Volatile Agent

The big American brought his arm up fast and hard, shoving the blade into Pucuro’s solar plexus and penetrating the diaphragm. Pucuro gasped and air rushed from his lungs. Blood spilled out sticky and hot across Bolan’s knuckles.

Bolan shoved Pucuro. The man bounced off the wall, and the soldier spun him into the open bathroom door. Pucuro’s pistol, a compact Glock 19, hung loose in his hands. Bolan’s fist lashed out again. The knife slid home under Pucuro’s chin and more blood spilled, splattering the floor. The Glock dropped to the concrete with a clatter.

Bolan let the dead man fall, then dropped to one knee beside the corpse and began to frisk the body. He found a fat wallet inside one pocket. A business envelope tucked into Pucuro’s other jacket pocket contained the memory stick.

Bolan carefully wiped the blade of his knife clean on the dead man’s shirt. He rose to his feet and put the envelope in his own jacket pocket.

He heard footsteps on the concrete outside. They hit the ground rapidly, and Bolan knew whoever was approaching was doing so at a dead run. He spun and pulled the Beretta 93-R from behind his back.

The first of the two men Bolan had seen in the parking lot rounded the corner. He was dressed in a business suit and an overcoat. A flat, black automatic pistol filled his fist. Over the first man’s shoulder the second man appeared, jockeying for position in the cramped quarters.

Bolan’s gaze locked onto the Chinese agent’s startled eyes. Both men raised their weapons. The big American threw himself to one side as he brought up the Beretta. The sound suppressor spit, and an instant later the tight chamber of the restroom reverberated with the sharp clap of a gunshot as the Chinese man fired simultaneously with an unmuffled pistol.

The Chinese agent staggered backward, a fount of blood opening up on his shoulder an inch above his heart. The man stumbled and his arms flew out as his pistol round rattled the metal divider around the toilets in the back of the room. Bolan bounced off the wall and spun, dropping to one knee.

Bolan pulled the trigger on his pistol again and buried a soft-nosed 9 mm round in the lead agent’s forehead. The second man twisted at the waist, ducking out of the way of the tumbling body, and his own pistol came up around the falling corpse.

Bolan shot him through the heart.

The man’s finger convulsed on his trigger, and the pistol bucked in his falling hand. A round flew past the crouching Bolan and shattered the thin, metal-backed glass of the restroom mirror. Splinters of glass showered the Executioner, sprinkling his hair and shoulders before falling to the floor.

The second agent hit the curve of the wall and slumped to the ground.

Bolan popped back up and quickly placed the still warm Beretta behind his back. He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair, spilling additional shards of glass onto the floor. He patted his pocket to make sure the memory stick was secure. Satisfied, he stood. Without hesitation he walked forward, stepped over the corpses and exited the restrooms.

The Executioner caught a glimpse of the teenagers across the park. They had stopped playing basketball and stood on the edge of the court, facing his direction. Several of them held up cell phones. He saw no sign of the elderly couple and their dog as he crossed the grass.

Moving quickly but staying calm, Bolan slid behind the wheel of the Lincoln Navigator. The big block engine purred to life immediately.

Bolan smoothly guided the big SUV out of the parking lot and into sparse traffic. He got out his cell phone and prepared to call Brognola. The big Fed had a mess that needed cleaning up.

2

The gunmen were in the hotel.

Crouched in the dark, Marie Saragossa eased the charging handle back on her mini-Uzi machine pistol. She chambered a 9 mm round and eased the receiver back into place. She pushed the safety selector onto the fire position. Out in the hallway beyond the door to her hotel room, Saragossa heard the murmur of deep male voices and the creaking of the floor under their footsteps.

Rain hammered the glass of the room’s only window. Despite the downpour, the heat in the room was stifling. Saragossa wore an olive green tank top, and it stuck to her body like a second skin. Perspiration ran into the valley between her breasts, and she could feel beads of sweat slide across her abdomen and along the small of her back.

Saragossa clenched then relaxed her grip on the machine pistol. As a young girl in Castro’s Cuba, she had been instructed in the use of weapons. Her subsequent rise into the intelligence service of the dictator’s country had only sharpened those skills—skills she now sold on the open market in the true spirit of the capitalism she had been taught to hate as a child.

The men in the hallway fell silent. Saragossa looked over the bed she crouched behind. A satellite phone lay on top of the covers, her only link with the outside world. From the street she heard rough laughter over the falling rain, then the stuttering burst of a Kalashnikov. There was a scream followed by more laughter.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

The rebels had driven across the border as night fell and had taken the town. The rains had rolled into the region, halting the government counteradvance in its tracks, and the rebels had begun an orgy of murder, torture, rape and looting. Intelligence indicated that the township of Yendere was a sanctuary point for the rebels and that they possessed a good relationship with the population on the Burkina Faso side of the border with the Ivory Coast.

Makimbo, Saragossa’s last street contact in the township, told her all of that had changed when the rebel units found the drugs.

The border town of Yendere had become a transition point. The rebels had morphed, becoming a link in the narcotic routes from Latin America into Europe. Cocaine and heroin were introduced by ship into the Ivory Coast, then made their way by a variety of means across the border into Burkina Faso’s capital of Ouagadougou. Only the rebel units who had arrived across the border one step ahead of Ivory Coast national forces hadn’t been a part of the established network. When they found shipments of narcotics among the crates of sheep wool in the warehouses behind the township mosque, the frenzy had begun.

Now Makimbo was gone, along with every other person who could make their escape along the only road leading out of town. With her dusky skin and long, straight hair Saragossa had been trapped. Her principal had promised her help if she could hold out long enough, but that was a huge if.

