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    Narc
    Narc
    Narc
    Ebook257 pages3 hours

    Narc

    By Marc Olden

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    About this ebook

    A narcotics agent comes between a dealer and the biggest heroin shipment in history

    One thousand pounds of uncut heroin. Street value: a quarter of a billion dollars. New York’s baddest dealer is a preening hustler named St. James Livingston, and his latest scheme will make the French Connection smuggling operation look small-time. The shipment is coming in through a Cuban diplomatic mission, and when it arrives Livingston won’t just make a fortune. He’ll make history. Only John Bolt stands in his way.

    The meanest narcotics agent in the country, Bolt arrests Livingston’s supplier during a South American raid. But cutting off the head won’t kill this snake. Too many junkies are hungry for smack, and too many crooks are desperate for profits. The biggest shipment in history will also be the bloodiest, and Bolt stands to make a killing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMysteriousPress.com Open Road
    Release dateJun 26, 2012
    ISBN9781453260616
    Narc
    Author

    Marc Olden

    Marc Olden (1933–2003) was the author of forty mystery and suspense novels. Born in Baltimore, he began writing while working in New York as a Broadway publicist. His first book, Angela Davis (1973), was a nonfiction study of the controversial Black Panther. In 1973 he also published Narc, under the name Robert Hawke, beginning a hard-boiled nine-book series about a federal narcotics agent. A year later, Black Samurai introduced Robert Sand, a martial arts expert who becomes the first non-Japanese student of a samurai master. Based on Olden’s own interest in martial arts, which led him to the advanced ranks of karate and aikido, the novel spawned a successful eight-book series. Olden continued writing for the next three decades, often drawing on his fascination with Japanese culture and history. 

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      Book preview

      Narc - Marc Olden

      Narc

      Narc Series (Book One)

      Marc Olden

      A MysteriousPress.com

      Open Road Integrated Media

      Ebook

      Contents

      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

      Preview: Death of a Courier

      Copyright Page

      CHAPTER 1

      THE THREE NARCOTICS AGENTS died painfully. Antoine Georges Peray wanted it that way.

      In Miami, an informant betrayed a narc to a mob, who cut off his left foot.

      Then they took him to the Everglades and left him there.

      Smelling the blood, alligators moved in quickly.

      In Tangiers, a narc was lured into a phony buy by Arabs, who cut off his testicles. Placing them in a small box, the Arabs mailed the box to the President of the United States.

      In Marseilles, a narc was captured by Corsicans who gouged out both of his eyes. His tongue was cut off. He lived. For a short while.

      But he went insane. And no one was surprised when he broke a light bulb and repeatedly jabbed himself in the throat with the jagged edge.

      He choked to death on his own blood.

      All three died because Antoine Georges Peray wanted to protect his business. His business was heroin. The White Death.

      For him, the streets of America were literally paved with gold. He sent his heroin there. In return receiving more money than most of the kings of history.

      From the tiny country of La Playa in South America, Peray—the wholesaler—sent out the best heroin, the most heroin. In three years he had sent a lot of it north into American cities.

      $2 billion worth.

      A tidal wave of horror. Killing those who used it. And forcing them to kill others. Heroin. A daily atomic bomb falling on a young nation growing old with fear. A nation of victims covered with white powder.

      Antoine Georges Peray. A small, fifty-seven-year-old, grey-haired French man. Now sitting in the back seat of a small black car.

      Handcuffed to the left wrist of a narc named John Bolt.

      Heading towards the La Playa airport and a plane that would bring him to New York for trial.

      Yesterday, in Washington D.C., Bolt had pounded Craven’s desk and demanded the assignment of bringing back Peray. Craven was the boss, he, ran D-3, The Department of Dangerous Drugs. But he didn’t run Bolt. And he was smart enough not to argue. Bolt was the best. Let him go.

      Manpower was tight. The war against drug dealers had every agent working full time. Craven could spare only six, including Bolt. He was placed in charge.

      The assignment was tough from the beginning. Only a handful of men, no time to do the job right, and a prisoner who was so important that the President of the United States had gotten on the phone, cursing another chief of state.

      That phone call had happened three days ago. Two things had been brought to the President’s attention. One—Antoine Georges Peray was free to do as he pleased in La Playa, paying a lot of money for the privilege, so long as he didn’t push heroin there. He didn’t.

