"A fucking headache."
"I don't want it."
"You're getting paid to want it. If I don't hear from my man in six days, you're going in."
"I don't do exfiltration work. Hire Delta."
Bitterly Clarence chuckled. "In the event I don't hear from my man, you won't be going in to exfiltrate."
"Terminate? Good. That's more like it. But you said six days. What the hell are me and my men supposed to do for six days?"
"Play cards," Atworth said in a sour voice.
Littel looked at Atworth as if he were a bug he wanted to step on.
"You'll wait here. I want security beefed up," Clarence said. "You know a guy by the name of Bolan?"
"Who hasn't heard of the Executioner?"
"He may be coming in."
"How do you figure that?"
"Gut feeling," Clarence said. "I sent my man in to wipe out Hector Akhupa."
"Colombian druglord?"
"Yeah."
"I thought he was dead."
"You thought wrong. I've got a whole inner circle here with everybody holding everybody else's hand. These two..." Clarence nodded at Atworth and Martin "...let Akhupa infiltrate the DEA so they could take a piece of the colonel's action for themselves."
"They're compromised."
Clarence nodded. He understood what "compromised" meant. Atworth and Martin looked confused. It was better, Clarence knew, to leave those two in the dark until the moment of truth dawned.
"So what makes you think Bolan will show here?"
"I told you, gut instinct. I haven't heard one word from my man."
"How does Bolan fit in?"
"Alchupa put a bounty on his head. He wanted my man in as part of the headhunting party."
"Why did Alchupa do that?" Littel asked.
"Ego. He wanted to take Bolan's head to ail his sponsors in Brazil. Play the big shot who can't be stopped by anybody alive. He had some grand delusion about overthrowing the government of Brazil and creating a whole army around him that could march up and down the lower Americas and conquer every country in sight."
"Delusion is right. Unless he's got the clout behind him."
"He was hoping his cocaine empire would fit in. When he was run out of Colombia, he set himself up in Brazil."
Littel shook his head and crushed his butt out in one of the overflowing ashtrays. "Weird. Real fucking weird. So what's the bottom line here?"
"We wait and see how the action unfolds."
"We set up a fortress here. Is that the idea?"
"For six days. I know exactly where you would have to go in Brazil."
"Where?"
"The Amazon jungle basin."
"That's a big place."
"I told you, I know exactly where."
"What kind of numbers would we be up against?"
"I'm not sure. Alchupa's people. And, if my man's screwed me over on this, his people."
"Forty? Fifty? A hundred? What?"
"No more than a hundred, I would imagine."
"I don't need 'imagine.' With only twenty men under me, I need solid intel."
"Twenty-two."
"You're going then?"
"Damn right. I intend to see this thing through."
"To the bitter end."
"Right. Now... within the next six days, I would assume you can round up a force of more than twenty."
Littel shrugged and fired up another cigarette. "Most of the people I know are down in Central America. It'll be tough."
"It's not like it's on short notice."
"And it's not like you gave me all the facts, either, Clarence."
"Well, you've got the facts now. You don't want the job, you can walk. There's the door."
Littel grinned. "And don't let it hit me in the ass on the way out, right?"
"You bet."
"Well, I didn't go through all this aggravation of getting here, of rounding up my people for nothing."
"I... I don't understand," Martin blurted. "What's going on here?"
"Nothing you need to worry about, pal," Littel said without looking at Martin.
Clarence had been unaware that his hand was draped over the butt of his Magnum. As he looked at Martin and Atworth, he smiled, realizing then that he was touching the butt of the revolver.
"Nothing you two need to worry about at all," Clarence added in a steely voice.
21
Exhausted, Bolan slumped back against the fuselage wall of the C-130. The rumble of the turboprop engines threatened to lull him to sleep. Bolan was tired, beaten, hungry and thirsty. And he was frustrated, too. Anaconda cannibals were still at large. Bolan had yet another rendezvous with serpents.
