China White (SuperBolan)

Manhattan Cruise Terminal

Waiting was the hard part, if you weren't accustomed to it. Early on, Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, had acquired the gift of patience, something schooled into him by his military training and experience in war zones where a hasty move meant losing everything. It came as second nature to him now, a part of life and every mission that he undertook. He couldn't always be proactive. Sometimes it came down to sit, and watch, and wait. Like now.

The ferry from New Jersey was on time, no problem there, and he'd picked out the guys who had been sent to meet it. The two young males were Asian, Chinese American presumably, although they could be FOB for all he knew. Fresh off the boat that was, in common slang, although their journey from Hong Kong, Macau or points west on the Chinese mainland would have brought them to New York by air, or maybe overland from Canada.

No matter.

They were here to do a job, the same as he was. Not the same job, but the three of them were waiting for the same boat and the same guy, carrying a suitcase full of misery.

Bolan wasn't concerned right now with how the heroin had reached the States from Southeast Asia. He would find that out in time, by one means or another, and pursue the powder trail. This day, right here and now, his job was to follow this shipment to its destination somewhere in the heart of Chinatown and to make sure it went no further.

Ten keys, maybe twelve, as pure as any lab could make it. Ready to be stepped on and distributed to addicts citywide at a tremendous profit for the men in charge. At last report, a kilo went for sixty thousand dollars, wholesale. Cut to 50 percent purity with powdered vitamin B or some other nontoxic substance, it doubled in volume and was then packaged into thirty thousand single-dose glassine envelopes for sale to street dealers at five bucks apiece. That was ninety thousand dollars profit to the cutters, while the dealers turned around and sold each dose for ten to fifteen bucks, somewhere between three hundred thousand and four hundred fifty thousand on the street.

Simple arithmetic. Ten kilos would be worth three million, minimum, in street sales; maybe four point five, with any luck. Who could resist a deal like that?

There would be risks, of course. City and state police, the DEA and FBI, all would be hungry for a major bust to raise their profiles, justify their budgets and convince a weary public that the war on drugs was still worth fighting in these days when the United States jailed more people than any other nation on the planet, at a cost some said was hurting the already-bruised economy.

And then there were the hijackers. Why spend six hundred thousand dollars on a suitcase full of smack if you could rip it off for nothing? Make a score like that, you clipped the rightful owner for the wholesale cost and cleared a cool three million, minus whatever it cost to cut the product. All you had to risk was life and limb.

The pickup team would be well armed, and so was Bolan. On the shotgun seat beside him in his gray Toyota Camry, a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun with a 100-round Beta C-Mag drum lay hidden in a canvas tote bag. Beneath his left arm hung his backup piece: a Glock 22 chambered in .40 caliber, with fifteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. In a crunch, Bolan could empty both guns in something like ten seconds, leaving devastation in his wake.

And he had something else the two young Wah Ching Triad soldiers couldn't match: experience. He had been fighting for his life before the pair of them was out of grade school. He'd sent hundreds of mafiosi to their graves during his one-man war against the Cosa Nostra, by the FBI's best estimate, and no one had been keeping score since he had pioneered the war on terrorism, operating on behalf of Uncle Sam.

All that since he had "died"—on paper, anyway—roughly a half mile from the spot where he was parked right now, in Central Park. Broad daylight, he'd been shot to hell, incinerated in front of a flock of witnesses.

Or so the story went.

And maybe it was true what people said. You couldn't keep a good man down.

He saw the ferry coming now, making its slow and steady way across the broad East River. In the old days, Dutch Schultz and his ilk had dropped their adversaries into that gray water, their feet set in concrete. How many skeletons were down there, even now, their eyeless sockets gazing upward at the ferry as it passed?

Good riddance, Bolan thought. There'd always be a new crop lining up to fill the slots dead mobsters left behind.

As the ferry docked, he raised a pair of compact field glasses and focused on the gangway, waiting for his target to appear.

"We should've sent somebody with him," John Lin said, watching the ferry as it nosed into the pier.

Smoking a cigarette beside him, Louis Chao said, "He was covered in New Jersey, all the way to boarding."

"Still, after that shit with Tommy—"

"Nobody's about to jump him on the ferry," Chao said, interrupting him. "They can't get off the boat until it docks, and there'd be cops all over, waiting for them."

"Right. Sounds good, unless you're dealing with a bunch of lunatics."

"Hey, we 're the lunatics, remember?" Chao was smiling at him through a haze of smoke. "And payback's gonna be a stone-cold bitch."

"I don't like all these cars around here," Lin complained.

"We're in a parking lot, for Christ's sake. What did you expect?"

"I mean, they could be anywhere, you know? Just waiting."

"Then you'd better keep your eyes peeled, Johnny Boy. Be ready for them."

Lin was ready, even looking forward to it, with his Uzi cocked and locked, ready to rip if anyone looked sideways at the courier they'd come to meet. He was another Wah Ching brother, Martin Tang, who'd carried cash across the river bright and early, met his escorts on the Jersey side, and called home when the deal was done. Now he was on his way back with the skag, and it was Lin's job to deliver both—the man and what he carried—to their boss in Chinatown.

So Lin was strapped, backing the Uzi with a sleek Beretta Px4 tucked underneath his belt, around in back, and for insurance, in an ankle holster, a little Colt Mustang .380. If none of that worked, he had a Balisong knife with a seven-inch blade in his pocket, sharp enough to shave with or to cut off some miserable lowlife's head.

All that and Chao still had him outgunned. He'd brought a Bushmaster Adaptive Combat Rifle, made by Remington, and wore a double shoulder holster bearing a matched pair of Glock 33s, chambered for .357 SIG rounds. That still was not enough for his partner, though. He also carried a 4-shot COP .357 Magnum derringer, and just for luck, had put two M-67 fragmentation grenades in the glove compartment of their black Ford Focus.

They were ready for war, and as much as John Lin ached for payback, he hoped they could make it back to the Lucky Dragon without killing anyone along the way. Or getting killed themselves.

"I see him," Chao said. "He's just starting down the ramp."

Tang was younger than Lin by six months or so, but had proved himself in action for the Wah Ching Triad. Nothing super-hideous, a little cutting and a drive-by, but he'd passed the test and this was graduation day. He might be nervous, but it wasn't showing as he ambled down the ferry's boarding ramp, keeping it casual among the tourists and commuters, careful not to jostle anybody with his suitcase full of...