Savage Rule

The Honduran dropped his shovel and managed to get a grip on both of his adversary’s forearms, squeezing for all he was worth. The pain was stunning in its sudden intensity. Some men might have passed out from that alone; Bolan could see spots swimming in his vision. Even as his mind raced to find a way out of this situation, he realized that the soldiers nearest them were falling back to brace the giant—and gasping in shock as they realized that the man held in the big man’s grip was not one of their number, after all.

Bolan, with no other options, rotated his wrists. The blades of his knives came down, the reversed, smaller one doing a more thorough job than the other, but both edges slicing deeply into flesh. The giant Honduran screamed in agony and surprise as Bolan carved his way free from his grip.

Then the Executioner stepped in and drove his longer blade through the man’s neck.

The big American didn’t wait to see his enemy fall. He wrenched the big knife free, reversed it and slammed the bloody blade home in its Kydex sheath, also resheathing the smaller off-hand blade. Then his fingers curled around the grip of his M-16 A-3.

Weapons were coming up and seeking target acquisition as he blazed his way through the entire 30-round magazine on full-automatic, mowing down the first row of encroaching soldiers. He dropped the mag and inserted another, but not before triggering a buckshot round from his 40-mm grenade launcher, shredding more of the enemy.

It didn’t take him long, working amid the Hondurans and in the fitful shadows of the burning night, to bring his manufactured chaos once more to a fever pitch. Again he shouted in Spanish as he ran, misleading one man, targeting another, misdirecting a third. He poured on the firepower as the answering guns of the dwindling raiding party increased their own pitch. The jungle came alive as staccato bursts of orange-white muzzle blasts mingled with the fires consuming the vehicles, and men screamed and died by the dozens.

As abruptly as this dance of death had opened, it drew to a close. The last pockets of resistance managed to wipe out one another, either through sheer determination or with Bolan’s help. Finally, the night’s darkness began to close in once again. The muzzle-flash blooms of illumination were few and far between, and the fires licking at the scorched hulks of the vehicles, though they showed no signs of truly dying, began to subside. Once more holding his rifle by his side on its single-point sling, Bolan drew the suppressed 93-R and began to administer mercy rounds to the dying.

Then, finally, nothing moved.

Bolan made two complete circuits of the raiding party’s camp, making certain. The Executioner had walked many a battlefield and ended the lives of countless gunmen…but it would never be a casual thing to him. He didn’t dismiss them as he walked among them. He was careful to check those who might be shamming, too, using his small combat light. He would illuminate a body here, toe a corpse for reaction there, always moving lest the light make him a target.

When he was satisfied that only one other man remained alive among the raiding party, he reached down to his belt and clicked off the portable radio jammer he carried. The device, a powerful miniature electronic unit crafted by Able Team’s Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz at Stony Man Farm, was powerful enough to prevent radio transmissions for roughly one half mile. That had been more than enough range to prevent the raiding party from calling for help or alerting the advance camp where they had been based. Bolan unclipped the jammer from his belt and examined it. It had almost depleted its lithium battery pack; the device was very strong for its size, but exacted a heavy toll from its power cell. He replaced the unit on his belt and continued tracking the raiding party’s sole survivor.

He had spotted the man during his second circuit of the devastated column. The soldier—who, like the giant Honduran Bolan had battled, wore the rank tabs of an officer—was badly wounded. He dragged himself through the muck of the clearing, among the bodies of his fallen comrades. Bolan closed in and then stopped, standing over him.

The officer turned over, painfully. The right side of his face was scorched black, and the eye on that side stared blindly. He fixed Bolan with his good eye and rattled off something in Spanish that the Executioner couldn’t catch. Then he made to grab for a rifle still clutched in the hands of a dead man nearby.

“Don’t,” Bolan said. “Leave it there.” He aimed the muzzle of the suppressed 93-R machine pistol at the wounded officer’s face. The flickering light from the truck fires was the only illumination.

“American,” the officer said, his accent heavy. “You are American.”

Bolan didn’t answer that. He stepped over and kicked the rifle out of the man’s reach. “I can provide medical treatment,” he said simply.

“Stay away,” the officer spit. He started to get up, shaking on his lacerated legs.

“Stay down,” Bolan countered.

The man didn’t listen. Perhaps given strength by sudden adrenaline, he regained his footing long enough to draw an M-7 bayonet from his belt. He lunged with the blade in a clumsy overhand strike.

