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LETHAL BARGAIN
A ninja attack in a Vegas casino leaves two billionaires dead, and all signs point to the Yakuza, a Japanese crime syndicate bent on infiltrating America’s legalized gambling industry. To cut the problem out at the root, Mack Bolan targets the gang’s Stateside web of legitimate businesses and vicious warriors, closing in fast on the Yakuza’s most ruthless clan.
But when the battle takes Bolan to Japan and he faces a quartet of elite killers, he realizes Vegas was just the tip of the iceberg. A cult-enthralled clan member has partnered with a corrupt Chinese general to bring about massive spiritual “cleansing”—in the form of a deadly toxic weapon. With millions of lives on the line, the Executioner isn’t playing the odds. He’s betting everything on his special brand of hellfire.
Bolan sprinted across the roof, heading for the fire escape.
A pistol cracked, and he heard the whisper of a bullet as it streaked past his cheek. One shooter was behind him when he turned, and Bolan saw another peeking from the rooftop access doorway. He sent the shooter spinning away with a 3-round burst, his white shirt spouting scarlet, then sent three more rounds to make the doorway peeper duck back out of sight.
With ammunition running low, he glanced over the parapet, saw no shooters prepared to pick him off as he descended and swung out onto the fire escape. Gripping the side rails with his hands and bracing the insteps of his shoes against them, Bolan slid down until he landed in a crouch fifty feet below.
Gunshots echoed above him, a reminder that he had no time to waste. Raising the MP5K’s muzzle, Bolan fired a burst and saw a face fly back.
His rented wheels waited for him half a block away.
Bolan ran.
Ninja Assault
Don Pendleton
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
—Plato
Human predators will never be eradicated. A new crop pops up when the old one is cut down. There is no cure for the plague of evil and avarice, but I can fight the symptoms when they surface, wherever they surface.
—Mack Bolan
For Captain William D. Swenson,
1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment
Cover
Back Cover Text
Introduction
Title Page
Quotes
Dedication
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
EPILOGUE
Copyright
PROLOGUE
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Tommy Wolff leaned closer to the window, peering at his face and raising one manicured hand to prod the pouches underneath his ice-blue eyes. He’d chosen Kisdon lighting for the penthouse bathroom, fixtures planned with flattery in mind, but lights could only do so much.
Time for a touch-up there, he thought, and made a mental note to fit it in.
Not that the ladies waiting for him in the bedroom would object to pouchy eyes. They’d been well paid to service him, with cash and with cocaine. They’d do whatever Wolff required, as he required it, and they’d damn well like it.
Hell, why not? They hadn’t seen his schmeckel yet, and they were bound to be impressed.
The ladies always were. No work required in that department.
Wolff retreated from the mirror, taking in the long view of himself from neck to knees. His time spent in the private gym had paid off handsomely. At fifty-five, he now looked better than he had in twenty years, his stamina was better, and he rarely needed a Viagra boost to keep the ladies happy.
Almost never.
Tommy Wolff preferred his women young, and—he had a guy who double-checked IDs in order to protect him from a statutory rape charge. Wolff had enough to think about on any given day, with IRS leeches and spies from the state Casino Control Commission crawling up his ass. The very last thing that he needed was to wind up on TV, doing the perp walk over some sweet thing who’d lied about her age to get a little taste of power.
Okay, not a little taste. But, still.
Wolff took his new robe off its hook behind the bathroom door. Kimono was the proper term, he understood, a black silk number, knee-length, with those baggy sleeves that stopped short of his wrists and made him feel like he should trade it for a larger size. Across the shoulders, looping down around his right hip, an embroidered wolf was snapping at a frightened lamb.
He liked that image. Liked it very much indeed.
The robe—kimono—was a gift from one of Wolff’s new partners in Japan. They’d pooled resources to erect a new resort in Tokyo, where current law prohibited casino gambling, but with nudges in the right direction and strategic contributions to the major players, rules could always change. Meanwhile, there was pachinko, mahjong, and kōei kyōgi, betting on a list of “public sports” that covered racing horses, bicycles, speedboats and cars.
Wolff slipped on the kimono, nothing underneath except his tanned, taut flesh, and broke eye contact with the mirror. Too much self-examination could be bad for anyone.
He thought about the young women in his bedroom, high atop Nero’s Hotel-Casino, with its sweeping panorama of the boardwalk. “Caesar’s” had been taken, but he’d found a Roman emperor who suited him, regardless. Nucky Johnson never dreamed of anything like Nero’s when he ran Atlantic City for the syndicate, and it was all completely legal now.
Well, close enough.
The girls—one blonde, one redhead, one brunette—had suddenly gone quiet in the bedroom. Frowning, Wolff considered whether he had left them too much coke to play with in his absence, but he doubted it. Besides, if one of them had OD’d, he’d expect the others to be panicking.