The journey down the Amazon River had ended in a village three days after leaving behind the carnage at Pinadante's camp, from that village on the river, a local pilot had given Bolan and his prisoner a lift to Belém. The guy had claimed he chartered flights for missionaries or anybody who needed a lift to Belém or any points down or upriver. The plane was a twin-engine Cessna that Bolan could tell had seen better days. And the airfield they had taken off from had been nothing more than a small grassy strip near the village. Bolan didn't bother to ask the pilot a lot of questions, just promised the guy a large cash payoff when he got them to Belém. That had been good enough for the Hispanic pilot.
Later, at Belém, Bolan called Brognola, and the big Fed, anxious to get Bolan back to the States, had sent the C-130 down to Brazil for the exfiltration. The Brazilian pilot had received five thousand dollars American for his service, courtesy of Stony Man, and he had left the airfield in Belém to return to his village with a big smile on his face.
Mack Bolan couldn't smile even if he wanted to. His face, brutally punished from the beating at the hands of the Viper and his goons, was stiff, sore and swollen.
It had been a long, hard ordeal for the Executioner, from Colorado to the rain forest of Brazil. Wiping out Anaconda. Tramping through the jungle with a pack of killers on his tail. Good men had died. Good men like Spiraldi and the other DEA agents who had gotten suckered into SOD's power play. Good men like Fernando Ortega, who would never again see his family. It always bothered Mack Bolan when good men died at the hands of bad men.
And bad men were still alive. Bad men like Max Weiss. Like James Clarence. Bolan had stirred the caldron, and there was only one possible ending left for this search-and-destroy.
Tear their damn house down to the ground.
Fortunately Brognola had already done the legwork for the final assault on Anaconda. Even if the Viper didn't lead him there, Bolan knew Brognola had pinned down the location of Clarence's safehouse.
Weiss was sitting on a bench directly across from Bolan. Bolan saw the guy grinning like a fool.
"What's so funny?" the Executioner asked. The AutoMag was the only weapon Bolan carried on him at the moment. As weary and mean as he was feeling, Bolan wouldn't have hesitated to blow the Viper's head off if the guy had tried to move on him.
"You're funny."
"Shut up and go to sleep."
"You'll never make it, Bolan."
"If you're talking about Clarence..."
"I am."
"Then he's got a surprise coming."
"How are you going to play this one, tough guy? Just walk in, guns blazing?"
"You'll see."
"Yeah, sure."
Bolan made an effort to keep his eyes open. There was nobody else in the cargo hold of the Hercules. Alone with the Viper, he was grimly aware that if he nodded off, Weiss wouldn't hesitate to kick his brains out.
Awareness of the problem became a sobering reality in the next instant.
Bolan's eyelids kept closing, as if they had lead weights attached to them. He sensed movement. The Viper, he thought, and forced his eyes open.
The knife arced for Bolan's throat.
The Viper was going for a quick kill.
Bolan didn't mind disappointing him one bit.
He threw
himself down, and the knife streaked over his head. How Weiss had gotten the knife, Bolan didn't know — and right now he didn't care. The Viper was going for broke, and had just given Bolan every reason to make sure the guy was cashiered out into the void.
After he pistoned a side kick into the Viper's guts, Bolan jumped to his feet. Like some wild animal, Weiss, snarling, came back at Bolan. In a lightning flash, the blade swept for Bolan's throat.
The Executioner was ready this time.
Again he ducked the knife that was meant to rip open his throat. As the blade tore for his face once more, Bolan drilled a snap kick into the Viper's knife hand. A sickening crack of bone, and the knife flew through the air.
But the fight was far from being knocked out of the Viper.
Bolan reached for the AutoMag, but Weiss drove a head butt into the Executioner's stomach. The wind driven from his lungs, Bolan tumbled into the wall. Desperately he pulled the AutoMag from its holster, but just as Big Thunder cleared leather, Weiss kicked the gun out of Bolan's hand, and it spun across the floorboards. Weiss hammered an uppercut off Bolan's jaw. The Executioner saw stars when his head banged off the wall.
The Viper meant to play hardball, and Bolan knew he was going to get Weiss's best.
