Busto skidded back into the room waving a key attached to a little yellow float. “Got it!”
“Memo! Najelli! Run for the docks.” Bolan nodded at H as they ran past. “You did good.” Bolan pistol-whipped him to his knees as the front door failed. He reloaded the Beretta and roared at the top of his lungs in Spanish, “Upstairs! They’re upstairs! They have the boss!”
Bolan hightailed it as more than a dozen men flooded in through the foyer. It was time to break contact. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a white-phosphorous grenade. The cotter lever pinged away as he reached the kitchen and Bolan tossed the grenade onto the kitchen island as he went out the door. Dominico and Busto had tripped the motion sensors as they made their escape, and Bolan ran out into the lunar glare. He holstered the Desert Eagle and slid the Beretta’s folding stock from its shoulder sheath. The Willie Pete detonated behind him, and the kitchen window blew out in streams of white smoke and burning phosphorus element. Bolan extended the stock with a snap of his wrist and clicked it onto the butt of the machine pistol as he ran. At the dock two 500-horsepower diesels roared like dinosaurs arising from their ancient sleep. Busto waved at him frantically. Bolan had closed the door behind them but men were coming over the walls. Busto banged off return fire, but the range was long for the woman and her handgun.
Bolan had transformed his machine pistol into a carbine.
He dropped to one knee and flicked the selector switch to semiauto. Two men were straddling the western wall and trying to bring Mexican Army rifles to bear. Bolan shouldered the Beretta and put the glowing dot of the front sight on the closer man’s chest. He squeezed the trigger and the rifleman jerked, dropped his rifle and pulled a Humpty Dumpty as Bolan’s bullet opened his throat. The Executioner tracked his sights as the second man on the wall exchanged fire with Busto. The throttles on the cigarette boat suddenly cut back ominously. Bolan ignored the dock and aimed. He squeezed the Beretta’s trigger, and the man on the wall dropped back like a shooting gallery target. Busto was running down the dock shouting Dominico’s name.
Bolan rose and ran.
The men at the western wall had ceased their siege.
The guys at the eastern one were just getting into gear. A bullet cracked past Bolan’s head as he ran. He cleared the back lawn, and boards thudded beneath his boots as he ran down the dock. Dominico was sprawled backward in the cigarette boat. Blood painted the white leather of the driver’s seat and fiberglass of the cockpit. Busto was bent over him.
“Go! Go! Go!” Bolan boomed.
Busto looked back over her shoulder desperately. “I don’t know how to drive a boat!”
Bolan took three more running steps and jumped as bullets whined and whipped past him. The cigarette boat lurched and the fiberglass floor made an ugly crackling noise as Bolan hit. He hauled Dominico out of the driver’s seat and rammed the throttles forward. The cigarette boat shot ahead like an arrow and screamed down the river. “Get down!”
Bolan dropped down and negotiated the next hundred yards of the river from snap memory. He had discouraged the men in the western house from attempting the wall. Now the cigarette boat took a broadside of lead in passing. Bullets walked across the prow, shot out the windscreen and tore into the stern. One of the diesels shrieked as something big enough to tear into the engine block gutted it. Bolan rose up as gunfire crackled, but the hull no longer shuddered with bullet strikes. He rose up just in time to violently swerve the boat away from the bank and aim it westward. The port diesel clanked and howled and died as Bolan throttled it back. The starboard engine still had five hundred horses, and Bolan kept the hammer down. Gunfire still crackled and sirens wailed along the river. Bolan could see the blue-and-red flashes of police lights strobing through the trees, but they were all heading east toward Amilcar’s house.
Bolan burned westward for the sea.
CHAPTER FIVE
Altata, Sinaloa, Mexico
Dominico had bled up a storm. A bullet had ripped through his left bicep. The local tissue destruction was minimal but it had zipped through close to the bone and had nicked his femoral artery. Bolan’s medical kit was minimal, but he had managed to clamp it and close it. Now he was closing the entry and exit wounds. Busto applied pressure above the wound as Bolan stitched beneath the light of the veranda’s bare 100-watt bulb. Dominico lay back in a hammock and drank tequila straight from the bottle with his good arm. They had checked into a camp that consisted of a cluster of adobes along the beach. Each had a reed-covered patio and was less than ten yards from the water. Altata was one of Sinaloa’s hidden gems. Most tourists beelined for Mazatlán. Altata was a sleepy little fishing village in Ensenada de Pabellones. Only the most ardent tourists reached it and did so by motorcycle through the endless dunes. The camp had a number of advantages. One was that almost no one came here. Two was that if an army of drug muscle came driving down the dirt road, they would see them a long way off and they could head straight back out to sea, and three, one of the nice things about clay-brick adobes was that short of heavy machine-gun fire they were pretty much bulletproof.
Busto nodded as Bolan worked. “You’re good.”
Bolan wished he had a medical stapler but his knitting skills would have to do. “Thanks.”
“I couldn’t do what you did inside his arm.”
Bolan shrugged. “That’s okay. Bandanna.”
Busto mopped Bolan’s brow with her bandanna. “But what you’re doing now?”
“Yeah?”
“I can do better.”
Bolan accepted that. Dominico groaned as he dug his thumb higher up on the femoral artery and let Busto get to sewing. “How’s it hanging, tough guy?”
“Pain I don’t mind. I’ve had plenty of that, but my fingers feel funny. Like my foot. It went tingly and numb when I hurt my back and had to quit wrestling.”
Bolan had been afraid of that. If a bullet damaged the femoral artery, it generally damaged the femoral nerve, as well. The question was whether the nerve had been nicked or just traumatized. The fact was Dominico needed a doctor. “I’m thinking of sending you back to Mexico City.”
“Fuck that, man. I’m just a quart low and need a nap.”
Busto sat back from her suturing and wiped a sweating brown tequila bottle across her brow. Dominico flinched as she took the tequila, poured some over the entry and exit wounds and gave herself a chaser before winding a bandage around his arm. Busto sighed as she sat on the ice chest and reached for her cigarettes. Her right cheek was purple; her left one was turning black. She grabbed ice from the hotel bucket and held it against her face with a sigh. Dominico took another long swig from the bottle and closed his eyes. The whole team needed a nap.
The problem was a nuclear time bomb was ticking.
Dominico began to snore.
“Najelli, I’m going to give him a couple hours’ rest. I need to contact my people.”
Busto opened the chest and cracked herself a fresh beer. “I’ll stay by him and watch.”
Bolan went in and plugged in his laptop and satellite link. He punched in his access codes and Aaron Kurtzman was online instantly. “You’ve been busy, Striker.”
Bolan took a seat on the cabin’s single rope bed. “Yeah, well, you know.”
“Culiacán local and federal police have been lighting up all night.”
“How bad is it?”
“Well, officially there’s a manhunt going on.”
Bolan had expected nothing less. “And unofficially?”
“Everyone thinks it was