“You little bitches better not be dozing off,” he muttered to himself. “You’ve got a long, hard night ahead of you.”
Longer than any of the three expected. Harder, too.
The schmeckel humor always made Wolff smile.
He lost the smile as he stepped through the bathroom doorway, turning toward the bed. It was the emperor size, imported from Ireland, forty-two square feet of padded playground on a hand-carved wooden frame, with satin sheets that had been white when Wolff went to the bathroom.
Why were they red now, and dripping on the carpet?
Wolff blinked, found two of the girls stretched out across the bed diagonally, side by side. It looked as if they’d been engaging in a little foreplay, but it hadn’t lasted long. The redhead, lying on her back, had one arm raised as if to shield her face. The other arm was…where, again?
Wolff felt the Lobster Thermidor and Provençal asparagus he’d eaten half an hour earlier trying to come back on him, but he kept it down with effort, taking in the gash below the redhead’s chin and shifting toward the nubile body sprawled beside her.
Someone had been more efficient with the brunette, taking off her head completely, propping it atop two pillows, wide blank eyes turned toward the bathroom doorway where Wolff stood. As far as he could tell, that was the only wound she’d suffered, but it had obviously done the job.
A mewling from his left brought Wolff around to face the blonde. She stood before him, naked as the day she’d come into the world but far from innocent, flanked by two men no taller than herself—say five foot six, if that—all dressed in black from head to toe.
Not black suits, mind you. These were some kind of commando costumes, maybe one piece, though Wolff couldn’t really tell. They both wore snug, formfitting hoods like ski masks, only thinner, that hid everything except their glinting eyes. And there was something odd about their shoes that took a second glance to recognize: split toes, of all things, which was new in Wolff’s experience.
But what he really focused on was the long sword each man held in his right hand. Katana they were called, as if it mattered now. Americans normally called them samurai swords.
“Jesus Christ.”
It came out as a whisper, barely audible even to Wolff as he spoke. The picture set before him clarified itself immediately, even if he still had trouble grasping its reality. He had a shitload of security downstairs to stop this kind of thing from happening, yet here he stood, confronting death times two.
Negotiation wouldn’t work. He knew that much instinctively. They’d come too far for that. Blood had been spilled, and only more blood could erase the problem.
Now, the only question: Was he fast enough?
Wolff kept a Glock 31 in the top nightstand drawer, to the right of his bed. It was chambered for .357 SIG rounds, loaded with Triton Quik-Shok bullets, and Wolff had practiced using it. There was no safety switch to fumble with in an emergency, just fifteen rounds in the magazine and one up the spout.
If he could reach the piece before one of the swordsmen got to him, Wolff thought he had a fighting chance.
Big if.
And standing there, considering it, only wasted precious time.
He bolted for the nightstand, heard a squeal behind him, from the blonde, and didn’t turn to watch her dying. Bimbos were a dime a dozen in AC, but Tommy Wolff was one in a million.
An endangered species, at the moment.
There was no time to circle the emperor bed, so Wolff clambered across it, mattress springing underneath his feet, trying to topple him. The dead girls lolled and rocked, the redhead’s one arm flopping as if reaching out to grab him by the ankle. Bloody satin squelched beneath his bare soles, slippery and treacherous. Wolff heard one of the men in black behind him, rushing toward him, and he vaulted toward the nightstand, stumbling on a bare, firm thigh and plunging headlong toward the finish line.
His forehead struck the nightstand’s edge, received a stunning gash that added Wolff’s blood to the mix, but he pushed past the pain and sudden dizziness, ripped at the drawer and pulled it free as he went down on to the floor. It banged against his chest, more pain, and Wolff upended it, dumping its contents on his torso, littering the black kimono.
Condoms. Moist towelettes. A vibrator.
The Glock.
Wolff grasped it, flung the empty nightstand drawer away from him, and raised the pistol as one of the black-clad swordsmen loomed above him. Finger on the trigger with its built-in safety, he was just about to fire when steel flashed, and a bolt of icy pain shot through his upraised arm.
Wolff saw his right hand flying, still clutching the Glock, and barked with startled laughter as his index finger clenched the trigger, firing one shot toward a limited edition of Picasso’s Buste de Femme au Chapeau Bleu, drilling the woman’s offset nose. All things considered, not a bad shot overall.
Wolff saw the sleek katana rising, flinging drops of crimson toward the ceiling, while his wrist pumped gouts and torrents of it. In the microseconds he had left to think about it, Tommy saw the story of his life written in blood.
For one last time, he’d gambled and he’d lost.
CHAPTER ONE
Atlantic City, Two Days Later
The boardwalk simmered, thronged with tourists on this summer afternoon. Mack Bolan didn’t mind the crowd, divided between gamblers seeking action and the families a person saw in any tourist town when school was out and vacation rolled around. Young couples held hands, sharing ice cream cones as if they were a promise of more intimate activities to come, while aged seniors passed with cans and shopping bags, regarding youth with envy.