Weiss raised his leg and attempted to stomp Bolan's head into the wall. Throwing his head sideways, Bolan felt the heel of the Viper's boot just graze his temple. With a sound like cannon fire, the Viper's boot crashed into the wall. Bolan's left arm swept the Viper's extended leg up in an explosion of power. As if he'd been poleaxed, the Viper slammed to the floor on his back. Undeterred, he roiled away and jumped to his feet.
Bolan and the Viper squared off.
Then the Viper laughed. "It's just me and you, Bolan."
"I wouldn't want it any other way."
The Viper feinted with a left, then cracked a right cross off Bolan's jaw. As he reeled, the Executioner realized he couldn't take many more punishing blows to the head and face. Falling against the wall, he braced himself, then pushed off the wall with his hands to spear another side kick into the Viper's guts. Deeper, though, and harder this time. A guttural belch ripped from the Viper's lips. Doubled over, he was paralyzed for a split second.
Time enough for Bolan to wind up his fury into high gear.
With a flurry of right and left crosses, Bolan drove Weiss into the far wall. Blood spurted from the Viper's pulped nose. Incredibly, though, he stayed standing, even after Bolan drilled a straight right into his mouth, snapping off several front teeth.
Briefly the Viper wobbled on rubbery legs. He showed Bolan eyes burning with hatred. Bolan thought now the guy would surely topple over, but the Viper proved to be every bit as tough as he had claimed.
"You had enough?" Bolan growled.
Groggy, the light in his eyes dimming, the Viper raised a shaky right fist.
"I guess you haven't," Bolan said, then with every bit of rage-powered might he could muster, the Executioner sledgehammered an uppercut off the Viper's jaw.
He couldn't deny that it felt good to hear the Viper's head smash into the wail. It felt even better to see the Viper crumpled in a heap at his feet. Down and out.
Quickly Bolan took one of the strips of rope that the Viper had sawed through with the knife and tied Weiss's hands behind his back.
"K-kill me... k-kill me... you... fucking bastard... go ahead."
Bolan rolled the Viper over. His face was a blood-sickened mask. Bolan showed him a graveyard smile. "No way, guy. If you think this was bad, the worst is still to come."
"Fuck you... worse for who?"
The Viper was going to hang tough until the bitter, bloody end, Bolan realized. Yeah, the Viper would go out with a roar.
"For you," Bolan said in a tired voice edged with disgust.
* * *
Hal Brognola was waiting for Bolan and the Viper at Andrews Air Force Base, with the Jimmy Bolan had requested.
The Viper knew where Clarence was hiding out, and Bolan intended to take Weiss there — to face his own music. Deep in heavily wooded country, a good twenty miles south of Manassas, Virginia, was where the headshed was located — or the Anaconda nest, as Bolan liked to think of the safehouse where Clarence and his DEA lackeys were holed up. The Viper had informed Bolan that he was more than willing to lead him to Clarence, for he was certain Bolan was going to meet his match when he tackled Clarence. But Bolan had already disappointed and frustrated the Viper on more than one occasion, most recently, Bolan recalled with grim satisfaction, on the floor of the C-130 when he had busted the Viper all to hell.
The sun was going down as Bolan guided the Jimmy with the floodtide of traffic on the Beltway, heading toward the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.
"Damn, Striker, you look like you've been through a war," Brognola said from the back seat.
"It's not over, Hal."
"No, it's not. I've been keeping tabs on Atworth and Martin. Both of them recently took a sudden vacation. They smell, and they suspect they're being fingered. Clarence is nowhere to be found, either."
"They're all hiding."
"Or waiting." The Viper's gloating words seemed to hang in the Jimmy.
"There's only one way to get a snake out of its hole," Bolan said. "You burn it out."
"So," Brognola said, "this is the Viper. I guess I don't need to ask, Viper, who got the better of whom here. Maybe you're not as tough as you thought you were."
"Nobody's won a damn thing yet, G-man," the Viper said, returning Brognoia's taunt, though his jaw was bruised and his face swollen and battered. "Everybody's in this one for himself — Atworth, Martin, Clarence. Okay, so they're running scared. Hell, that'll make them fight that much harder. Your buddy, Bolan here, may have won a couple of battles, but the war's not over."
