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