Silence.
Slowly the faint but mounting crackle of fire penetrated his senses. He opened his eyes, wondering if he’d been knocked out and for how long, the abominable stench both wanting to revive but making him wish he was back in warm slumber. Gagging, he stared into the smoke, hoping his men had turned back the invaders, but feared, sensed the worst.
He thought he saw a tall dark shape coming his way, through the hazy wall of drifting smoke. Let it be one of his men, he hoped, as the figure seemed to glide closer, more like a floating wraith, as nausea swelled his belly, shadowy mist filled his eyes.
He was about to call out to the shadow, but something in the way the figure moved sounded a silent alarm. There was a big object in his hands, a shotgun, he thought, then firelight, most likely, winked off the fixed cylinders, still smoking. None of his men had access to a weapon like that.
“Who are you?” Salvadore croaked, fearful the knifing pain in his lower back meant it was broken. “Help me. I have money…name your price…just get me out of here.”
Salvadore heard himself cry out loud, then silently railed at the madness and injustice of it all. He thought he was about to pass out, when the faceless shadow appeared to gather speed, then punched a massive handgun into full view as he surged clear of the smoke and told him, “You’re finished.”
14
He had been around the hard way. Thus, in his vast bloody experience, Braden knew that when a man believed the world was out to get him, the truth on that grim score wasn’t far behind—double-timing it, in fact, to catch and grind him up.
These were the facts of life.
One thorn in his side, Durham, was suddenly making noise he might be forced to come partially clean with the President when Camp Triangle was abandoned, what with the bodies of fifteen Marines strewed all over the grounds, the killers—TFT traitors—in the wind.
Talk about shearing the scapegoat, Braden thought angrily.
The man with the big plan, he thought, safe on the sidelines for the time being, counting on, maybe secretly admiring the dragons who could burn up the other guys in a fiery battlefield spume of blood and guts. But it was always the cannon fodder who ended up holding the shit end of the stick. Why was that, he wondered, and why, did Durham feel he deserved salvation? Why should he be first in line?
Any way it was hacked, Braden knew he would have his neck in the noose within hours, he’d be one of the planet’s most wanted scumbags. Durham would surely mix half-truths with bald-faced lies to cover his own assets while steering blame his way and urging the President to marshal a hunting expedition until he uncorked the genie for his own big event.
And then there was Compton. What a pain in the ass, Braden thought as the general intercepted him as soon as he stepped from the armory, bombarding him behind the foul winds of whiskey with the latest round of worry and fear, pointing at the Gulfstream as it lifted off for points unknown with Mohammed Bal-Ada in tow.
If nothing else, the general would be easy enough to reach out to and eliminate.
“I can see it,” Braden snarled, wondering if he shouldn’t just unsling his submachine gun and drop Compton, there and then. The guard towers were manned by his men, after all, part of the deadly plot about to see fruition, as soon as the hired guns from Ciudad del Este were in place, and Turkle and Hanover returned to lead the attack.
And then there was Stone, poised to drop the hammer on the place, he was sure, Compton railing on about how Washington surely knew by now they were running a Gestapo-style prison camp.
No question, their number was up.
“I don’t like this, Colonel. What we’re about to do is an abomination, sacrilege, you want the truth, to the uniform! What kind of soldier are you? Killing Arab fanatics, the dung of the earth who murder the innocent is one thing, but you’re prepared to murder United States Marines, young guys, most of them, husbands and fathers, for God’s sake.” Compton was sounding hysterical.
“General, trust me, when I tell you God wants nothing to do with us. Nothing at all,” Braden said.
He suspected it was all really beyond hope. Standing there, ready to sink in a pity pot maybe, infected by Compton’s weakness of spirit, he figured himself ignored, at best, abandoned at worst by God, country and CENTCOM.
