Grave Mercy

Blue eyes looked up pleadingly at Fortescue. The young woman looked as if she wanted to move her lips, minor twitches, but the power of the tubocurarine was just too much for her. It would take upward of a minute or two more for her to suffocate. The young man twitched, able to influence his own body that much, staying alive. He could sense his lover’s distress, or at least see that she had stopped breathing.

Fortescue rested his hand on the paralyzed young man’s chest, checking for a heartbeat. You’ll forget her quickly enough, he thought. It was a pointless gesture, the youth couldn’t hear his thought, and he really didn’t care about his torment, but that brief show of compassion was something he felt the urge to give.

As soon as the Haitian had his dart gun loaded, he nodded to his companion. A third of their number was waiting in reserve, ready to hit anyone who wasn’t put down by Fortescue and friend’s darts.

Four quiet puffs of CO2 launched their pointed, toxin-laden missiles with stealthy quickness. The two young couples were rendered immobile with little fuss or muss. One of the young men struggled, his lungs failing due to an unforeseen bout of asthmatic response, but two losses abovedeck were little loss to Morrot’s operational plans. Fortescue waved his assistants on to scoop up the unconscious ones, ignoring the flopped corpses on the decks.

“How many belowdecks?” Fortescue asked.

“Register says three crew and another couple,” his ally, Cornelius, said, looking at the laminated paper. “Do we take the crew?”

“They’re strong and will be useful,” Fortescue said. “Besides, these men aren’t true believers. Just because they share the same skin color means nothing. They are pagans, adherents to heathen gods.”

“They think the same about us,” Cornelius answered. “So, it’s only fair.”

“It is unconscionable that they consider us savages, worshipping carcasses impaled to planks or a burning shrubbery,” Fortescue replied. “When we make our move, their world’s streets will run with their blood.”

Cornelius’s smile was broad and infectious. “Blood shed by their own hands.”

Fortescue nodded sagely. “Reload, and we’ll head belowdecks. Get Gallad.”

The three Black Avengers headed below the deck.

THE STRAPS CUT into Guillermo Rojas’s wrists as consciousness returned to him, his arms twitching futilely in response to his feeling of restraint. Rojas wanted to turn his head, but a leather thong across his forehead and gripping his chin kept him still.

All he could remember was Stephanie, her gorgeous blue eyes alit with horror, foam streaming over her lips. Then there was the black shadow, wielding a strange, sci-fi-looking handgun, that reached out to touch his chest, as if to soothe his worries over the gurgling, drowning girl who trembled beside him. Rage and grief spun in his strap-bound chest, his fury an impotent storm as he didn’t know where the midnight-skinned marauder was, and grief over the sweet, blue-eyed creature he’d fallen for. Stephanie Coulton, tiny and privileged, had found him as beautiful as he’d found her, and had brought him down for a spring getaway despite her father’s disgust that she was consorting with someone that the man felt was destined to be a pool boy or a gardener, not her social equal.

She’d loved him, she’d defied her father, and now he knew what her face looked like when her lungs shut down, jammed with histamine. He knew the symptoms of bronchoconstriction well—Rojas was a medical student, only a year away from his first internship. His mind reeled as he searched for a reason why he’d just lain there, helpless as she died, suffocating.

His mouth was dry, and he wasn’t able to speak. His pharmaceutical knowledge simply wasn’t enough to determine what had happened, but he was certain that it wasn’t any form of anaesthetic. No “knockout drug” acted so quickly against a person, but he knew that there were toxins out there that were used for rapid incapacitation. He’d been present at emergency intubations, and knew anaesthesiologists utilized drugs that caused instant paralysis—which was why intubation teams acted instantly when the patients were given their injections. As soon as the subject went limp, the intubation tube was put down the windpipe and into the main bronchial tube.

Such a drug acted instantly, and was capable of stopping someone’s breathing, indeed it was counted on to prevent reflexive movement during surgery. Handled right, it could render a big man like him immobile, easily captured, but a dose that would leave him helpless was far too much for a girl who was half his weight. Muscles frozen, Stephanie was doomed the minute the toxin hit her bloodstream.

