Silent Running

by Don Pendleton

  “His nickname was Hot Dog,” de Lorenzo corrected him. “And he never touched mescal because it made him puke.”

  “I’m sorry about that test, Mr. Attorney General,” Mendez said. “But I’m sure you understand that I cannot afford to take chances.”

  “I completely understand,” de Lorenzo said. “But how about telling this young stud here who I am.”

  “Put him on the radio.”

  Villa listened for a moment before answering, “Of course, sir.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he told de Lorenzo. “But I have to be careful.”

  “I understand,” de Lorenzo said. “Now, if we can get on with it, I have that American official I mentioned hiding back there, and he’s also a close personal friend. I want to get him over here before he gets himself killed. Can you lend me a rifle so I can go back after him?”

  “No, sir,” Villa said, “I can’t allow you to risk your life. My unit will all go get this man.”

  De Lorenzo had to bow to that reasoning. “But I still want a weapon.”

  Villa reached down and unbuckled his twin pistol rig and handed it over. “I’d be honored, sir, if you would use these guns.”

  “Thank you.” De Lorenzo belted the brace of pistols around his waist. “And knock off all the ‘sirs.’ As long as I’m in the field, my name’s Hector.”

  Villa smiled. “My men call me Pancho.”

  WHEN BOLAN and Brognola saw the Mexicans start a maneuver drill to bring them up to their position, Bolan patted the big Fed on the shoulder.

  “I’m going to take off,” he said. “I don’t want to get involved with the Mexican army. If they come into town, though, let them know that I’m out there.”

  “Good luck.”

  “You, too.”

  Brognola knew the drill. He had his shotgun on the ground, the muzzle facing to the rear, and his hands up when the first Mexican soldier appeared. “Buenos dias,” he said.

  “Don’t move, Señor,” the rifleman said in English.

  “No problem.”

  After the soldier patted down Brognola, he motioned for him to follow. A few yards away, de Lorenzo was waiting with half a dozen Mexicans. “You okay, Hal?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.” Brognola put his hands down.

  “Where’s your friend?”

  “He went hunting in town.”

  BEING IN THE TROPICS was the closest to living in paradise that most humans would ever experience. Memories of the Garden of Eden were so deeply embedded in the human psyche that it drove millions of sun-seeking tourists to Mexico and the Caribbean every year. But, as with most pleasure, being in the tropics wasn’t without a corresponding, and equal, measure of pain. To keep those who lived in paradise from thinking that they had somehow been singularly blessed by a loving deity, the tropical latitudes also provided some of the most destructive weather known on the planet.

  By the time Bolan got back to the main resort area, the winds had picked up. And with them came the rain. At first it was just torrential rain, water falling in never-ending bucketfuls, limiting one’s vision to no more than fifty yards. Before long, though, the wind grew strong enough to start deflecting the rain, sending it slashing sideways like liquid bullets.

  Bolan didn’t mind the rain whipping his face and obscuring his vision. He could handle it, but it didn’t look as though the opposition was dealing with it well. When a pair of gunmen running for cover from the deluge came into view, he simply shot them down one at a time. The second man didn’t appear to have heard the first shot over the howl of the wind.

  He revisited the defensive positions he and Brognola had spotted earlier. Some of the positions were no longer manned, the gunmen apparently having left to seek cover from the storm. In one such abandoned machine gun position, he found that the Russian RPD machine gun had been left behind, as well. He quickly removed the weapon’s bolt and threw it far away. It never made sense to leave a usable enemy weapon at your back.

  Moving on, he found one stouthearted terrorist still at his post braving the downpour. Bolan admired the gunman’s fortitude, but that didn’t grant him any slack on the battlefield. Using a little Kentucky windage in the face of the gale, Bolan put a bullet through the sentry’s heart. The late sentry’s position also had a machine gun, which he disabled, as well, before continuing.