The green light indicating battery charge on her sat phone glowed like a beacon in the dark room. Outside her door Saragossa heard whispers. Holding the machine pistol close to her face in her right hand, the woman reached across the bedspread and wrapped her fingers around the phone.

The doorknob rattled as a heavy hand fell across it. Saragossa drew the phone to her and turned off the power. The bed lay between her and the door. Already on her knees, she slowly lowered herself to her stomach behind the mattress and frame as the doorknob began to turn.

She had taken a gamble. If she had locked the door, then she would be announcing her presence to the rampaging troops. She had to simply hide until help arrived in the form of mercenaries, government troops or a moneyman. Saragossa had experienced many unpleasant things since her days as a girl in Cuba. Being raped was not one she wanted to endure ever again.

The door creaked loudly as the rebel outside pushed it open. Saragossa slid under the bed. Light from the hallway spilled into the room. From her position she saw a pair of bare, skinny ankles above a filthy pair of rubber-soled tennis shoes. The soles of the shoes were thick with mud, and the toes were splattered with dark splotches that could only be blood.

Saragossa eased her arm up from her side, bringing the mini-Uzi around should she need to use it. Her breathing sounded as loud as a furnace bellows to her. The rebel walked a few steps into the room. She smelled cheap tobacco burning and an almost overwhelming stench of body odor.

The material of Saragossa’s shirt was stuck tight to the small of her back from the humidity and her own sweat. In the next moment she felt a fat weight drop onto her from the bottom of the mattress. She tensed in horror.

She felt the tiny presence scuttle up her back. She closed her eyes against the shudder of revulsion that threatened to ripple across her body. The thing was too short to be a centipede, but the legs felt too close together to be a spider. To Saragossa’s mind that left two options—one creepy the other deadly. The first was a roach. West African roaches were prevalent, disgusting and huge. The second was a scorpion. If a Death Stalker scorpion was to crawl up her back and become entangled in the thick mass of her long hair, she knew she was in very real danger.

The poison of the Death Stalker was fierce, deadly in children and the elderly, and likely to make her so sick she’d be unable to save herself if the rebels attacked her. In the field pack hidden behind her under the bed she had a first-aid kit complete with antivenin shots for insects and snakes. But nothing would help her if she was discovered by the gunmen in the room.

The creature scurried up her body, and Saragossa bit down hard on her trembling lower lip to stifle any sound. A young bass voice called out something from the hallway. The thing perched between Saragossa’s shoulder blades froze as the man in the room answered, his voice loud and slurred.

Saragossa held her breath. A sting from a scorpion that close to her spine and central nervous system could be fatal. If the gunmen discovered her under the bed and forced her to move and fire in self-defense, she was damned. There was no way that one of the aggressive African scorpion species would not strike.

Let it be a roach, she thought. Or a beetle. Let it be a goddamned dung beetle.

The man walked farther into the room. From where she lay Saragossa could see the ragged bottoms of the man’s cutoff jeans hanging down past his knees. The gunman relaxed—apparently satisfied the room was empty—and lowered his weapon so that Saragossa could see the muzzle and front sight of the assault rifle.

She heard the light switch snap on and off and the man curse in frustration. She had unscrewed the lightbulbs earlier but left them in the outlet to make it appear as if they had only burned out. On her back the creature began to move again, climbing up her nape where her hair was held in place by a cloth strip from a field medic kit used to splint broken bones or wrap wounds.

A tiny puddle of sweat had pooled in the hollow there. She felt the hard, sticky legs of the creature play themselves across the goose bumps of her flesh as it paused, drinking in her perspiration. The monsoon rains had kept the malaria-bearing mosquitoes and potential deadly flies inactive, and Saragossa hadn’t bothered using her insect repellant for days. She was an inviting playground to the bugs driven indoors by the rain.

The rebel opened the door to the hotel room all the way, spilling in more light. He dropped his half-smoked cigarette to the floor, and Saragossa watched him grind it out inches from her face. It lay on the room’s only rug and smoldered. A trail of smoke streamed up from the half-crushed cigarette and into her face.

The weight at the back of her neck shifted with sudden purpose and scurried onto her left shoulder. She breathed out slowly and cautiously. Afraid to turn her head, Saragossa shifted her eyes to follow the gunman as he walked deeper into the room. Predictably, he was headed for the closet.

The legs on her shoulder began a lazy trail down her arm toward her elbow. The thing was in such disgustingly intimate contact with her that Saragossa was almost positive it was no cockroach or dung beetle.

The rebel opened the door to her closet and chuckled. He called out to the other gunman in the hallway, and then he started throwing Saragossa’s luggage onto the bed. The mattress spring bounced in protest as her heavy backpack bounced onto the rickety bed.

The bed undulated above her, threatening to press down against her head. The thing on her arm froze in midstride. Saragossa could hear a hiss and knew without a doubt it was a scorpion. She felt a surge of adrenaline as her stomach clenched and sour bile flooded the back of her throat.

She heard footsteps and shifted her eyes to the door. The second gunman had entered to see what the first had found. This one wore dirty black sweatpants tucked into battered old army boots. He said something to the first gunman, and both pairs of feet crowded up to the bed.

Agitated, the scorpion crawled off Saragossa’s arm, running down her bicep to the plank wood floor. She gritted her teeth against the horror of how close the thing was to her face, especially her eyes. She had felt the segmented serpentine sway of the arachnid’s stinger as it slid off her arm.

Above her the bed bounced as the two gunmen began to open and rifle through her bags. Dust scattered by the activity trailed down into Saragossa’s face. She shifted her eyes to the left, trying to see the scorpion, but her hair hung in her way.

Terrified, Saragossa risked moving her head. She felt the searching grasp of the creature’s brittle-haired legs reach her left wrist. She felt the wiry folds of the front pincers bump across her skin as it climbed onto her hand.