A fingertip caressed his cheek, and Rojas grimaced as his effort to turn was again stymied by the rig that held his head in place. Tendons cracked as they tried to move a completely immobilized head.

“The first one awake, good.”

Rojas tried to open his mouth, but he finally figured out the dryness in his mouth—a leather “tongue” was stuffed into it, and it was part of the multistrap system that held him immobile. All he could do was murmur past the gag.

“Yes, so sorry about not allowing you to speak, but unlike my favorite visionary, I do not care to listen to the wails and laments of my experiments,” the voice said, a lilting French accent weighing heavily on his words. His timber was deep, its resonant echo making Rojas imagine that it came not from a throat, but a bottomless gullet that would be more at home on a shark.

Rojas snorted, trying to trumpet out some form of sound. His eyes craned to see the shadowy man flitting in the darkness at the edges of his peripheral vision. His chewed on the leather pad that gagged him until his teeth started to hurt.

“Such fire. I appreciate it,” the French-accented shadow man said. “It gives me a challenge.”

Rojas’s blood chilled at the ominous sound of that statement. Dark brown eyes swiveled in their sockets, grasping for more than a blurred glimpse of the smear of motion that possessed the doom-laden French accent that taunted him. Fingernails scratched along his jawline, and the young man caught a glimpse of the man’s digits, callused and long, bearing the color of straight, strong coffee.

“Oh, you want to see me?” his tormentor asked.

Rojas managed an affirmative sound.

A face loomed into the light over Rojas’s left shoulder. The shadowy figure bore a distinguished face that was handsome with middle age’s wisdom and grace, his broad, flat nose the only sign of any imperfection as the bridge had an odd kink in the middle of it. Rojas almost felt relief that it was a fairly normal-looking man, not some chimeric predator, when dread snuck into his heart, a frightened tingle that zipped through his chest and rolled down his arms to his fingertips. Something on the other side was wrong, horribly wrong.

The man stepped out from behind Rojas’s chair and turned toward him. The oversize, milky-white eye glared out of the fused mass of flesh that was the remnants of what used to be human features. The eye, three concentric rings of varying hues of white, glared at him, and Rojas would have kicked and screamed had he retained any ability to move. Instead, a high-pitched whine blared through his nostrils, the closest approximation of a scream of horror that he could manage with a mouth stuffed with leather.

“My name is Dr. Morrot,” the man said.

Rojas had initially thought he’d awakened to a nightmare, a fever-dream where Stephanie had died slowly and horribly and where he had been kidnapped by monsters. He realized that the first of his waking moments were a respite of peace compared to the wave of insanity washing over him. Bound helpless in front of a deformed madman with a nausea-inducing orb where an eye should have been, tormented by a voice that belonged to a devil, not a human, Rojas’s arms, laden with lean, strong muscle, flexed against his restraints, but they didn’t budge. His legs tried to kick, to twist, but they, too, were thwarted by the trap that Morrot had placed him in.

Rojas could hear that others in the room had begun to awaken. Their nostrils blared and bleated as they made an effort to speak, alarm filling those nasal sounds as they realized that they, too, were immobilized.

Morrot leaned in, licking Rojas’s shoulder. “Mmm. The salty taste of fear, accompanied by the buttery scent of panic. Of course, the smell is really a byproduct of the body’s elimination of potassium, but as a medical student, you already knew that, right, Mr. Rojas?”

Rojas wanted to bellow, to throw that trivia back into Morrot’s ugly, misshapen face. He’d wondered if he were free, if he’d have the courage to punch this spindly figure standing in front of him. However, the baleful eye glaring unblinkingly at him, sagging in its socket, was as paralyzing as the dart that had taken him on the yacht.

“Good morning, children!” Morrot boomed, his slender arms spread wide. Now that the disfigured doctor had stepped back, Rojas could see the man in full. He wore a short-sleeved, olive-colored T-shirt that was covered by a maroon-and-purple-stained butcher’s apron. The slender limbs were deceptive in their thinness, as Morrot was a tall man, easily six foot six, and those arms were corded with muscle that flexed with every movement. The horrible damage to the left side of the man’s face extended down his neck and to his upper left arm, stringy tendrils of skin spiderwebbed over a raw, red surface.