Still gripping his pistol, Bolan stepped in, meeting the raised arm and slapping it down and away. He folded the man’s hand back on itself and drove the point of the bayonet toward the officer’s stomach. The wounded man lost his footing and collapsed onto the blood-soaked soil once more. The knife had never touched him. It fell to the ground next to him.

“You…you are…a butcher.” His voice had become a whisper. “Los…campesinos…sufrirán para su insolencia.”

The Executioner’s face hardened at that. “If I were a butcher,” he said, jerking his chin toward the bayonet on the ground, “that would be in your stomach right now.” He raised the 93-R for a mercy shot, but it was already too late.

“You…you…” The man’s good eye suddenly stared at nothing. The tension went out of his body as death finally took him.

Bolan shook his head. “The peasants will suffer for your insolence,” the man had said in Spanish. That was what he was fighting. According to Brognola, some unknown number of Honduran citizens had already suffered under Orieza’s ironfisted regime. Bolan didn’t intend to let that continue, or to let Orieza’s thugs bring their terror across the boarder to Honduras’s neighbors.

Bolan surveyed the ruined column one last time. Nothing and no one else moved.

The Executioner hurried off into the night, leaving only guttering flames and dead men behind him.

CHAPTER THREE

Cupping his hand over its face, Mack Bolan checked his field watch once more before replacing the ballistic nylon cover that concealed it on his wrist. The first gray rays of predawn were perhaps an hour away, maybe less. That didn’t leave him much time to operate; he would need the cover of darkness to execute his one-man assault on the Honduran base camp.

He surveyed the advance camp, taking special note of the pipeline that stood on prefabricated struts a few hundred yards to the west. Additional segments of pipe were piled nearby amid parked earthmoving and construction vehicles. The equipment and portions of the base camp itself were “protected” under camouflage netting that had proved insufficient to hide the operation from NSA’s satellite surveillance.

Bolan, crouched in the dense undergrowth bordering the cleared no-man’s-land surrounding the camp, took a moment to check the briefing on his smartphone. He had memorized the basic layout in transit, but now compared his intel to the reality of the camp before him. He saw no glaring contradictions. In the field, knowledge—real-time intelligence verified through direct experience—was invaluable. The more he knew, the more flexible he could be, tailoring his strategies and tactics to the fluid and ever-changing conditions of the modern battlefield. That was at least the theory; from long practice, the Executioner knew that a great deal was driven by sheer will, by determination and ferocity.

The camp’s layout was basic, but sound. Any trees and scrub had been slashed and burned, clear-cut around the base perimeter to deny an enemy cover or concealment. The camp itself was ringed by sandbagged machine-gun emplacements, not all of which were manned at any one time, from what he could see. The guns were FN Minimis most likely chambered in 5.56-mm NATO, Bolan suspected. Guards moved casually among the widely spaced pits, occasionally conferring with sentries stationed at other posts.

The last line of defense around the camp itself was a rough palisade apparently built from the materials cleared for the base, and topped by razor wire. Four small watchtowers, made of prefabricated metal struts, with what looked like metal-bucket crow’s nests at their tops, were placed at the corners of the square perimeter.

Even at this distance, Bolan could hear screams.

The faint sounds of human torment carried to him on the night breeze, which would have been refreshing in the Honduran undergrowth if not for those chilling noises. Bolan could just make out, through his field glasses, the blue epaulets on the uniforms of the men guarding a prefabricated metal hut near the center of the advance camp. These would be, according to the Farm’s briefing, Orieza’s shock troops. They formed the vanguard of Orieza’s campaign of terror within Honduras, according to the information in Bolan’s files.

It stood to reason; that was a common enough tactic among strong-arm dictators and their ilk. Creating a cadre of loyalists whose powers exceeded those of the regular military fostered a sense of fear among the lower echelons of a dictator’s power base, while shoring up—through preferential treatment and a sense of elite status—the core of men willing to fight and die for their leader. This had been, after all, the theory and concept behind Iraq’s Republican Guard, essentially a special-forces unit tasked with protecting Saddam Hussein’s regime as well as with the dictator’s most critical military operations. Republican Guard recruits were volunteers on whom many material perks were lavished. They’d enjoyed their often cruel jobs and were well rewarded for them. There was every reason to believe that Orieza’s shock troops were every bit as brutal and every bit as highly motivated.