Compton cried out, “You kill Marines, it’s a sure death sentence for all of us—”
“Only if we’re caught, General.” Braden chuckled, wondered if the future would prove as bleak and horrible as the past. Could he stand again on his own and kick the seemingly insurmountable demons of the present in the teeth? What choice did he have? “Where we’re headed, as of tonight, we will be surrounded and protected by fighting men of like thinking and standing. Pull yourself together, General, you knew what was going to happen here. You chose this, even if you think someone else chose it for you. You made some bad choices along the way. You know we will be covered, new identities,” he said, lifting the war bag stuffed with spare clips, grenades, C-4 and remote detonators and three hundred thousand in cash, “with a bag full of money.”
“I forgot. You have all the answers.”
Braden felt his anger intensify, but for once didn’t erupt. No, he didn’t have any answers, other than to bail, grab whatever good the future held for him. Had he possessed all the right answers, he wouldn’t be here now. Briefly, he wondered if maybe he wasn’t punishing himself for the lives of young Green Berets snuffed out in Afghanistan. Had he folded his hand following that debacle? Was becoming one of history’s worst traitors a form of suicide by itself, leaving behind a legacy of shame? Even though, if cornered, he was ready to go out with a roar, was there still a part of him that was…
A coward?
Would living right, with honor, be the best revenge? He knew things were too far gone to stop what was already on the way.
And what was about to happen.
Fifteen United States Marines would be served up by his hand. And for what?
Braden squared his shoulders. “It’s a little late in the game, General, to grow a conscience. And need I remind you, sir, that you are bought and paid for. If you want to step off I have all your sins and crimes documented and ready to dump off on CENTCOM. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do,” Braden said, brushing past Compton, thinking if he stood there any longer he would eliminate his first problem on impulse.
“It’s murder, Braden,” Compton shouted.
Braden clenched his teeth, felt sick to his stomach. “No. It’s the first step to freedom,” he said, hating himself as soon as the words left his mouth.
Freedom? he wondered, thinking he chuckled with a bitterness best reserved for an adder swallowing its own venom.
Freedom from what?
15
The Executioner knew the clock was ticking. Already the southern portion of the city was jumping with sirens and teeming with local authorities. From there on, he needed to pick up the pace, Michaels having guided him swiftly to round two, some five blocks north from the Brazilian death squad’s abattoir.
Bolan got lucky, as far as breaching the terror nest went. The terrorist in question was at the front door to the apartment, knocking, there, Bolan figured, to beef up an armed contingent his eyes in the sky informed him was en route for Camp Triangle. Between the grim, nagging suspicion and the high-tech eavesdropping, Bolan believed Task Force Talon’s top lieutenants and Poscalar were trying to hire shooters to besiege and lay waste to Camp Triangle. They could scratch Aurelio Salvadore and his murdering brigands from the lineup.
Bolan’s gut warned him he had been followed into the building, and he had a good idea just who was tracking him. He checked the gloomy hall that reeked of stale urine, cigarette and marijuana smoke, and saw he was clear. The mini-Uzi with sound suppressor was snaking out from one of the deeper wells of his trenchcoat, tracking the terrorist just as the door opened. A bearded, swarthy man with pistol in hand was framed inside the jamb.
Who and how ma
ny armed combatants were inside Bolan couldn’t say. He hated running blind, he knew the final outcome of any shooting engagement was usually only as good as the intelligence, but there was no choice.
Hit and run.
They came alive, all anger and fear at the sight of the Executioner’s weapon, the guest digging inside his leather jacket, arming himself with a .44 Magnum pistol.
The Executioner held back on the compact weapon’s trigger, stuttering forth a burst that zipped guest across the back first, then swept the host with a burst of 9 mm Parabellum rounds to the chest, leaving no doubt a grim reaper was on-site. Sudden vicious impact then gravity took over, guest folding into host, bodies collapsing inside the door in a sprawled tangle.