  This was where the lack of communication between him and Brognola was going to start hurting the operation. With no way to talk to him, Bolan had no way to find out what the Mexican commander’s intentions were and didn’t know where he could do the most good to help him. Even so, as long as he could find careless terrorists, he could take them out.

  THE INFORMATION de Lorenzo passed on to Mendez made him only more determined to get his people onto the peninsula to start ridding it of terrorists. He had many concerns about that operation, but the storm wasn’t one of them. The Panther battalion was accustomed to dealing with the weather in the tropics. Hurricanes were a way of life in the Yucatán, and the jungle war always went on, storm or no.

  When Mendez saw that the gunmen at the end of the bridge seemed more interested in seeking cover from the slashing rain instead of defending the causeway, he quickly changed his battle plan. Rather than risk his men trying to cross the southern end of the lagoon in small boats, he’d take the bridge and cross his remaining units on one axis.

  Calling over Captain Ortega, he pointed out the enemy positions. “Push them off that bridge, Captain,” he ordered.

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  From his hotel office command post, Diego Garcia was closely following the firefight on the beach to the north. A shoreline wasn’t a good place to mount an attack, and it didn’t make sense that the enemy would try to come at him from that direction. When the firing stopped after a short time and the intruders withdrew, he suspected that the Mexicans had sent only a small patrol to test his defenses. When another small firefight broke out on the other side of the peninsula, it confirmed his suspicions. They were probing his positions, looking for his weak points.

  Rather than attempt to defend the entire peninsula, the Cuban had gone to a strong-point defense posture. He had units positioned at each of the hotels guarding the hostages and the rest of his troops were scattered out in strong positions at the main avenues of approach throughout the area. That should have been adequate to deal with isolated attacks by anyone who hadn’t been rounded up in the initial takeover. How his defenses would hold up against the Mexican troops depended on both their strength on the ground and their determination to attack.

  “Comrade Colonel!” the Matador radio operator cried as he rushed into his office. “The Mexicans are attacking us at the bridge!”

  He now saw that the probes from the north had been feints to draw his forces away from the bridge, and he’d fallen for it like an amateur. If he lost control of the bridge before he could move his men back in to defend it, he wouldn’t be able to hold on to Cancun and his plan would fail.

  “Tell them to blow the bridge,” he commanded. “And to be prepared to beat back a major attack. I will send him reinforcements as fast as I can.”

  “Yes, Comrade Colonel.”

  COLONEL PABLO MENDEZ’S troops were barely onto the village end of the bridge when a thunderous explosion split the air, sending chunks of concrete and steel flying. Ortega’s assault unit had been caught by surprise, but the demolition charges had been set off too soon and few of his men had been caught up in the blast.

  The smoke and dust of the explosion barely had time to rise in the air before the wind and rain beat it back down. When Mendez could see clearly again, he was relieved to find that the bridge hadn’t been completely destroyed. Only one side of the roadway had been blown into the lagoon and, even then, only for about a third of the length of the span. The rest of it looked to be passable for his troops, at least for the moment. It could have suffered unseen damage to the under structure that might cause it to collapse be
neath their weight, but that risk had to be taken.

  “Push them across as fast as you can and secure the other side, Captain,” Mendez ordered the commander of his assault units. “I don’t want to lose the momentum.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  Under covering fire from his two M-60 machine guns and a brief 40 mm grenade fire, Ortega threw two squads across the shattered bridge as a point element. A full platoon followed them twenty-five yards behind.

  “Let’s go, men!” he shouted.

  Rather than stand and fight for their end of the bridge, Ortega was surprised to see the terrorists abandon their barricades and fall back to secondary prepared positions farther inside the town. Whoever was running this bunch of bandits was no soldier, but Ortega wasn’t complaining. He’d take a little good luck any time it showed up.

  When the first of the Panthers reached the peninsula end of the bridge, they quickly took cover behind the abandoned sandbag barricades and engaged the fleeing enemy. Almost immediately, though, more gunmen appeared from inside the town and a fierce firefight broke out.