      Two—Foreign aid to La Playa was due to expire in two weeks. El Presidente de La Playa wanted the aid to continue. With a fat increase as well. Recent floods and an earthquake had done much damage.

      And so the phone call. Give us Peray, the American President had said, or American aid stops. And stays stopped as long as I am in office.

      An iron pipe across the knees. Stop American money from going south and La Playa would become a mudhole overnight. The cursing came about when the President got tired of hearing El Presidente brag about Peray’s contributions to local charities.

      No amount of bribes, however, could match the droppings on La Playa from the eagle in the north.

      Peray was arrested. By order of El Presidente, immediately turning a necessity into a virtue. The La Playa press kept quiet. By order of El Presidente.

      Twenty-seven hours without sleep. John Bolt doubted he could have slept anyway, so why bitch about it? Bringing Peray back for trial was his assignment. An assignment he had asked for.

      Bolt had known the three narcs Peray had ordered tortured and killed. Clem had been a French teacher in a Detroit high school. He had seen what dope did to kids. It was no trouble recruiting him for D-3.

      Speaking French had gotten him the Marseilles assignment. It had been his first. And his last.

      Art had been to North Africa on his honeymoon. He had volunteered for the Tangiers assignment.

      What had happened to Frank in Miami had been tough for Bolt to live with. It was Bolt who had suggested him for the assignment. Frank was young, only twenty-four, blond, he looked like a beachboy.

      At the time, it had seemed like a good cover. As it turned out, it wasn’t good enough.

      Clem, Art, Frank. Good agents. Good men. Now just cold meat rotting in the ground. And Peray had dismissed them with death. Casually. As dealers the world over did every day.

      Drug dealers made money because people died. Killing narcs was simply a sound business practice.

      Bolt, with five other narcotics agents, had flown into La Playa yesterday. His plan was to get in one day, get out the next. He had a strong feeling that Peray would not go quietly.

      Bolt’s decisions were quick and direct. Leave for the La Playa airport the very next night. Use the decoy system. Three groups of cars, three cars to a group. Each group to take a different route to the airport.

      Breakdown of each group: four guards in the first car. Two narcs and Peray (or a stand-in) in the second car. Four guards in the third car.

      Everybody to be armed.

      Radio contact between all three groups, checking in every ten minutes. Each narc team to have maps of all three routes.

      Bolt would be in the car with Peray. Of the five D-3 narcs, Bolt picked Ray to ride with him. Ray had asked him to be best man at his wedding, set for next week.

      Bolt liked Ray’s quickness. Put his back against the wall, and Ray wouldn’t whine. He’d start kicking ass. A good man.

      In the hot, moonlit night, the trip to the airport was nothing out of a travel folder. Which of the La Playa cops serving as guards and drivers had been bought off by Peray? Which of them was ready to betray and kill?

      Bolt had stared at their sweating, brown faces, looking for a sign. Anything that would say this guy’s gone over. He saw nothing.

      Time and time again he had been told that he was a hard-ass. There was no other way to be in his line of work and still be alive after six years. His one rule boiled down to one word: suspicion.

      Be suspicious of everybody. Survival depends on suspicion. Trust no one. In the world of narcotics, everybody’s lying. Everybody betrays.

      And if you’re careless, if you’re weak, you end up flat on your back with a mouthful of dirt.

      Would they try to take Peray now, on the road?

      At the airport?

      When?

      Damn. Bolt wanted out of this country. If he could do it without being shot at, whoopee. He didn’t know what El Presidente had done with American aid and Peray’s bribes, but he wasn’t spending any of it on improving the roads. The tiny car was hitting every hole, every bump in La Playa roads that had probably been there since the Spaniards had showed up five hundred years ago to rip off the natives.

      And the local bugs and mosquitos had been sinking their fangs into his face and neck. A blood-sucking welcome wagon.

      In the back seat of the car, Peray sat quietly between Bolt and Ray. The bugs didn’t seem to come near him. Bolt noticed that. Maybe the bugs were scared shitless that Peray would put out a contract on them if they did.

      Ray’s Colt .45 ACP Commander was in his left hand, away from the prisoner. A heavy gun. Made a big hole. All narcs were carrying heavy guns these days. Drug dealers were shooting at them too often.