Bolan bounded over the bodies, taking in the trio in the spacious living room, when he sensed it all poised to go south. On the fly, attempting to grab temporary cover behind a belly-high-partitioned counter that separated the kitchen from living room, Bolan hit the mini-Uzi’s trigger. The men were already in flight, two HK 33s and a submachine gun of indeterminate make blazing away, as they rolled over a large couch, out of sight but raging in Arabic, blasting wild. Bolan took in the hallway that fanned away to his three o’clock, wondering if the rooms held any lethal surprises. He had to believe they would have showed their hand by this time, which would mean a whole other world of hurt if they were riding out a few more seconds.
Bolan backed up against a fat pillar as the trio began spraying his cover, the tempest of lead blowing past, exploding cabinets, detonating glass, thudding a drumbeat across a refrigerator.
He was pinned.
Bolan charged low beneath the counter, rounds screaming off the top, wood slivers and stucco blasting in minidetonations, biting at his nape, clawing at his cheeks before he reached a moment’s sanctuary behind the other pillar. He was in the process of reaching for a frag grenade to end it when the door behind him exploded in a thunderous eruption of wood. A howl of pure rage, like that of a wild beast embroiled in a savage contest, bellowed in his ears.
Bolan was wheeling in a one-eighty toward the threat when the mini-Uzi was slapped from his hand and out into the living room.
CONSIDERING HIMSELF a stone-cold professional, proud he never lost control of his emotions no matter what the pressure cooker, Steven Turkle nonetheless struggled to maintain a rapidly deteriorating composure. Between the snarled traffic slowing the GMC to a near crawl—when they were a mere three blocks from rounding up the next group of shooters—the mysterious but clearly horrific event he was attempting to put behind in the southeast quarter of the city and Poscalar unraveling at the bad news he was receiving on the other end of the cell phone transmission, it was all he could do to cap his anger.
Clenching his jaw at Poscalar’s bleating and whimpering, Turkle suddenly imagined he heard his shouldered M-9 calling the man’s name. Poscalar, he glimpsed, disgusted, was rubbing his face, hanging his head, and damn near looked set to break out in tears.
“Oh, God, no! All of it? No, no, no.” Poscalar choked down a sob, then found his former shadow of arrogance as he launched the blame game. “Damn your eyes, Captain Hoessvalez. I have paid you and all of your men promptly, exorbitant sums, for protection, and compared to your paltry annual salaries you were meant to not only kiss the ground on which I walk, but you were to make certain just such a thing as what I’m hearing about never happens! Now you tell me my merchandise was melted? Six hundred kilos are now a steaming puddle of green slime? What do you mean you can’t explain it? Whatever was in those drums—”
Turkle listened intently, still silently cursing traffic but closer to where he needed to be. It sounded like their cargo was history, either demolished or spilled in the attack. Whatever remained was likely to be seized by the Paraguayan authorities.
They were finished in South America, no question. And there would be no bartering their toxic haul. All the risk, the wasted effort, Turkle thought, to not only brew the toxin—created in a fly-by-night factory—but establish pipelines for potential buyers—
If it was true misery loved company, then Turkle found himself wanting to laugh out loud as Poscalar continued yelling into the cell phone.
“Your inefficiency on that is not my concern. I don’t care about your lack of HAZMAT teams or that the building is quarantined. What troubles me is that you sound to be standing around, wringing your balls, which I will have mounted! Wrap a bandanna around your nose, for all I care, but get in there and double-check my merchandise…
“Of course, I want to know who did this, but you’re telling there are no witnesses, other than a vagrant drunk,” the Brazilian continued, after pausing to listen to his contact.
Whatever had happened to Poscalar’s hired killers, Turkle surmised they had gone the way of the Bolivians’ cocaine. The way he overheard it, the building was on fire, Poscalar’s death squad fugitives littering the warehouse floor, fumes from within so overpowering no one could enter without donning a spacesuit. As evidenced by the sky over the lowlying neo-colonial structures behind, dancing in a swirling light show, Turkle knew all available law enforcement and military personnel would be scrambling in that direction.
