistani air force base, comfortably outside of Islamabad in case India launched a surgical nuclear strike against the weapons stored there. The weapons themselves were stored in hardened underground bunkers. Underground rail tunnels led out to the airfields, which allowed the weapons to be rapidly transferred to revetted Mirage III/5B supersonic fighter-bombers. If the balloon went up between the two Asian superpowers, the French-made jets would scramble across the border to devastate the Indian subcontinent.

At least, that was the plan.

The current problem with the plan was that three of those nuclear warheads had vanished.

Bolan watched the footage for the fourth time. Bored guards armed with Chinese Type 56-1 assault rifles manned the internal checkpoints. One by one they swiftly rose onto the tips of their toes, flailing, struggling and clawing at their throats. Bolan counted seconds. Each guard went limp at ten and then dropped after another thirty. It took approximately nine to ten seconds to strangle someone unconscious and an approximate total time of thirty to forty seconds of strangulation to make sure that victim never woke up again.

Supernatural or not, whoever had attacked the Al-Nouri facility had strangled each guard in their way with clocklike precision. “Autopsies would show strangulation as the cause of death.”

“Indeed,” Makhdoom agreed. “Except that we have no bodies.”

“The guards worked in pairs at the internal checkpoints within the facility. That would imply two-man elimination teams to eliminate them at the least, and four would be better.”

Makhdoom shook his head in frustration. “Where are these ‘elimination teams’ you speak of?” He waved an angry hand at the monitor. “Where? I see nothing!”

“They’re there.” Bolan pointed at the screen. “We just can’t see them.”

“I can accept that they attacked the video system, somehow erasing themselves from the camera footage, but you and I were out in the pass. You saw what I saw, and with your own eyes you did not see what I did not see, as well. They were not observable in night-vision equipment, nor were they observable to our naked eyes, even in the glare of a magnesium flare.” Makhdoom sagged in his chair. “Explain that.”

“I can’t. Not yet. But the answer is right here.” Bolan hit the rewind button again.

“Did any guards survive?” he went on.

“Most of the guards in the facility survived. Indeed, most were unaware that anything had happened until after the warheads and the men guarding them were discovered to be missing.”

“What about the men who were monitoring the video control area?”

“Gone.” The Pakistani sighed. “Presumed dead.”

Bolan let out a long breath. “There’s a mass grave, like the one we found in the tunnels, probably very nearby. If they were transporting the warheads, they would neither have had the time nor the manpower to drag them far.”

“Yes, I suspect you are right. I will have men sweep the outlying area.” Makhdoom leaned back in his chair. “What else do you suggest?”

“You say the rest of the staff here has already been interrogated?”

“Yes. Vigorously.”

Bolan nodded. “I propose we speak to them again.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Islamabad

The man in the cell wasn’t happy. He didn’t have a skylight. No one was bringing him barbecued goat kabobs. No one looked to have brought him anything but pain. His clothes were torn and bloodstained. His face was a misshapen lump of hamburger. A pair of guards stood over the miserable man, each with a tapered, leather-bound wooden club.

The bottoms of the prisoner’s feet were masses of purple bruising.

This was the twelfth such prisoner Bolan had seen. Pakistani justice, both military and civilian, was primitive, corrupt and brutal. One’s best hope was to be tried under Sharia—Islamic Law. The men Bolan had seen weren’t being tried. They were simply being tortured for information. Even if they knew nothing, their apparent failure at keeping the nuclear weapons in their charge secure justified their punishment in the minds of their jailers. Most had been wearing Pakistani army uniforms and had been guards at the Al-Nouri Weapons Facility. This man was dressed in civilian rags.

One of the guards looked up, saluted and shrugged at Makhdoom. He muttered a few words in Urdu, which Bolan didn’t need translated. The prisoner had been tortured extensively and he had nothing useful to say. Makhdoom let out a long breath. He clearly wasn’t pleased with the torturing of the prisoners, but neither was he raising any fuss about it. He had lost half a platoon of men and the fate of his nation could depend on what was discovered.

Whatever kid gloves of civility Makhdoom normally wore as an officer and a gentleman had come off in the past twenty-four hours.