Bolan, for his part, was wary.
Nothing special there, since he was always wary, anywhere he went.
That was the price of waking up each day in a hostile world.
Before Hurricane Sandy, the Atlantic City boardwalk had extended from Absecon Inlet in the north to Ventnor City, six and a half miles southward. Rampant nature had wiped out the promenade’s northern end, but the rest—built in 1870 and billed as the “Showplace of America”—had managed to survive unscathed. The vast casinos facing the North Atlantic had ignored that storm, as they’d ignored all other challenges from God and man since they were legalized, back in the 1970s.
AC had been the new Las Vegas in those days, and while the new had quickly faded, tourism declining with renovations in Las Vegas and erection of new gambling palaces in Connecticut, the boardwalk and its temples of mammon remained the city’s backbone and its throbbing, greedy heart. The flood of cash and service jobs had done little for the middle class, much less the residents of ghettos where resentment smoldered, ever ready to ignite.
Back in 2005, Forbes magazine had called Atlantic City “dangerous and depraved,” boasting a crime rate triple that of any other US city, double on the murder rate. While gross gambling revenue increased each year, the number of casino jobs declined.
AC had bet its future on the gaming tables. Some would say the town had lost its soul.
Of course, it hadn’t started in the seventies, by any means. That was the era when casinos had been legalized—controlled, in theory, by the guardians of civilized society. Supporters of the scheme had looked at Vegas, saw the neon and the bottom line without considering the downside, and had rushed ahead to claim their places at the trough. But vice had put down deep, abiding roots decades before a modern crop of architects had dreamed the Taj Mahal or the Borgata, run by men who settled scores with lead, instead of million-dollar lawsuits.
Atlantic City was the midwife to America’s crime syndicate, born on that very boardwalk, Bolan knew, during May of 1929, when every hood who mattered in the eastern half of the United States had come to hammer out their plans for the remaining years of Prohibition. Those who weren’t invited had been killed within a year or so, clearing the dead wood as a younger generation rose to claim its due.
Bolan was standing outside Nero’s when another tall man stopped beside him, frowning from the shadow of a gray fedora. “Penny for them,” said the new arrival.
“I keep watching out for Nucky Johnson.”
“Thompson.”
“Johnson,” Bolan said again. “They changed it for the TV series.”
“Ah. Wrong century, regardless,” Hal Brognola said.
They shook hands, old friends and combatants in a struggle that would outlast both of them. They knew the rules, expected no heavenly trumpets to declare their final victory and took it one day at a time.
“So, this is where it all went down,” Brognola said, tilting his head back, squinting at the sharp metallic gleam of penthouse windows high above, where seagulls wheeled and screamed.
“The Wolff thing,” Bolan said.
“None other. Four dead in the penthouse, three more from security before the hit team made it all the way upstairs.”
“Messy.”
“But quiet,” Brognola replied. “They knew what they were doing. Never fired a shot.”
“On CNN, they’re talking stab wounds.”
“Make that sword wounds, and you’ve got it right.”
Bolan had no response to that. He waited, knowing the big Fed would get around to it in his own time.
“You know much about Tommy Wolff?” Brognola asked.
“A younger version of The Donald or Steve Wynn. More cash than he could spend in twenty lifetimes.”
“And he didn’t even manage one.”
“I’m guessing that the Bureau and the state police are on it.”
“Absolutely,” Brognola agreed. “And getting nowhere.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, for starters, Wolff and all the rest of them were killed by ninjas.”
“The real deal.”
“Looks like. Black tights and balaclavas, swords and split-toe shoes. It’s all on video.”
“So, no ID on any of the perps.”
“Not even close. They’ve got ICE working on it, too, the passport angle.”
“ICE” was Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Homeland Security umbrella that had theoretically shielded America from foreign attacks since September 2011. In practice, Bolan knew, safety required much more than uniformed guards and a roster of alphabet agencies.
“They’re thinking Japanese, then?” Bolan asked. “Ninja originals?”
“Why not? We know they’re out there.”
Right. Bolan had faced some personally, once upon a time, and lived to tell about it. If he was allowed to tell. If anybody would believe it.
“So?”
“I sent a coded file to your smartphone, when you get a chance to take a look,” Brognola informed him. “Same password as usual.”
“You want to run the basics past me?”
“Abridged version, Wolff had been negotiating with a company in Tokyo to build a Nero’s Far East, matching this one, the joint he’s got—well, had—in Vegas, and the Nero’s San Juan, down in Puerto Rico.”
“There’s no legit casino gambling in Japan,” Bolan stated.
“Say he was hopeful, betting on a sea change.”
“Or he had some other kind of action in the works.”
“Or that.”