Out here on the border, it was unlikely the prisoners were Honduran citizens. They could be Guatemalan troops lost in the previous forays made by Orieza’s raiders. They might even be Honduran soldiers accused of disloyalty, real or imagined. Hard-line regimes like Orieza’s were notorious for their paranoia, Bolan knew. It didn’t matter. The advance camp had to be destroyed, and completely, for the Executioner’s daring one-man blitz through Honduras to succeed. It was merely the second step in a chain of raids that would take him, before he was done, to the heart of Orieza’s government… But first things first. Whoever the prisoners were, Bolan would make sure they were freed. And before he was done, their torturers would answer in full for what had been inflicted upon those captives screaming in the night.

Bolan crept along the brush line until he found a suitable target: a sentry who had ranged just a little too far from his sandbag nest, smoking a truly gigantic, cheap cigar that was producing large volumes of blue smoke. From the banter being exchanged in stage whispers between the sentry and his compadre still in the machine-gun emplacement, it was clear that the fumes were objectionable to the second man; hence the smoker’s distance from his post. Bolan listened to them trade vulgar insults in Spanish. There were at least a few threats. Both men, if Bolan heard them correctly, were vowing to stab each other. Shaking his head and questioning his fellow soldier’s parentage, the sentry with the cigar grudgingly moved a few paces farther.

Perfect.

Bolan removed a simple fork of carbon fiber from a ballistic nylon pouch on his belt. He unsnapped the wrist brace and attached a heavy, synthetic rubber band to the two posts of the fork. Then he produced a small ball bearing from the belt pouch, placed it in the wrist-brace slingshot he held and stretched the band taut.

The sentry turned away, sucking in a deep mouthful of smoke. When the tip of the cigar flared orange-red, Bolan let fly.

The ball bearing snapped the man in the neck, hard. The sentry swore and slapped at the spot. His cigar fell down the front of his uniform, spraying dull orange sparks, and he slapped at them, as well, cursing quietly. He was reasonably discreet nonetheless. No doubt he would be disciplined, perhaps harshly, for drifting from his post to enjoy a late-night smoke.

“Come here!” Bolan whispered in Spanish, beckoning from the cover of the brush and hoping the man could see his arm despite the damage the burning cigar would had done to the sentry’s night vision. “You have to take a look at this. Hurry!”

“What?” the man whispered, confused. “Tomas?” He stepped forward hesitantly.

“Hurry up!” Bolan urged.

The sentry’s curiosity, and perhaps some overconfidence characteristic of Orieza’s raiders—who, after all, had met little resistance from the disorganized Guatemalan troops—got the better of him. He groped for his cigar, picked it up and hurried forward, firing a series of whispered questions in Spanish. Bolan couldn’t catch it all, but he gathered the sentry thought this was some practical joke played by a friend in his unit, the “Tomas” he kept naming.

Up close, Bolan could see this man wore the blue epaulets of the shock troops. The joke was on the sentry, all right.

Once he was in range, Bolan struck. He reached for the man as fast as a rattler uncoiling, and grabbed him by the shoulder and the face, his fingers jabbing up and under the sentry’s jawline. The sudden move brought a gasp of surprise from Bolan’s target as the man hit the ground like a sack of wet cement. The big American lifted his hand from the man’s jaw and slashed down savagely with the smaller of his two fighting knives, silencing the sentry forever.

Wiping the gory blade on the dead man’s uniform, Bolan searched him and found what he wanted: the sentry’s radio. Then he drew the suppressed Beretta 93-R, crouched to brace his elbow against his knee, and waited for the sentry’s cigar-hating fellow trooper to pop his head up over the sandbags. The fact that an alarm hadn’t already been raised was proof that nobody had seen the Executioner grab the man in the shadows. Now, when the cigar-smoking soldier was nowhere to be found, it shouldn’t take long for the other soldier to wonder where he went.

It didn’t. The curse in Spanish was another loud stage whisper, and when the Honduran soldier propped himself up above the sandbags to call to his wayward comrade, Bolan put a silenced 147-grain 9-mm hollowpoint through the man’s brain.

Working his way in the darkness across the cleared perimeter as far as he dared, he found Claymore mines placed at intervals to cover the dead soldiers’ position at the southwest. No doubt there were more mines similarly spaced all around the advance camp. He kept an eye on the crow’s nest of the tower on that corner of the base as he crawled back the way he’d come. The guard appeared to be slumped in his metal enclosure, possibly napping.

The combat clock was ticking, now. The Executioner had no idea on what schedule the perimeter guards called in, or if they did at all, but it was standard military procedure to do so. He worked his way around the perimeter of the camp as stealthily as he could. When he faced the north side of the camp, he was ready. He picked up his stolen radio, keyed it twice, then started groaning into it.