1

      Malay Archipelago

      The killers were coming. Their outrigger canoes slid through the water beneath the starless, storm-warning-black South Pacific sky, knifing through whitecaps toward the yacht.

      Mack Bolan touched his throat mike. “Contact.”

      “Striker!” Barbara Price’s voice was urgent in Bolan’s earpiece. The mission controller back in Virginia was clearly unhappy. “Twenty-two minutes until satellite window! We do not have visual! Repeat! We do not have you!”

      “Doesn’t matter,” Bolan said.

      The enemy showed up clearly in tones of green and gray in the Executioner’s night-vision goggles. They were half naked, wearing turbans and sarongs and festooned with weapons.

      “They have us.”

      “Striker, be advised strategic withdrawal recommended.”

      The premonsoon winds moaned through the rigging of Bolan’s yacht. The craft lay anchored thirty yards from the beach. The tiny atoll was little more than a crescent of palm trees jutting a few feet above sea level. The canoes aimed for the mouth of the lagoon to cut off the yacht from the open ocean. The paddlers did not need night-vision equipment to acquire their target. The yacht’s dim deck lights marked it as a pool of radiance in the velvet dark of the shallow harbor.

      Bolan checked the loads in his weapon system as the jaws of the trap closed. He was a sitting duck.

      And that was just the way the Executioner wanted it.

      “Noted, Control. Standby,” he whispered.

      The killers would be in boarding range in less than a minute.

      Across the galley Bolan’s wife checked her weapon.

      Marcie “The Mouse” Mei was barely five feet tall, and the mass of highly modified, blackened steel and plastic she was toting appeared impossibly large in her tiny hands. She manipulated the weapon’s controls with practiced ease. If an Olympic gymnast and a pixie had spawned a warchild in the Philippines, Marcie Mei would be it. Only her snub nose and generous mouth showed beneath her night-vision goggles.

      The CIA field agent’s big smile flashed at Bolan in the dark of the hold. “Platoon strength,” she said as she flicked off the safeties on her weapon system. “Closing fast.”

      “Roger that.” Bolan spoke low. “Scott?”

      Escotto Clellande nodded from the other side of the cabin. In comparison, the M-4 carbine looked like a toy in the hulking ex-Philippine special operation commando’s hands. “Yeah, I make it about forty hostiles. Heavily armed.” Scott grunted to himself with relief. “No support weapons visible.”

      Bolan was silently relieved, as well. The yacht was not a normal pleasure craft by any stretch of the imagination, but RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers were the ocean-borne artillery of choice in the South Pacific. A few broadsides of antiarmor rockets with shaped-charge warheads would burn the old girl down to the waterline.

      Scott grimaced as the killers closed in. “Whole lotta cutlery, though.”

      Bolan nodded. Pirates the world over had an anachronistic love of edged weapons.

      Piracy in the South Pacific had recently taken a very ugly turn. Boats had been found adrift from the Sulu to the Andaman Sea. Everything from private yachts to cargo vessels had been taken. The ships were stripped of their cargo and any valuables, and the passengers, whether professional seamen or sport fisherman out for a trophy, were ritually butchered to the last man, woman and child. The stripped hulks were left to drift like floating slaughter yards.

      Mack Bolan was sailing the South Pacific in a million-dollar yacht off the Philippines. To all appearances he was a rich westerner with a native wife, asking in every port of call for private coves and beautiful, secluded spots off the beaten path.

      The atoll where they lay anchored had no name. It was picture-postcard beautiful, well off the beaten path, very secluded, and Bolan, Mei and the yacht made for a very tempting target.

      Someone had just taken the bait.

      Clellande was posing as their hired crewman and cook. He was an able sailor, and Bolan would have wanted him along for his culinary skills alone, not withstanding his skills as a Special Forces operator.

      The pair was on loan from the CIA station in Manila. Clellande peered at the incoming enemy. “They’re slowing down.”

      “Jesus…” Mei’s ever-present smile went down in wattage. “They’re slinging their rifles.”

      “And out comes the cutlery.” Bolan watched as a platoon of pirates drew razor-sharp kris daggers, parangs, and bolo knives. Elaborate curved, razor-sharp steel of every description flashed and glittered in the Executioner’s night vision.

      The men in the canoes were bent on slaughter.

      Bolan clicked the seven-inch, saw-toothed blade of his bayonet onto the muzzle of his carbine. “Control, high-level of probability that targets are prime.”

      “Affirmative, Striker. Choppers are in the air. ETA twenty minutes.”

      Bolan signaled his team. “I think these are some of the boys we’re looking for. Be ready.”

      Mei and Clelland fixed bayonets.

      Bolan’s strategy was simple. He had lifted it from British WWII naval tactics. In the battle for the Atlantic, German submarines had initially ruled the waves. The U-boats sank allied shipping with impunity, but U-boats were small and could carry only two dozen torpedoes, and those were reserved for enemy warships and large transports. To engage smaller merchant vessels, the German submarines would surface and use their deck guns. The British had invented the Q-boat