“Continuing sweep.” Bolan slid from pallet to pallet and stack to stack. Ostensibly the warehouse was used in the transshipment of beans and soya out of the Mexican highlands to the south. Bolan knew that any dope-sniffing dog worth his salt would be doing backflips from the scent of the residual Mexican brown heroin and Colombian cocaine that had spent the night on its way to the United States border. Gun-sniffing dogs would have recognized the scent of Cosmoline, Russian military lubricants and high-explosive blocks. As far as Bolan knew, there were no uranium-sniffing dogs, and if there were they had very short life spans. But the needle of the electrical sniffer in his hand began to twitch like a nose as it scented the air. “Reading getting stronger.”
“Maintain safety protocols, Striker,” Kurtzman warned.
“Readings still far below danger levels.” Bolan knelt on the warehouse floor as the needle shook like a leaf in the wind. His eyes narrowed beneath his night-vision gear. The needle was still vibrating against the low-end peg. He traced his fingers on the outline in the floor where pallets had obviously rested for years. Bolan passed the IDR-4 over the scratched square, and the needle twitched up a hairbreadth. Something radioactive had indeed rested here. The fact that there was still a distinctive radiation signature told Bolan that the bad guys had either breached the original containment vessel or they had transferred the materials to a new container whose shielding was not up to spec. “Confirmed, material was in the warehouse, and has since been moved.”
Kurtzman’s silence spoke volumes. Nuclear material had gotten within six hundred miles of the U.S. and was still presumably heading north.
They both knew there was only one option left.
“Bear, I’m heading up to the hacienda for some Q and A.”
“Copy that, Striker. Will advise the Man.”
Kurtzman was going to inform the president that the mission had progressed from reconnaissance to search and destroy. Bolan finished sweeping the warehouse, but the strongest reading continued to be the suspiciously empty space. He stepped back over the stricken sentry. The man was alive but wouldn’t be raising the alarm anytime soon. Bolan’s boots crunched on the gravel road as he moved up toward the house. In the distance the Tamazula River gleamed with reflected starlight. Oswaldo “Pinto” Salcido seemed an unlikely trafficker in nuclear materials. He had gotten his nickname for the continent-shaped wine stains that streaked his left cheek and temple and had a vicious reputation in an already vicious line of work. He was still lower echelon, a regional warlord who exploited his locals and took a taste of goods moving through his territory rather than a major player in the Mexican crime cartels. If he was moving nuclear material, then he had moved up to the big leagues.
Bolan was about to give Pinto some big-league attention.
The Executioner raised his night-vision goggles and unslung his SCAR rifle. The weapon had a 40 mm grenade launcher mounted and loaded beneath the barrel, but he reached over his shoulder into his pack and drew forth a GREMs barricade breaching rifle grenade and clicked it on his muzzle. Salcido’s place was standard twentieth-century Mexican crime lord. High pink adobe walls surrounded a sprawling hacienda. Bolan closed within twenty yards of the automatic iron gate, peered through his rifle’s optic and fired. The assault rifle bucked against his shoulder as the rifle grenade flew from the muzzle. The grenade slammed into the gate’s locking plate and ripped the entire wrought-iron fence right off its tracks and left it twisted and lying in the driveway. Bolan squinted as the hacienda’s security floodlights snapped on and threw the entire front of the house into shadowless glare. The front door flew open and three men with AKs charged down the steps. Bolan leveled his rifle but pulled the trigger on the grenade launcher. Pale yellow fire belched from the 40 mm muzzle, and a bee swarm of buckshot expanded and enveloped the charging men in an invisible cloud of lead ball bearings that passed through their bodies like a withering wind. The three men twisted and fell.
Bolan raised his rifle and fired six quick bursts into the arc of floodlights, and the front and sides of the hacienda plunged back into darkness. He pulled his night-vision goggles back down, jacked a tear gas grenade into his launcher and slid a fresh magazine into his rifle.
Within the hacienda men were shouting, women were screaming and dogs were barking.
A man leaned out of an upstairs window and sprayed the grounds with submachine-gun fire, but he was firing blind into the darkness. He showed up perfectly in Bolan’s optics and the Executioner’s burst blasted him from the window and dropped him down to the patio below. Bolan sent his tear gas round spiraling through the vacated window and sent a second one through the front door into the house a few seconds later. He took a moment to don his gas mask and clip it to his night-vision gear. Bolan moved up to the hacienda. Ignoring the open front door, he stepped onto the patio, picked up a wrought-iron patio chair and hurled it through the French windows. Shattered shards of glass cascaded to the tiles. Fresh feminine screaming broke out, as well as several gunshots, but none were aimed at Bolan. He jacked another buckshot round into his grenade launcher.
Glass crunched beneath his boots as the Executioner entered Casa de Salcido.
The gas was spreading nicely from room to room. Bolan went to the kitchen and took the stairs into the basement. He raised his rifle and burned a magazine on full-auto in the fuse box. The rest of the Salcido household plunged into darkness. Bolan strode back upstairs. Everything was chaos. People ran throughout the house shouting, screaming, choking and cursing. He could see everyone and everything through his optics, but to the inhabitants of the house he was just one more dark shape in the gloom and gas. Men with guns, Bolan shot. Men without guns, Bolan gave a lick with the butt of his rifle and dropped them. He grasped women firmly by their shoulders, told them “Get out” in Spanish and shoved them toward the closest exit. No one Bolan had encountered so far matched Pinto’s description. The soldier finished sweeping the ground floor of the hacienda and began to suspect Señor Salcido was upstairs.
Bolan went to find him.
Things were slightly more organized on the second floor. Flashlight beams were sweeping wildly about while someone—Bolan suspected Salcido—was bellowing orders at the top of his lungs. A man appeared at the head of the stairs waving a flashlight and a pistol. Bolan stitched him with a burst and he tumbled down the steps. The rest of the gunners upstairs finally found some focus, and salvos of gunfire erupted and tore across the top of the landing. Bolan drew two flash-bang grenades from his bandolier, pulled the pins and lobbed the bombs over the landing. He prudently closed his eyes beneath his goggles and stuck fingers in his ears. Twin incandescent flashes lit up the upstairs landing and twin booms rocked the house like thunder.
Bolan came to the top of the stairs.
Two men with rifles staggered like drunks in half-blind, half-deaf disorientation. Hundreds of winking, pyrotechnic aftereffects flitted about like fireflies. A third man was holding himself up with one hand on the wall and desperately shaking his head to clear it from the effects of the stun grenade. In the gray-green world of the night-vision goggles the wine stains on the man’s face looked black. Bolan put a burst into each of the riflemen and put them down. Salcido pushed himself away from the wall and tried to raise a pistol.
Bolan closed in three strides and snapped the butt of his rifle on Salcido’s wrist. The man screamed as his wrist fractured and the pistol thudded to the carpet. Whipping the butt up, Bolan cracked Salcido across the cheek. As his adversary staggered back under the assault, the Executioner slung his rifle and buried his fist into the man’s guts. The drug lord doubled over and then screamed and stiffened like a board as Bolan dropped his fist across each kidney as if he were hammering nails. The big American seized him by the collar and belt, and marched him into the master bedroom. More French doors opened onto a balcony. Pinto howled as Bolan accelerated from a fast walk to a run and gave him the bum’s rush right off the balcony.
Salcido screamed as he plummeted through the darkness.
His screams were cut short as he hit the swimming pool with a splash. Bolan climbed over the balustrade, hung by his hands for a moment and then dropped down in the backyard