Bolan examined the prisoner critically. He sat crumpled and hunched on the stone floor between the two guards, flinching with adrenaline reaction from his most recent beating and fear whenever either of the guards moved. He sniveled as one of the guards prodded him to demonstrate what a useless prisoner he was.

Bolan happened to be wearing the uniform of a Pakistani captain of special forces. His blue eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, even though they were in an underground cell. He had the reassuring weight of a loaded Browning Hi-Power pistol holstered on his hip. Bolan nodded at Makhdoom. It sickened him, but it was the only way.

Makhdoom nodded at the guards.

The prisoner shrieked as the bastinadoes of the guards fell upon him once more like rain. The beating went on for a few moments, then Makhdoom strode into the middle of it. He seized the prisoner by his shirtfront and slammed him against the wall of the cell. Spittle flew as Makhdoom screamed first in Urdu then in Sind. The man flinched and jerked as he was threatened with everything from castration to death. Makhdoom cut off his tirade and hurled the prisoner to the floor.

Bolan took off his sunglasses and strode forward.

The prisoner stared up into Bolan’s burning blue eyes and cringed in terror. The man flinched and pressed himself into the wall as Bolan crouched and cocked his hand back as if he were going to backhand him.

Bolan’s back was to Makhdoom and the guards. He didn’t backhand the prisoner. Instead he quickly passed his right hand down in front of his face. The prisoner’s eyes flew wide. Bolan whispered one of the two phrases in Hindi he had memorized this day.

“Greetings, Ali my brother.”

It was an ancient greeting, that members of the Cult of Kali had once used to identify fellow members in strange cities. The prisoner’s eyes flared wide at the words. Not with fear, nor with confusion, but with recognition.

Bolan had gotten a bite. He yanked on the hook to bury it deep and reeled the man in as he used his second phrase of Hindi. “Be strong. Be ready. We will come for you.”

The big American suddenly stood and yanked the prisoner up with him. He snarled a phrase in Urdu he had learned long ago during a mission in Asia, something about the prisoner enjoying relations with goats and how he particularly enjoyed allowing the goats to assume the dominant position in the relationship. The guards laughed uproariously. Bolan grabbed the prisoner by the throat and shoved him across the room. The prisoner collapsed into a heap in the corner. Bolan hated this aspect of role playing, but it was necessary.

Bolan spit on the man and fell into step with Makhdoom as they left the cell.

“You have a remarkable gift with languages,” the captain acknowledged.

“Thank you. You have a beautiful language filled with poetic metaphor.”

Makhdoom smiled for the first time in seventy-two hours. “And now?”

“Now? Now I think it’s time that you arranged a jailbreak.”

“Ah.”

Bolan cocked an eyebrow. “Do you speak Hindi, by the way?”

“I am a Pakistani special forces captain.” Makhdoom smiled slyly. “Infiltration was one of my specialities.”

Bolan nodded. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

The Prison, 4:00 a.m.

“SO WHO IS THIS GUY and what’s his story?” Bolan watched the bored guard pace outside.

“Atta,” Makhdoom answered. The Pakistani captain flipped through a file on his lap. “Atta Naqbi. He is a technician, recently graduated from the American University in Egypt. His family fled from East Pakistan during the 1971 war. He had no criminal record and has been working at the Al-Nouri Weapons Facility for six months.”

Bolan considered the information. What was once Eastern Pakistan was now known as Bangladesh. It was about half the size of Kansas and just as flat. Only unlike Kansas, Bangladesh was cut by the mighty courses of the Ganges, the Tista and the Brahmaputra rivers. When the snows of the Himalayas melted, Bangladesh was their final destination. Flooding was endemic. When the mountains didn’t flood the land, the monsoons swept the sea-level nation with tidal waves. Swiftly approaching a thousand people per square kilometer, every disaster took a horrific toll in human life. Bangladesh was an autonomous nation, but she was heavily reliant on the help of India to survive. Of much more interest to Bolan, Bangladesh was also the neighbor of the Indian state of West Bengal.

The traditional home range of the Cult of Kali.

“What city is he from?”