Around him, Rojas’s companions from the yacht let out their fright in any way they could, from guttural throat constrictions to piercing whines through nostrils. Morrot seemed to bathe in the captives’ fear, letting it wash over him like a refreshing drizzle breaking up a steamy, hot and ugly day.

Morrot took a deep breath, then lowered his gaze to the prisoners as a masked assistant, wearing a white coat and scrub pants approached him, carrying a tray laden with syringes. “It’s time to open your minds and say ‘ah.’”

Rojas and his companions tried to scream past their gags, but all that came out were panicked whines through their noses.

THE YOUNG PUNK rocker paused as she stood beside the idling Jeep, regarding a convalescing Mack Bolan as he swung in a hammock. He could still taste the hint of cherry on his lips, the silken softness of her pink-and-blond hair a fresh sensation on his fingers. Honey’s dark red lips pursed as she blew him a kiss.

Bolan casually caught it with his good hand, and he returned a salute to the tough woman. The driver of the Jeep leaned on the horn to get Honey’s attention, eliciting a middle finger for him. She gave one last lingering look to the soldier, then jumped into the back.

Tires ground at the dirt road, kicking up a cloud that did nothing to hamper the verdant slashes of color beneath a sky as crystal clear blue as a painting. This place was paradise, so close to the beach that he could smell the salt of the sea and gentle rush of waves. Children carried surfboards from a small hut, waving to the soldier as he reclined in the hammock.

Bolan waved back to the kids. Honey had arranged for him to stay with a friend of hers, Anton Spaulding, at the Jamaican surf camp he owned. Spaulding was an exceptional host, laid back and gentle, the epitome of the surfer lifestyle, having built his dream home in the pleasant, peaceful woods.

Spaulding walked toward the hammock, clad only in blue-and-white palm-frond-patterned surfer shorts. His skin was browned from constant exposure to the sun, his hair a dirty blend of sun-bleached blond and dark brunette that fell haphazardly over his forehead and ears. His blue eyes gleaming over a broken nose.

“Shame to see her go,” he said, leaning on one of the trees holding Bolan’s hammock.

“She has things to do. Better things than looking after me,” Bolan replied with a chuckle.

Spaulding smirked. “I don’t know. Looked like leaving was harder for her than pulling a tooth.”

“Wasn’t easy for me, either,” Bolan said. Glass clinked, and he turned to see Spaulding hold up a pair of beer bottles.

“I’m not sure if these will go well with your painkillers.”

Bolan smiled. “I try to limit the chemicals that go into me. Alcohol, too, but…”

“When it’s time to relax, you got the beer.”

The two men chuckled. A convulsive twitch of muscle over one of Bolan’s healing ribs sent a spark of pain rushing through him. Still, it was a worthwhile exchange. With a twist, Bolan rolled out of the hammock. The stitch in his side started to fade as he accepted the beer bottle.

“Finally moving now that Honey’s not around?”

Bolan shot a glance at Spaulding. “What, you’re going to be my nursemaid now?”

Spaulding shook his head. “No way, man. But she must have threatened you to keep you lying down.”

“Combination of threats and pain.”

“When do you think you’ll be out to join us in the butter?” Spaulding asked.

Bolan had to remember he was at a surf camp to decipher that the bronzed young man was inquiring about when Bolan would take a few spins on a surfboard. “Once I don’t feel like I’m being kicked in the chest when I laugh. And by then, I should be on my way out of here.”

“It’d be a shame.”

Bolan frowned. “Trouble finds me easily. It’d be a shame if it landed here.”

Spaulding began chuckling again. “This place is as far from trouble as you can get. That’s why Honey dropped you off here.”

“I hope so,” Bolan answered.

CHAPTER THREE

The crystal clear waters of the Caribbean ocean felt good.

Though Mack Bolan continued to feel the lingering ache of his broken ribs, he was still capable of kicking his feet as they dangled off of the back of the surfboard. He was propelling himself through crests and furrows in the water, aiming the tip of the fiberglass “plank” at oncoming swells.

The soldier had surfed a few times between missions. The sport was one that was easy to pick up, but one of those things that took a lifetime to master. Bolan’s excellent conditioning and agility put him above the rank of rookie. The twenty-first-century board he was on was even more accommodating to his aching form as it was lightweight, but designed to support more than the weight of slight-limbed youths. Bolan could easily lift this plank, and it was shaped so that it could keep him afloat with any balanced weight on top.