      Watch the cops, Bolt had told Ray. Keep them in your cross hairs. Suspicion being normal with Bolt, he had insisted on the La Playa cops sitting up front. Right where he could see them.

      Their backs to him was better than his back to them.

      Especially if Peray had been passing around the pesos lately.

      The call-ins came over the small radio. Ray was answering them.

      A special shotgun rested on Bolt’s knee, butt down, barrel straight up. The shotgun was short, a fraction under 27 inches long, single barrel. It fired three shots.

      An ex-Nazi in West Germany had created it especially for Herr Bolt, sweating and smiling in the intense heat of the gun factory. The ex-Nazi enjoyed his work.

      Bolt had done the test firing himself. He had smiled, too. Politics aside, the German knew how to make a gun. This one left a hole big enough for an elephant to walk through sideways.

      As busy as he had been during his twenty-seven hours in La Playa, Bolt had found time to clean and oil that gun. He had also made a run out to the airport and back, setting landmarks in his mind. Just in case the assigned driver decided on a last-minute change of route and neglected to tell anyone.

      I’ll take that, Bolt said to Ray, pointing to the radio. You take him. Uncuffing himself, then Peray, Bolt passed cuffs and key to Ray. Ray clicked them on his own right wrist and Peray’s left wrist. He put the key in his own inside shirt pocket.

      In the heat, Bolt’s shoulder holster was chafing him. Let it, he thought. He wasn’t taking it off until he turned the key on this creep in a New York jail. He wasn’t going to take off the ankle holster he wore, either.

      That tiny Beretta around his ankle had saved his life twice.

      He spoke into the radio. Harry. Harry. Come in. This is Bolt.

      Coming through loud and clear. Up yours, Bolt. Bolt grinned at the radio. Nothing like a friendly voice when a man is far from home.

      If Harry’s vocabulary was limited at the moment, nothing came from the La Playa cops up front or Peray in the back. Bolt didn’t mind. It was less to distract him. His Spanish was fluent. So was his French. It made undercover work in South America and Europe that much safer.

      If you’re going to lie, do it in the language of those you’re talking to at the time.

      He would liked to have heard what the La Playa cops had to say. OK la policia, thought Bolt, nail your lips shut. Just sit up front and sweat and think of all those pesos you’re not going to be getting anymore.

      And then with savage swiftness…

      The attack.

      Flares. Arcing up into the sky, then pop!

      And the road lit up with a green, eerie brightness.

      Then a grenade. Flying out of the darkness at the first car. Hitting the door on the driver’s side, killing him instantly and turning the car over on its side. The burning car now blocked the road.

      From the flame and smoke of that overturned car, two guards crawled out and began running for the side of the road. Bullets stitched crisscrossing red lines across the chest of one, driving him backwards and to the ground.

      The other got a few feet past his companion, when he was hit. Again and again and again, spinning him around in a circle, like a child’s aimless dance. He fell to the earth, both of his hands under his body.

      We’ve been hit! We’ve been hit! Bolt yelled into the radio over the noise of the first car exploding. Get here!

      He saw his driver make a quick motion. The car keys. Right out the window.

      Peray. That bastard, Bolt thought. He’s bought off at least one person in this car. How many more? Two? All three?

      It was a question needing a quick answer.

      CHAPTER 2

      THEY WEREN’T VERY GOOD. But they were still dangerous as hell.

      The cop sitting in front of Bolt had been told to kill him. Being fat and left-handed, however, and too dumb to think for himself, the cop got killed. By the intended victim.

      In the small car, the fat cop was tight against the door on his right, and the cop next to him. Being left-handed meant he had to draw his gun and squirm to his right to get a shot at Bolt.

      The fat cop would have been better off drawing with his left hand, then shooting Bolt. Instead he followed orders, giving the edge to Bolt.

      Bolt took it.

      He saw the cop trying to turn around and he knew why. Lowering the shotgun, Bolt placed it on the fat cop’s cheekbone and pulled the trigger. With the shotgun’s roar, the top of the fat cop’s head flew off and splattered on the windshield. His body leaned against the door, gently forcing it open.

      The fat cop, following the opening door, fell out into the road.