  Mendez immediately committed the rest of his men to reinforce Ortega and sent them across the damaged span on the run. He had his bridge head now, but, like at Arnheim, it might prove to almost be more trouble than it was worth.

  The only thing that was making it even possible was the fact that the enemy didn’t have much in the line of heavy defensive weapons. He didn’t, either, so it would be a fight between infantry rifles and light machine guns. With the storm increasing, weather was also going to become a serious consideration, but he was confident that his people could deal with it better than the terrorists.

  As he always did, he moved forward himself to take command of the battle. The motto of his battalion was “Follow me” not “After you.”

  WHEN BOLAN HEARD the explosion at the bridge, he realized that the Mexicans were trying to cross and it sounded as though the Cubans had blown it up. He had no way of knowing if they had been successful, but it was worth a look. If nothing else, the terrorists would be congregated there and it should be a target-rich environment.

  As he got closer, he heard the firefight intensify, which told him that whatever the explosion had been, the Mexicans had been able to cross the lagoon and establish a beachhead. With the Mexican assault holding the gunmen’s attention, it provided a perfect opportunity for him to move in to create a second front.

  Bolan had little trouble maneuvering behind the Cubans. When he came upon a sandbagged position blocking one of the streets leading to the bridge, he located a covered firing position well back so he wouldn’t be easily spotted and pinned down.

  The gusting winds were going to make his accuracy a bit tricky, but would also muffle the report and make it almost impossible for the Cubans to discover where he was firing from. Getting his first man in his sights, he compensated for the wind and squeezed off a round.

  EVEN THOUGH most of the Panthers were fighting in the open, they had made some progress. Ortega had managed to slip a couple of hunter-killer teams down the shoreline and into the town behind the gunners. If he could put enough pressure on their flanks, he expected that they would fold as they had done at the bridge. Marxists could get themselves fired up well enough when they were brutalizing civilians, but he had rarely known them to dig in and fight to the death. He expected nothing different from this mob.

  Mendez received a report from the hunter-killer teams that someone was attacking the terrorists from the rear, and he turned to his radio operator. “Get hold of Lieutenant Villa’s team and have him ask the attorney general if he knows anything about this.”

  “At once, Colonel.”

  “Colonel,” the radio operator came back quickly, “Mr. de Lorenzo says that the American commando who rescued him and the gringo official stayed behind when they linked up with Lieutenant Villa.”

  That was all Mendez needed to have to worry about right now, a friendly working freelance in his combat zone. “Tell all of our people,” he told the radio man, “that there’s a gringo commando working behind the enemy lines and not to shoot at him unless they have to.”

  “They will want to know what he looks like, Sir.”

  Mendez shrugged. “I have no idea except that he’s a gringo and he’ll be well armed. Make sure that if they see some guy shooting at the bandits, they let him continue to do it. Particularly if he’s a good shot.”

  “If they can see him at all, Colonel,” the radio operator replied. “The visibility is down to only fifty meters.”

  The storm was becoming more of a factor in the battle than Mendez had bargained for. But it was a factor he could use to his advantage. His men were suffering from it, but he was confident that the enemy was suffering even more. There was no way that these Cuban bastards were tougher than his men.

  THE HOTEL MAYA had been designed to withstand the worst that a Caribbean storm could throw its way. Its walls were thick, its windows were reinforced glass and it had auxiliary generators to provide power for the sump pumps. Several times the staff and guests had ridden out a seasonal storm with little or no discomfort. In fact, the hotel had a tradition of holding raucous storm parties—fueled by free drinks and snacks—beside the sheltered pool.

  This storm was no different than the ones that had passed this way before. The only damage the wind did to the pseudopyramid was to wipe out most of Diego Garcia’s communications system. The antennas for his long-range radios had been placed on top of the building for the best reception, but they hadn’t been designed to ride out a hundred-mile-an-hour wind gusts. Garcia could no longer communicate with the outside world.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, the news he was receiving from his short-range tactical radios forced him to concentrate on his local battle situation, which was getting worse.