The exercise provided by his efforts at balance on the fiberglass hull was at once gentle on his tender ribs yet invigorating to his shoulders and abdominal muscles. Arms and legs, constantly flexing to make the most of his momentum when the wave caught him up and hurled him on, were eating up the exertion, re-strengthening their too-long-inert spring-steel tautness.

As Spaulding soared past, hurtling along a “left”—a wave that’s tube extended from right to left—he gave Bolan a thumb’s up before he ducked down, letting the cresting wave form a pipe over his head. The soldier had seen the man tilting, pushing against the rising concave of the wave, seeming to defy gravity as he ground along the wall of water. Once inside the pipe, Spaulding was in a world that had to be experienced to be appreciated, a tunnel of serenity where a man or woman could disappear for a slice of time that seemed to last longer on the inside than outside, embraced by the ocean’s enormous power without any of the punishment of its potential death grip.

Spaulding glided along the Jamaican shore, where there were no flesh-rending reefs, no bone-shattering rocks. Here was a place where the youngest students—known in the sporting community as “groms”—and veteran surfers could frolic. It was where this particular, injured soldier could rehabilitate without risk of exacerbating his injuries.

Bolan had finally picked up one of Spaulding’s spare boards when Martin Rudd had shown him the physical rejuvenation qualities of surfing. Rudd had been a winter extreme sports photographer, a man who had skied and snowboarded down untamed mountainsides, skirting trees and boulders in search of a new day’s shot of adrenaline mixed with the majestic glory of snowcapped mountains splayed out in front of him. That ended when Rudd, skiing through a gap of boulders, snagged the tip of one ski on a jutting rock and spiral-fractured his right femur. Left with one thighbone an inch shorter than the other, Rudd had expected never to take to a slope again.

Now, the forty-something “extreme” sportsman had found renewed strength and freedom on the pounding surf, enough to get him back onto mountainsides, if not doing stunts, then at least able to keep up and photograph the new wave of somersaulting snow devils. Rudd still suffered from a permanent limp, but it was from the disparate lengths of his legs, not because of the pain of a now fused and healed femur. The truncated leg had been allowed to heal, regaining much of its lost might and vigor.

Bolan had first followed Rudd into the butter five days before, but the soldier had one pang of regret though he was no longer subjected to searing pain like a knife in his lungs after doing wind sprints on the sand. The injuries that had kept him here for this brief span of heaven were no longer a hindrance. He easily hoisted young groms onto his shoulders as they begged to see the world from eight feet in the air. Staying here for more than another day or two, healing, was no longer an option.

The Executioner hopped to a crouched position, his feet and hands on the board as he settled his balance, the sleek shell maintaining its forward momentum as it rushed into the coming swell. As he steered the board by gripping its smooth sides, he got the right angle and rose to his full height. His mass pushed the board against the opposing force of the coming wave, and in a heartbeat, he was lifted effortlessly onto the crest. The power of the ocean beneath him was akin to an Asian elephant he’d ridden in Thailand when battling a Chinese heroin ring. Like that powerful pachyderm, the wave didn’t notice Bolan’s added mass, continuing on its course without pause. In the Thai jungles, he had been able to steer the beast through a den of vicious Chinese gunmen, the mighty elephant carrying him like a living tank through the battle.

The ocean, however, dwarfed that seemingly endless might, accepting no commands from knee prods against its neck. Where Bolan had been only barely able to direct his pachyderm on its charge of destruction, the Caribbean Sea accepted no commands, took no orders. Instead the soldier had to aim the surfboard, his sharp eyes and instincts feeling for furrows and paths of least resistance as the wave rose behind him.

It was exhilarating and humbling in the same primal instant. Bolan had the freedom of a winged god, yet was at the mercy of cosmic gravitational vortices that hurled the Earth and the moon around the sun at millions of miles per hour. Balanced precariously, he skimmed over the surface of the ocean as swift as an arrow, mere pivots of his hips enabling him to adjust his course, compensating for gravity and the swelling sea beneath him. It wasn’t true flight, just like his parachuting or his free falls, it was “falling with style” to quote one movie. Still, with the wind in his face and the sea at his back, he hurled along, arms spread to take in the sun and the breeze, drinking in the wonders of the Earth before the wave’s push and gravity’s pull overwhelmed the delicate balance.