"Sure. Whatever you say," Brognola told the Viper, then turned his attention back to Bolan. "Everything you need is stowed in back, Striker, all the hardware you requested."
"I appreciate that, Hal. I'll need it."
"Damn right you will," commented Weiss.
"What's he running off at the mouth about now, Striker?" Brognola asked.
"I'll have a welcoming committee at Clarence's... or so I've been told."
"All the big guns," the Viper added.
Bolan couldn't help but rub a little salt into the Viper's wounded pride. "Like your boys down in the Amazon? Look how big they turned out to be."
The Viper scowled. "They got careless."
"Clarence may get careless, too."
"I doubt it."
"Hal," Bolan said, "I'm taking the Viper in with me, but I want you to sit this one out."
Brognola patted one of two Ingram MAC-10 subguns beside him. "No way, Striker. I've been sitting this one out too damn long. Why do you think I brought along this extra Ingram?"
"I can't risk losing you at this stage of the game, Hal."
"Since when did we worry about risk?"
"Since now. If I can, I'm pulling Atworth and Martin out of Clarence's, You'll need names. They'll give them to you. There's more than one bad apple in the DEA. You can do more good with Atworth and Martin spilling their guts to you when I'm finished with this, than you can by going in with me for the assault."
"You're pretty sure you're going to see this through, Bolan. Don't count on it," the Viper sneered. "Clarence knows a lot of the same people I do. He'll be laying for you with the best talent around."
"This guy's starting to bug me," Brognola commented.
"You're not alone," Bolan said.
"All right, Striker, I'll sit it out. You can drop me at my office. I'll wait."
"You'll be waiting for a dead man."
Bolan ignored the Viper. Most definitely he was starting to bug the Executioner.
22
Dousing the headlights on the Jimmy, Bolan pulled it off to the side of the dirt road and killed the engine. According to the Viper, the driveway that led to Clarence's safehouse was just ahead, around the bend in the ro
ad. Bolan listened to the night. Silence. Darkness.
Togged in combat blacksuit, the Executioner was moments away from becoming one with the night. And he was loaded down with his choice weapons for the next killing field. The silenced Beretta 93-R fitted snug in his shoulder holster while Big Thunder rode quickdraw leather on his right hip. To create utter chaos and confusion and take out any enemy killers he found packed together, Bolan would carry ten MK-2 frag grenades into the fight. And, because he wasn't sure what numbers he was facing, the Ingram MAC-10 subgun would be the perfect weapon to further destroy the enemy. Bolan opted to go without the MAC suppressor on the Ingram because he didn't intend to be quiet when he hit Clarence's safehouse. If, as the Viper claimed, Clarence had called in a squad or two of hitters, then Bolan was quite prepared to deal out slaughter quickly, swiftly.
His goal was to get into the safehouse, terminate Clarence and corral Atworthy and Martin for Brognola. The founders of the so-called DEA SOD had a lot of questions to answer. Because Brognola didn't know how many agents or higher-ups in the Administration had been compromised through the treachery and greed of Atworth and Martin, Bolan intended to deliver them to justice, alive and in one piece. Brognola had given Bolan complete descriptions of Atworth and Martin, and the Executioner knew exactly who he was hunting for. Judgment day wasn't about to pass them by.
The Executioner was grimly aware that Atworth or Martin might not survive the hard hit he intended to nail on Clarence, but he would do his damnedest to make sure those two stayed out of any line of fire. With their help Brognola could do a lot of damage, through official channels, to the hydra that had wrapped its tentacles around the DEA, could make one clean furious sweep of his own on the DEA SOD. If it weren't for Hal's tireless pursuit of justice, his steely dedication to duty and honor, Bolan would just as soon leave Atworth and Martin burning in the flames of death and destruction. Indirectly they were responsible for the deaths of many good men who had gone to Brazil believing they were setting Alchupa up for his plunge to doom, when, in reality, the DEA SOD headshed had merely been using agents to keep tabs on the late Colombian colonel.
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