  Part of it was because of the storm. The winds were gusting up to a hundred miles an hour now and the blinding rain made it difficult for his troops to hold their positions. For some reason, though, the Mexicans weren’t being affected as much as his men were. Not a man to denigrate his opposition, Garcia knew that the Mexican counterterrorist units were well trained. His men had been well trained, too, but few had the extensive combat experience the Mexicans had, and that additional experience was telling.

  He was well aware of the classic military axiom that said no operations plan survived the initial contact with the enemy, and he had prepared his fallback plans for almost any contingency. But he hadn’t expected to face an additional enemy in the form of a hurricane. He could fight the Mexican troops or he could fight the storm, but he couldn’t fight both at the same time.

  The storm would pass, but with the Mexicans now firmly established in the town, the initiative had been passed to them. He would soon be tied down and forced into fighting a series of defensive battles.

  He wasn’t, though, condemned to be trapped like a rat. One of his contingency plans gave him a way out. The storm would make it more difficult to pull off, but it still could be done.

  Being a Cuban, Garcia was no stranger to Caribbean hurricanes. They slashed across his motherland on a regular basis. And, as every Cubano knew, a hurricane wasn’t an unrelenting fury that lasted for days. It was a furious spiral of wind that whirled around a core of calm known as the eye of the storm. Within that eye, often as large as fifty miles in diameter, there was no fury and no destruction as there was no wind. When the eye passed over, the winds died to nothing, the sun reappeared and the birds took to the air once again. People left their shelters to marvel in the calm and to watch the wall of darkness that was the other side of the wheel of fury slowly approach.

  “When is the eye of the storm supposed to pass over us?” he asked his radio operator.

  “I don’t know.” The man shrugged. “We can’t get through to the weather center anymore. But the last forecast I had before we lost the antennas was that it will be here in a little more than an hour.”

  “Can you repair the antennas?�
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  “If I could find them, Comrade. They’re probably halfway across the Yucatán right now.”

  “Can you reach the ship with the little radios?”

  “Yes, Comrade.”

  “Get Comrade Nguyen on the radio.”

  “At once, Comrade.”

  AS HER NAME IMPLIED, the SS Carib Princess made her living plying the seaways of the Caribbean Sea. While primarily a fair-weather sailor, she had been fitted with stabilizers large enough to handle anything that Mother Nature could throw her way should she ever need them. But with modern satellites keeping track of the world’s weather, a South Atlantic storm was barely able to even get started before someone spotted and reported it. When that occurred, the Carib Princess with her combination navigational and meteorological suite was always among the first to know in time to get out of the way of the storm.

  As the cruise ship’s de facto captain, Nguyen Cao Nguyen had kept a close eye on the hurricane as it approached. The South China Sea didn’t get the number of typhoons that the Caribbean did, but they weren’t unknown. As soon as the wind had picked up, he put out to sea a few miles to keep the ship from being battered at her mooring. He had no fear about being able to ride out the storm. The Carib Princess had been built to take a Force-Five Gale, and this was predicted to be only a Four.

  He was watching the storm on the bridge radar screen when his radioman told him that Garcia was on the radio.

  “Yes, Comrade,” he replied.

  “The situation has changed,” the Cuban said. “The Mexicans are across the bridge, and I lost my long-range communications. I am going to transfer the Yankee doctors back to the ship and my operations staff, as well. I need to use the ship’s radios so I can have communication, and having the doctors on board will protect us from the Yankee government. They won’t dare attack us when I’m holding so many of their prominent medical people hostage.”

  Nguyen wasn’t happy to hear that. If Garcia transferred both the hostages and the operational staff to the ship, it would be easier for him to abandon Cancun if things got too hot. Holding the peninsula was critical to provide a beachhead if Beijing decided to land their forces in support of the “revolution.” Without it, they would have to risk going into Guatemala or Panama.