      Ray had been the driver’s target. The driver’s luck, however, was just as bad. He had been told two things: Bolt has to die first. And be careful not to shoot Peray.

      Following instructions made the driver slow. He had given himself away by throwing the keys out the window. When he reached to unbutton his holster, Ray shot him in the temple. The cop’s body stiffened as though he were attempting to sit up straight. Then he collapsed against the seat.

      The third cop panicked, screaming Nada mas! Nada mas! He didn’t want to earn his blood money. He wanted out, nothing more. Sliding quickly to his right, his hands and arms covered with blood from those beside him, the third cop fell to the road on his hands and knees.

      He stood up, tripped, got up again and started running for the trees. The attackers, waited until he was away from the car and opened fire. He was dead before he hit the ground. Tonight, only Peray’s safety counted.

      They’re being careful, said Bolt, as he put a new shell in his shotgun. They don’t want to hit him. Stay loose but stay in the car. One thing—if we can’t hold on to him, he’s not to be rescued. I mean it. I want a bullet in him, if that’s the way it has to be.

      Ray looked at Bolt, saying nothing. Then he nodded. He understood.

      Bolt then looked at Peray and told him, in French, that the narcs would kill him before letting him go free. Peray smiled and in French said to Bolt, Let us see who kills and who dies, pig! Your jail does not interest me. Can death be any worse than that?

      Placing the barrel of the shotgun near Peray’s eye, Bolt said, Are you sure you feel that way?

      Peray drew his head back. His pride as a man, as a ruler, was being challenged by a narc whose yearly salary was less than the street price of a kilo of heroin. This pig now had the power of life and death over him.

      At first Peray didn’t trust himself to speak. He trusted himself to hate. And he knew that he hated Bolt. He drew strength from that hatred. As long as I am alive, he said, you are a dead man. No matter where I am in the world, either free or in jail, you are dead. I will have you killed as painfully as possible.

      Bolt knew Peray meant it. He also knew Peray had admitted more than he was aware of Peray did not want to die. That was one reason for the venomous speech. But not the only reason.

      Men had come for Bolt’s life before.

      But Peray was different. If Bolt lived through tonight, he would have to be more careful than he had ever been in his life.

      Shooting stopped. The third car. Where was the third car? And where the hell were the two other groups? Bolt hoped they had gotten his frantic message.

      Ray. The radio. Get on it and stay on it.

      Done. Picking the radio off the car floor where it had been dropped in a hurry, Ray flicked the switch. Nothing. He flicked it again, And again. Nothing.

      Bolt reached over, ripped it from his hand and began flicking the switch. Again and again. Then, a faint sound of static. Ray grinned and said Yeah…

      Bolt’s heart leaped. More static, but stronger this time.

      And then the third car. Bolt heard it before he saw it in the moonlight. Coming up behind them. Fast. Aiming itself at them. Ready to ram.

      They’re trying to force us out! said Bolt. Give me the key. Stay put. Ray passed the key to Bolt, who put it in his shirt pocket. I’m going out, he said to Ray. If I come back, it’ll be in a hurry, so don’t get trigger happy.

      Ray nodded.

      The third car was closer. Bumpy roads and darkness had made driving hard, but it was clear what was on the driver’s mind.

      A flare went up. Plenty of light now. Just for a few seconds, but enough time for Bolt.

      He turned the handle, then kicked the car door open and quickly scrambled out on the road. No shooting at him yet. He was too near the car, too near Peray.

      Crawling fast, Bolt got around to the back of the car, then rolled underneath it. No time to aim. Pointing the shotgun at the uncoming car, he fired one shot at the front left tire, tearing half of it off.

      The speeding car leaned in the direction of the collapsing tire, then turned in a sharp half-circle. Now the entire left side of the car was facing Bolt. In range of his shotgun.

      He jerked the trigger twice, firing both blasts into the windows. High-pitched screams told him he had hit someone. The broken glass slicing across the inside of the car cut into the four men.

      The shotgun shells did more damage than that. Two cops were killed immediately, a third was blinded by the flying glass, while the fourth had his arm torn off at the shoulder.

      Dazed by the pain, he sat in the driver’s seat muttering Spanish prayers. The cop blinded by the glass was squealing and rubbing the glass further into

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