He finally ditched into four-foot-deep water, the incompressible fluid cushioning his torso and head as he dived in, pulling up before he dug his face into the sediment at the bottom. Behind him, the neoprene leash around his ankle connecting him to his board yanked the fiberglass hull into his ankle and shin. His lower legs no longer sparked sharp jolts of pain from the glancing impacts as the board cracked on them. Bolan’s bruises had developed into “surf bumps” days ago.

With a shrug of his long arms and strong shoulders, he propelled himself to the surface. The right shoulder’s cut had long since closed, and the skin fused shut without fear of opening up again after its two-week reprieve. One stroke had brought him up to suck in air, and he twisted to grab his board, scrabbling on top of it. A deep intake of air no longer was an exercise in masochism. There was still pain, but it was a dull, throbbing pulse, telling Bolan that the flexing bones of his ribs were almost good enough for him to return to duty without fear of physical failure.

A day, two at the most, and the Executioner would launch himself back into action.

Spaulding had been right, Bolan mused as he kicked out to meet more swells. It would have been criminal to have lived in this stretch of Earth where land, sea and sky intersected to form the surest proof that the universe didn’t solely exist to punish humanity. Joy and mercy were rare sights in the spheres where the Executioner traveled, and he could easily have fallen into the fallacious trap that reality held only cruelty and suffering. Even a minute basking under this sun, smelling this forest, listening to the hushed whispers of this surf, had washed away the caked layers of cynicism that had threatened to darken his heart of hearts.

Life was good here.

Bolan couldn’t feel disheartened by the duties that pulled him away from this affirming environment. The tranquil peace, broken only by the laughter of children and the crash of waves was a reminder of the things that he fought for.

This gentle realm was the spur for the Executioner’s War Everlasting. The violence that Bolan brought to bear against the savagery of criminals, terrorists and other violent predators was a firebreak. He was the wall between civilization and the corrupters who looked for an easy way to feed whatever their greedy hearts desired. A week among kids and beach bums had renewed his touch with humanity. It returned faces to what could have too easily become an abstract concept of innocence, and enabled him to return to the shadows around the world, stalking those who’d bolster themselves with pain and suffering.

Bolan mounted the surfboard, dangling a leg on either side of it as if he were riding a fiberglass horse. He ran his fingers through his wet black hair, cool blue eyes scanning the horizon where the sky drooped to meet the Caribbean Sea.

It was beautiful, another glorious sight in a world full of them. Though Bolan would soon have to leave, he kept a realistic appreciation of the seascape. He had been on every continent in the world, and had visited most of the major island chains, summoned to engagements against murderers and conquerors on every one. This was far from his first visit to Jamaica and given the piracy, drug smuggling and other pursuits of the criminal mind, the Executioner would once more come back to the island nation that held this small cradle of placid joy.

His fighting energies had been built back up, and they were trying to rush Bolan’s injured parts to heal so that they could turn themselves toward productive ventures in the Executioner’s endless crusade to protect all that was good and civilized in the world. He was thinking about the hints and whispers of trouble that hummed in the daily news, clues that would be far more blatant if Bolan had access to the threat matrix gathered at Stony Man Farm, a plug-in roster of unrest and violence that were symptoms of diseases to which he had to bring his cleansing flame.

The most blatant bit of news was the discovery of a yacht found adrift, no crew on board, and no signs of violence. Several young college students, here on spring break, had disappeared without a trace. It was nothing new in Jamaican waters as the fabled “pirates of the Caribbean” had evolved over the centuries, trading in their flintlocks for M-16s and their rowboats for Zodiac rafts with high-horsepower engines on the back. There were other small news passages about a couple of fishing boats that had gone missing. However, since the crews weren’t made up of beautiful, young American tourists, the news agencies didn’t care about them. It had been two fishing trawlers, their combined crews at thirty, also gone as if snatched by the ghosts of the sea.