“Chulna, it lies upon the Pusur River, in the Great Mouths of the Ganges,” Makhdoom responded. “Do you know of it?”

“I’ve seen the Mouths of the Ganges,” Bolan responded, “but I’ve never been to Chulna. It’s not on my mental map.” Bolan cocked his head slightly. “How many kilometers is it from Calcutta?”

The captain grinned. “Why, less than one hundred.”

“Does Mr. Naqbi still have family there?”

“Most of his family reportedly came here, to Pakistan. But we have spies in Bangladesh, and in Bengal. I am having it looked into.”

“Does he speak English?”

“Fluently.”

Bolan pulled his black ski mask down over his head. “Let’s go rescue Atta.”

“Indeed.” Makhdoom pulled down his own mask. “Let us go rescue Atta.”

Bolan and Makhdoom got out of the battered 1950s vintage Mercedes and approached the guard at the gate. The guard snapped to attention and saluted. Makhdoom returned the salute. “Corporal?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“You are dead.”

The corporal dropped to the ground, flailed and made expiring noises.

“Less melodrama, Corporal.”

“Yes, Captain,” the corpse whispered.

Bolan and Makhdoom swept through the prison. Guards saluted and fell down “dead” in their wake like human driftwood. The two of them swiftly came to Atta Naqbi’s cell. The guard outside the door stood and turned. Bolan whipped a knotted silk sash around the guard’s neck. The guard went to his knees and made throttling noises as Makhdoom threw open the door.

Naqbi sat in his cell and gaped as Bolan apparently strangled the guard to death. Makhdoom ran in and yanked him up. The man could barely walk with his swollen feet. Makhdoom and Bolan took an arm each and strung him between them as they carried him out of the cell. Despite his pain and fatigue, Naqbi began firing off questions rapidly.

He wasn’t speaking Urdu or Sind.

Makhdoom shushed him. Naqbi spent the next few moments quietly staring in astonishment at the seemingly dead guards strewing the floor of the jail. They gave Naqbi no chance to examine any of the “corpses” too closely. They spirited him outside and deposited him into the waiting car.

Bolan took the wheel and drove off into the night.

The translator spoke in Bolan’s earpiece. “Striker, do you read me?”

Bolan reached up and tapped his earpiece twice in acknowledgment. His satellite rig was in the back seat and he was plugged into the satellite above. There was a microphone in the back seat, as well.

The translator began translating what Naqbi and Makhdoom were saying to each other in Hindi.

Naqbi was chattering a stream of questions, and Makhdoom was playing it close. They jockeyed back and forth with questions and counterquestions. Makhdoom was playing with a deck missing many cards. There had to be call signs and recognition signals, ones that neither Bolan nor Makhdoom knew. They needed to make the man admit something. The only gambit they had was that Naqbi had spent the past forty-eight hours being starved, beaten and sleep deprived and that he wasn’t quite firing on all cylinders.

Makhdoom laid all the money down and rolled the dice. “Are the weapons safe?”

“What?” Naqbi shook his head. “Only the chosen ones could know of that! How could I—”

Chosen ones. Bolan grinned under his mask.

Hook, line and sinker.

“There have been problems,” Makhdoom stated. “Somehow the Americans have become involved.”

“Americans?” Naqbi gaped in confusion. “Impossible! What Americans?”

Bolan pulled off his mask, locked his gaze with Naqbi’s as he spoke in English. “Me.”

“Oh…” Naqbi’s shoulders and arms clenched in upon himself like a spider that had just been stepped on. His face went as white as a sheet. “Goddess…” He shuddered with the enormity of his betrayal. He clutched his face with his hands. “I…am doomed.”

“You’re in a world of hurt.” Bolan’s voice was as cold as the grave. “Doomed is up to you.”

“Doomed…” Naqbi was swiftly sinking into a robotic stupor of terror.

Makhdoom snapped him out of it with the back of his hand. The captain suddenly glanced up at the lightening horizon. From a minaret beyond the Christian Quarter, an Imam sang forth the call to prayer. Bolan listened as the call rang out against the orange light of dawn. He had fought Muslim opponents many times, but the unearthly beauty of the call and its message had never failed to move him.