“Which was it?”
“All I hear, so far, is that he’d stepped on certain toes in Tokyo. The Sumiyoshi-kai, for starters.”
“Big toes, then.”
“And highly sensitive.”
The Sumiyoshi-kai was Japan’s second-largest Yakuza family, claiming some twenty thousand oath-bound members and at least that many hangers-on. As number two, they tried harder, chasing the larger, stronger Yamaguchi-gumi, while the Inagawa-kai snapped at their heels.
“Still, taking out a guy Wolff’s size, with his high profile…”
“Sends a very public message,” Brognola filled in for him.
“Why do I get the feeling this isn’t a one-off?” Bolan asked.
“Because you know your way around. Six months ago, out in LA, Merv Mendelbaum dropped out of sight. He hasn’t surfaced yet. The family’s been sitting on it, but they’re lawyered up and getting out the carving knives.”
“That’s Mendelbaum of Goldstone Entertainment?”
Brognola nodded. “Owner of casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, one up in New London and another in Biloxi.”
“So, coincidence?”
“Goldstone was also putting feelers out to Tokyo, feeling its way around the National Diet, schmoozing with the prime minister and leaders of his party.”
“More toes bruised,” Bolan surmised.
“The Yakuza likes things the way they are, most forms of gambling banned but readily available through outlets they control. They stand to lose a fortune—not a small one—from another US occupation.”
“What about their operations stateside?”
“They’d love to have a stake in gambling where it’s legal, if they don’t lose anything at home. Right now, they mostly smuggle methamphetamine and heroin into the States, and take guns home.”
Bolan knew that Japan’s gun control laws ranked among the world’s strictest. Police estimated there were 710,000 firearms in civilian hands, scattered among 128 million citizens—or one gun for every 180 Japanese. America, by contrast, had at least 270 million guns floating around the civilian population, one for every 1.2 men, women and children. The upshot was 32,000 gun deaths per year in the States, versus eleven annually in Japan.
Coincidence?
Unlikely.
Bolan brought his mind back to the topic on the table. “So, the Sumiyoshi-kai could benefit from taking out a few top men,” he said. “Keep US gaming corporations out of Tokyo and cause a power vacuum over here.”
“It cuts both ways,” Brognola said. “Just like a sword.”
“Suspects?”
“They’re listed in the file I sent you, but we don’t have any solid evidence. The Sumiyoshi-kai had kyodai—‘big brothers,’ similar to capos in the Mafia—both here and in Las Vegas. If the family killed Wolff and Mendelbaum, they’ll be the place to start.”
Brognola didn’t have to say the rest, but Bolan looked downrange. “What about carrying the fight back home?” he asked.
“It’s not my place to second-guess a soldier on the ground,” the big Fed said. “But obviously, if we have a chance to make the problem go away, at least for now…”
He let the sentence trail off, staring up at the casino. There was no need to explain what both of them already knew from long experience.
The predators would never be eradicated. Some defect within humankind itself produced a new crop every time the old one was cut down. Evil could be beaten down and held at bay, but it could never be extracted from the human genome. There was no cure, no inoculation, for the plague of avarice and cruelty that lurked behind the thin facade of “civilized” society.
No cure, perhaps, but he could fight the symptoms when and where they surfaced.
Starting now.
The file was waiting for him, just as Brognola had said.
Roughly two hundred years older than Sicily’s Mafia, Japan’s homegrown version of organized crime had arisen from a merger of two criminal classes: the bakuto, itinerant gamblers, and the tekiya, peddlers who furnished goods and services proscribed by feudal law. After resisting for a time, the Edo Dynasty had bowed to the realities of daily life, legitimized the syndicates and granted their leaders—known as oyabun, “fathers, or godfathers”—the right to carry short wakizashi swords, while the larger katanas were reserved for full-fledged samurai. The overall syndicate’s name, ya-ku-za, translated as “8-9-3,” a losing hand in Oicho-Kabu, the Japanese version of blackjack.
This day, the Yakuza consisted of some seventy-odd rival clans, fighting for turf in the shadow of Japan’s top three families. Only the Sumiyoshi-kai concerned Bolan as he began to scan Brognola’s file.
The outfit’s oyabun was Kazuo Takumi, based in Tokyo, which kept him near the seat of government and all the major economic action. Sixty-one years old, he’d earned his reputation the old-fashioned way, by wading in the blood of rivals, and had risen to the status of a recognized philanthropist whose generosity to charity was known throughout Japan. He held shares in a score of thriving companies and sat on several of their boards, ensuring that the firms he graced were never short of cheap materials or healthy profit margins.
The oyabun’s only son and heir apparent was Toi Takumi, something of a cipher in the file Brognola had provided. He had earned a playboy’s reputation in his early twenties, but now, approaching thirty, he had dropped out of the social scene and rarely showed his face in public.