Council of Kings (14 page)

Bolan did not know what to say. He looked mutely at the figure crouching beside him.

"You have already started to do that," continued Thanh. "Look at what you do in the villages. Are you making friends there? You give the Vietcong more supporters everywhere your army goes."

"But the camps — we get more and more people in our camps..."

"Simply because the people must avoid the American bombs. You cannot promise these people anything that the French have not already promised. Look where it got the French. We will always win."

Bolan sat rooted to the bed. There was a heaviness in his limbs he had never felt before. He had suckered Thanh with his talk, and the guy had fallen for it.

"Did you say "we"?" asked Bolan.

"No," said Thanh, reaching for a cigarette. "I didn't."

Bolan sprang. With one big hand he smothered Thanh's face, pressing down into the bed. He rose over Tharth and sank his knee into the smaller man's gut.

"You joined them, didn't you, Thanh? It was you who got to Buddy first."

Thanh looked up at the big bastard who held his life in his hands. Bolan saw that his eyes held fear, but no more than fear. He could see that Thanh had expected it to end this way. Had expected it since childhood.

Bolan gently took out his knife and cut into Thanh's throat, holding him until the body stopped jerking.

Then he ransacked the room feverishly. In his pocket Buddy's ear began to twitch. Bolan ignored it. He knew it was fatigue and not reality, but all the same he felt the ear jump as if it were alive. Thanh's bowels had let go, and the room had begun to smell of the foulness of death.

Nothing escaped Bolan's hand. He knew the thing was somewhere in the room, though he could not say how he knew. From the bookshelf he withdrew a worn copy of Les Misgrables.

Holding it by the spine, he let the contents fall from between the leaves. It lay there on the desk, downy and tattered like a piece of litter.

Buddy's map.

Bolan sat in a padded chair, looking at a picture on Putnam's desk of the man's family at Disneyland. They were stuffing their faces with cotton candy. Bolan closed his eyes against the image. Morning sun glared through the office blinds. The door opened for a senior bureaucrat looking well groomed in a gray suit. Maybe he was taking someone to lunch. He crossed the room and thrust his hand toward Bolan, the essence of ease and authority.

"Dick Putnam. You're Johnson?"

"That's right," said Bolan. "Phil Johnson."

"You know something about this heroin thing?" asked Putnam, settling himself into his chair behind the fortress of a desk.

"Yeah," said Bolan. "I know a lot about it. I know you run the operation. You use the dead bodies of American soldiers to ship your heroin. I know you lie about the strength of the Vietcong. I know you get a lot of innocent kids killed or maimed for life." Bolan was surprised at his own sureness. He was a young man unused to going too far. Putnam's face had become a mask of hate and panic.

He sat immobilized. Bolan continued to drive words home like a jackhammer.

"You scar people. You use them for your own purposes and then kill them. You killed Naiman and blamed me for it. You use your position of trust as if it were your whore."

Putnam's eyes darted to the photo of his family.

Bolan drove on mercilessly. "You could say I know something about it. I lost a buddy because of you."

Furious, Putnam reached across the desk and grabbed the picture frame as a weapon. Bolan smashed his fist down on Putnam's, breaking the hand and shattering the glass and the frame that it held. Putnam cried out, his face white and twisted with pain, and he put his injured hand between his thighs.

Bolan reached around Putnam's throat and pulled him across the desk with a powerful jerk of his shoulder. Putnam lay wheezing, his head on the desk, the corners of his mouth wet with spittle.

"It's not me you want," the CIA man gasped. "I answer to others. Please..."

"I'll bet you answer to others," Bolan said. He spread his fingers around Putnam's neck and jaw and applied pressure. "What others?"

"The Council," Putnam hissed against the constriction around his throat.

"Who on the Council?"

Putnam looked at his assailant in panic. Bolan pressed down hard.

"Civilians," the guy squealed. "They're not soldiers... nothing to do with the war. Except Heiss. Karl Heiss..."

"And the civilians?"

"Gunrunners. Just gunrunners and money-men. They buy the heroin."

"Names." Bolan introduced more significant pressure.

"Marcello. Andriola. Canzonari. That's it...."

This rat was living up to its name. Bolan pulled the remains of the map from his pocket. Putnam clamped his jaws shut. Bolan loosened them with a punch to the temple, then pulled them apart until Putnam's fillings gleamed in the sun. "This is for Buddy," he said. "Don't you ever forget." Bolan pushed the map into Putnam's mouth and rammed it down his throat until Putnam gagged. Bolan turned to leave. At the door he looked back. Putnam rolled off the desk, his right hand hanging useless and discolored. The CIA man began to began to vomit, retching painfully.

"Chew that over with your Council of Kings," Bolan said. He slammed the door and marched down the corridor, moving purposefully out of there. Bolan knew a little more about himself now, a lot more about brotherhood and loss. And he knew for absolute sure that he would survive to shove injustice down the throats of many more vermin to come. He had heard the names — and had just heard the call. And he was still so damn near over the edge. So he prayed for his family, because he was scared, and he vowed that he would never voluntarily share this dreadful war with his kin, his mother and father, his sister, Cindy, and younger brother Johnny, all back home. And then Bolan prayed that in his personal war to come, the inevitable war seeded in this corruption called Vietnam, the enemy would be his and his alone. No buddies. And now, back to war. Back to Mohawk time in the Mekong...

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