Oh, well, he thought, so their shooting herd was thinned out. He hadn’t put much stock in the warring capabilities of men who hunted down unarmed urchins in the streets of Rio anyway, who never put their lives on the firing line unless they were backed by overwhelming numbers and firepower. Poscalar’s not-so-wild bunch, he concluded, had obviously come up against a warrior-sized predicament, and failed to cut it.
Traffic began jerking, car by car, toward the intersection, but Turkle spied a couple in the vehicle ahead, necking in the front seat. He laid on the horn.
Poscalar shrieked at him. Turkle growled back a curse.
“Impossible, Captain!” Poscalar shouted, eyes darting like a cornered animal. “They were thirteen trained professionals! And you’re telling me your one witness ‘believes’ he saw one man leave the premises? Now you want to tell me ghost stories how one faceless marauder is responsible—”
Turkle chuckled and glimpsed Poscalar glaring at him with murderous wrath. He wasn’t about to tell Poscalar his theory on the culprit, lest he was drawn into a long, bitter and fruitless argument, but Hanover had trailed Colonel Stone to the death squad compound, and his eyewitness account about who walked out with smoke and leaping flames in his wake was believable, albeit incredible.
There was suspicion, though, from the moment they’d laid on eyes on Washington’s man. Turkle knew that Stone was way more than just a DOD or Pentagon desk-lifer, sent to Camp Triangle to fill out paperwork in triplicate for his superiors.
In a way, it made their job that much easier—Washington looking to hide the truth from the public, cover its own shame over an operation and a base that painted them borderline outlaw—that Stone was black ops. The coming war would serve as both a graveyard for the unwelcomed and a giant smoke screen, both meant to hurl up enough confusion and mystery until they were at least halfway across the Atlantic. Or so went Braden’s plan.
As he heard Poscalar groan, dumping the cell phone on the floorboards, he caught a break at the intersection. With just enough room to zip between a tour bus and another vehicle, Poscalar screaming about the sudden jolt, Turkle lurched them into a dark gap between two shops and shut the GMC down.
Poscalar looked on the verge of puking, as he said, “I am holding Braden personally responsible for my loss. He should have told me how volatile that cargo was. Why didn’t he tell me it was a substance like sulfuric acid? I would never—do you realize how much money I have lost—no, how much money I owe the Bolivians? That shipment was only partly paid for! It was on consignment, good faith. Millions…perhaps tens of millions—”
Turkle reached over the seat and hauled up his war bag, then gathered the nylon satchel beneath his legs. When Poscalar dropped his face in his hands, whimpering, Turkle whipped out the M-9 and jammed the muzzle in the man’s ear.
Poscalar slowly pulled his face out of his hands, eyes bulging. “Wh-what…are you doing?”
“You pull it together now, Colonel, or I will drop you right here. Your scumbags with badges are dead, your coke is gone, but so is our cargo, which, by the way, I don’t hear you crying all that much about. Are you going to follow through in helping me scrounge up this riffraff for what I—no we—have to do? Think hard before you answer. You still have a world to save—as in your own life.”
Poscalar seemed to calm down, considering something, lips flapping but no sound emerging for several moments. “Very well. Perhaps…perhaps all is not lost.”
Whatever that meant, Turkle guessed the Brazilian’s mind was tumbling with an avalanche of excuses, rationales for the Bolivians, or how he would divert the blame for his disaster. It didn’t matter. He already knew Poscalar’s ultimate fate.
“Fall out,” Turkle said, opening his door as he stowed the M-9.
BEFORE CRASHING THE GATE, Bolan knew the play was dicey. He had next to zero intelligence on numbers, layout, type and how many weapons, no positive ID and background on the players. He had no idea if his move was a straight bullrush, where he should have drawn first blood. There was no contingency plan in the event of unforeseen disaster, no concrete or even vague mental sketch for an escape hatch.
He grappled with his attacker, his throat being squeezed so hard he felt like his eyeballs were ready to pop from their sockets. Bolan knew he had but two heartbeats, tops, to turn the tide. A foot stomp, a knee to the groin was out of the question. Only a crippling blow to his human vise would un-clamp his throat.
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